Union President: Maggie Dallman 'misinformed' College Council

The original headline for this article was changed on the 23rd of May at 16:05. An explanation is published at the bottom of the article.

Alex Kendall has reignited the controversy over the Life Sciences restructure and subsequent Teaching Review by accusing the Head of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Maggie Dallman, of lying to College Council.

Kendall has previously accused the Life Sciences department of lying about the possible impact of the restructure and also criticised the Teaching Review for not including questions relating to the department restructure. However, the accusation levelled at Professor Dallman is the first time that he has so harshly criticised a specific member of staff.

Additionally, the course changes proposed by the Teaching Review were sent back for improvement this week after the Science Studies Committee decided that they did not, in their current form, guarantee the highest teaching standards for next year.

In his President’s Report to Union Council, Alex Kendall claims that the removal of modules proposed by the review is in conflict with promises made by Professor Margaret Dallman, Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, to the July 2010 College Council that “the experience of students in Life Sciences should not be unduly affected by this restructuring”. He also pointed to a note sent by the Department of Life Science to the College Senate stating that the Department did “not anticipate that the review [would] lead to a reduction in the contact hours or module choice experienced by students.” Given that Dallman confirmed that the restructure was “progressing according to plan” to the November 2010 Council, a week before the Life Science redundancies were announced, Kendall alleged that Dallman “misinformed [the Council] at their July meeting” with regard to the effect of this plan on teaching.

Kendall’s President’s Report suggested the Union “making a formal complaint about the Restructure panel” but Kendall has since informed Felix that he has been told that “there is no mechanism for students to make formal complaints about members of staff”. A Union submission to the panel concerning the modules to be scrapped, however, has resulted in a number of them reappearing in the final review document published last week.

Professor Dallman declined to address Kendall’s accusations directly but said that the proposals put forward by the Teaching Review would increase student choice, allowing them to choose from six options rather than four or five currently and said that the plans would see an increase in the amount of small group teaching.

Kendall was also critical of the proposals presented by the Teaching Review. The draft review document published in March proposed a reduction in the number of final year Biology and Biochemistry modules. Among those to be cut were Animal Behaviour and all existing plant based modules, though some new courses, including Pathogens and Mutualists, were also introduced. The review document also suggested that Life Sciences stop teaching Biomedical Science, a course run jointly by the Department of Life Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine. The draft review proposes withdrawing the course as soon as October 2012, stating that it does not believe that “teaching on the Biomedical Science degree is an optimal use of our resources”. The draft review claims that the loss of the 50 students who take Biomedical Science each year will allow an uptake of an additional 24 people to the Biology degree: “ideally those who express organismal/ecological, rather than cellular/biochemical, interests”.

Professor Dallman told Felix that no long-term decision had been made yet regarding the Biomedical Science degree and that such a decision would be made in consultation with the Faculty of Medicine.

These issues were discussed at the Science Studies Committee last Tuesday. Deputy President (Education) Alex Dahinten said that the committee, which exists to maintain high teaching standards, would not allow “anything sub-par to pass” and that the ball was in the Department’s court. The committee has given the Department until the 24th of May to answer their concerns.

Statement [23/05/2011 – 16:05]: Felix would like to apologise to Professor Maggie Dallman, and other affected parties, for any distress caused by the front-page story entitled ‘Union President: Maggie Dallman lied to College Council’ published in Issue 1489 on 20 May 2011. We regret the provocative nature of the headline and in hindsight should have chosen more moderate words – we have since altered the headline and the sub-headline.

In the Union President’s report to Union Council he wrote, after detailing two separate comments that Professor Dallman made to College Council, “we have to conclude that College Council were misinformed at their July meeting and the Union President directly lied to by Professor Dallman.”

Felix chose to interpret this to mean that Alex Kendall was accusing Professor Dallman of lying to the Union President at College Council, and thus by extension, College Council itself. While we stand by our interpretation of the President’s report – it is worth noting that the Union President has not suggested that he was misrepresented – we accept, as mentioned before, that the use of such a provocative headline was not appropriate in this case; we were reporting an accusation and we have neither the direct evidence to substantiate the accusation nor the unambiguous confirmation, prior to publication, from the President that this was his intention.