Call for decision on women's studies to be rescinded

NUI Galway has been urged by a group of current and past students to rescind its decision to close the university's women's studies centre. A new campaign, the Save Women's Studies Coalition, issued the appeal at a press conference in Galway yesterday, where it announced plans to hold a protest on the university campus on International Women's Day.

The National Women's Council of Ireland has already expressed public concern about the closure.

The campaign says that the university's move to merge women's studies into the department of political science and technology would undermine the subject's inter-disciplinary nature.

It would also devalue diplomas and degrees already awarded to its students and would have a negative impact on outreach programmes developed by the centre with groups such as the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland, the campaign says.

The centre, which has 51 students and three staff (one part-time), is involved in developing a new domestic violence intervention certificate/diploma programme. It was established in 1988 and has run undergraduate, diploma and post-graduate courses. Its Irish Feminist Review is the only feminist journal currently published in Ireland.

Elizabeth Power, a women's studies degree graduate, says that while Harvard University had promoted a women's studies scholar to become its first female president, NUIG was now creating conditions which made it "impossible for the discipline of women's studies to thrive and grow".

The university has said that it engaged in 15 months of consultation before it was decided to close the centre and move two academic posts into the department of political science and sociology. The move prompted a petition, signed by 46 senior arts faculty staff, expressing "widespread anxiety" over the manner in which it came about.

In a statement issued yesterday, NUIG said that it was "not closing" women's studies but was "engaged in a process to take full advantage of the importance of women's studies and its successes in entering the mainstream of other disciplines".