Dear staff at the Faculty of Arts

The summer holiday is approaching fast – but before we all go our separate ways, I’d just like to wish you a happy holiday and thank you very much for all your hard work this semester.

It was wonderful to have the chance to meet so many people at the summer party on 7 June. The weather was perfect for a garden party, and both in Emdrup and Aarhus the attendance was even better than last year. More than 600 people turned up to celebrate the arrival of summer after a pretty hectic spring.

The results of the psychological workplace assessment had a big impact on the first half of 2013, and in many ways these results were not satisfactory. A variety of problem areas were revealed relating to the process of restructuring at AU – and not least at the Faculty of Arts. Since the assessment a great number of you have been involved in a series of meetings to discuss the working environment, the way our administrative offices are run, and the way our departments are organised. My impression is that these meetings in our departments have given us a sound basis for making decisions after the summer holiday about how to adjust our internal departmental structure. These adjustments should help to strengthen the glue that binds our departments together, as well as reinforcing the ties between our departments and administrative offices.

During the spring we also worked hard to reinvent the way we do our teaching, and this work will continue after the holiday. As you all know, we are under constant pressure to increase the number of hours of teaching – but this also gives us the chance to have a good brainstorm and find new ways of optimising the learning processes of our students within the framework that has been laid down for us. Here, too, a great number of people have provided some excellent suggestions for new forms of teaching which will be tested in the upcoming semester. In the faculty management we have also just finished processing a range of potential new degree programmes – and I must say that once again I was truly impressed at the way our teaching environments manage to adjust their activities to meet the needs of the world around us.

In terms of research, the spring also produced some great results in terms of gaining new research funding and collaborating with external partners. But if we want to maintain the diversity of our subject range and the strength of our expertise, we need more of our research applications to generate greater funding. In this respect our research programmes can support the processes involved all the way from the creation of ideas to the submission of project applications.

The demands made on us are increasing all the time, and I am fully aware of the need to ensure that people are not faced with unreasonable workloads and that tasks are distributed fairly in our departments. As a result, the management and staff have now started to negotiate a new joint agreement covering working hours which should be finalised in the autumn. The agreement will standardise the way we calculate our working hours throughout the faculty.

The strategy process will be continuing at the faculty and departments after the summer holiday, and you can keep up with this process at the ‘Arts’ strategi 2013-2020’ website.

In the autumn we will also be focusing hard on preparations for the accreditation of our departments. Accreditation requires documentation and will make new demands on our administration. We need to find solutions for this problem. But I also view this as an opportunity to document and ensure the high quality of our teaching. Departmental accreditation will mean that we no longer have to gain accreditation for each individual degree programme; and in particular we hope it will give us greater freedom to develop our educational profile.

I expect the start of the new academic year to run more smoothly this year. For instance, the classroom booking system should work much better than last year, and we are dedicating more resources to welcoming our new Bachelor and Master students.

I hope you all have the chance to slow down a bit before the start of your holiday, and that the summer turns out to be everything that you could possibly have wished for.

Best wishes

Mette Thunø

Dean