Towards an Autonomous Language
Centre: Opportunities and Threats
Diah
Kristina
The UNS Language Centre is at
a critical point at present, not only because its subsidy is being reduced, but
also because the reformation era has brought with it a strong wind for
transparency both in terms of financial accountability and in terms of quality
assurance of the services provided by the center.
This wind of democracy is
promising for the process of decision making that used to be top-down and now bit by bit is
becoming more bottom-up oriented. However, from the perspective of budgeting, a
manager of a Language Centre is expected to be creative and sensitive to the
public demand. This self-financing trend is alarming for some people.
In terms of networking, the
Language Centre is becoming more flexible in opening up collaboration with
other institutions without waiting for permission from the university. This is
interesting to some people but confusing for others.
This paper aims at showing the
steps we have taken and the steps we plan to take in order to anticipate the
future demands.
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Kristina, D. (2002, March). Towards an autonomous language
centre: Opportunities and threats. Paper presented at the national
conference on Autonomy,
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