Arts faculty staff at NUI Galway have disputed the university's claim that there was extensive consultation on the future of the women's studies centre.
The university said this week that it had engaged in 15 months of consultation before it was decided to close the centre and move two academic posts into the university's department of political science and sociology.
The decision was taken last week in spite of a petition by 46 senior arts faculty staff expressing "widespread anxiety" over the manner in which it came about. The development comes at a time of considerable unrest over restructuring plans within the college.
Arts faculty staff have said that an e-mail sent out on the issue by the dean of the arts faculty, Prof Kevin Barry, on August 28th last to heads of department and centres was misleading and did not refer specifically to closure. The e-mail gave a two-week deadline for responses at one of the busiest times of the academic year, staff have told The Irish Times.
Prof Tadhg Foley, of the english department, who was a co-founder of the centre, said that there was a "charade of consultation" which did not augur well for other smaller units within the university.
"There's a great deal of chat about the need for an inter-disciplinary approach in the university, and this was the approach the women's studies centre was taking. They have now reduced it to a single discipline," he said.
Maggie Ronayne, a lecturer in the archaeology department, said that the procedure was "anti-democratic" and one which would damage the university's relations with the community outside the campus. "It raised the wider question of what a public university is," she said.
Prof Ulf Strohmayer, of the geography department, said that the centre had met all the accepted yardsticks for academic performance. "A similar process of destabilising women's studies would have been unthinkable in a US university."
Prof Strohmayer questioned the university's lack of a core value system and an approach in a third-level institution which decreed that "everything has to pay its way".
