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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
taught, and our intention to teach it as a second-year class – as that is where we expect to find interested non-majors to take it – Dean Kouwenberg required that it go through the whole evaluation process again. It got through FAQAC in July and Faculty Board in August. It will be taught in Semester 2 of 2024. The campus may yet be fly-posted. We are also reviving another second-year undergraduate course on the Archaeology of Africa. This too had to go right through the FAQAC process again as in the fifteen years since it was last taught the evidence for early hominids in Africa has been antedated by three million years. A revision to its time scale that merited a re-submission. Thus far efforts to acknowledge that the decades when Roy Augier’s first year Devel- opment of Civilization lectures were a magnet that drew students into History are now long past. A changing of the guard that may well have been marked last July when a fairly fragile Sir Roy came up to campus to make some selections from his book-crammed office prior to its being cleared for re-assignment, though I do hope that he may yet resume attending our Department seminars on line. Instead, the Department is now pushing hard to attract sufficient non-majors so that we can fill a broad range of undergraduate classes to offer our undergraduate majors and joint-majors a choice of courses for their degrees. We are also moving our one semester first year survey of Jamaican history to Semester One. In 2022–23 it was stuck in Semester Two and as 1 st year students are not told what courses outside their major are available in Semester Two, we only got sixteen enrollees, primar- ily History & Archaeology majors. A Semester One version should attract more interested students with a free class slot on their timetable. Given that Jamaican schools do not offer courses on Jamaica’s own past, the Department hopes that an introduction to the island’s history will recruit students from across the campus. Reconfiguring our course offerings remains a work in progress. The advertising that was a departmental strength has been undercut by the headhunting of the secretary in our Department office, an alumnae, who had taught herself sufficient skills to offer effective on-line recruiting flyers, to the Dean’s Office. Finding a permanent replacement is proving difficult, though a late summer 2023 hire of a recent graduate and former President of the History Club has resulted in some striking posters. This is a temporary fix. The University’s staff recruitment system is so cumbersome that it makes “Byzantine” appear a term of praise. We advertised in spring 2022; received a shortlist from Personnel in July and then only offered interviews when we were well into Semester 1. By then it was a very picked-over group with only two participating in on-line interviews. We made an offer to one candidate – the other looked a disaster – but she turned down the terms she was offered. As incoming chair Dr. Cresser will have to see if he can fill this key staff vacancy permanently in 2023–24.
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