10 November 2021
Dear Frances Corner, Dinah Caine, members of Council and of the Change management team.
We are writing as members of the Department of Psychology to express our strong opposition to the new plans for delivering Student Facing Services presented in Tranche 1 of the recovery program. We believe the proposals would be detrimental to the functioning of our department and will have a highly negative effect on our students’ experience.
Attached to this letter you will find a set of testimonies from many members of the department representing a wide range of roles and levels of seniority, from PhD students to former heads of department. We are united in our appreciation and support for the colleagues whose roles are being removed from our department. We also believe that reassigning their amazing work to a centralised administrative team will lose huge amounts of knowledge, efficiency and cohesiveness. As a result, staff workloads will go up both within the department and outside. Response times will be slower. Research will be harder. Students will suffer.
We ask that you take strong account of these substantial and heartfelt objections to your plans from colleagues who care deeply about our department, our students and our institution. The college may need reforms but these changes and the way they are being imposed do not, in our view, solve any of the problems.
Testimonial document from the psychology department (viewable by Goldsmiths’ staff and students only)
Signed,
Caspar Addyman
Rebecca Chamberlain
Maria Herrojo Ruiz
Peter Holland
Stacey Humphries
Adrian Scott
Emma Davies
Elaine Beattie
Lauren Stewart
Merritt Millman
Ondine Aurelle Delaye
Daniel Müllensiefen
Caroline Rix
Alan Pickering
Aleksandra Igdalova
Alexandra Gabriela Georgescu
Chloe Stacey MacGregor
Joydeep Bhattacharya
Evelyne Mercure
Christopher French
Gianna Cocchini
Jo Kenrick
Alice Gregory
Madoka Kumashiro
Fiona Gabbert
Andy Cooper
Heijo van de Werf
Lorna Goddard
Yulia Kovas
Diana Omigie
Herb Blumberg
Ramisa Ahmed
Titash Mehr Reza
Charlotte Hooley
Martin Kozon
Matthew Devine
Dominik Sala
Eduardo Fiorin e Silva
James Hunt
Vasco Diniz
Blue Koppi
Patrick Reed
Helen Olawole-Scott
Daniel Corsini
Ian Hannent
Kira Taiwo
Gabriel Jones Lafuente
Letisya Sayek
Oluwaremilekun Ajuwon
Safia Oakley-Green
Priyanka Jain
Jacob King
Gemma Armstrong