Arts editor HELEN MUSA says People Power seems to have triumphed in bringing the School of Music back from the brink, but the devil is often in the detail when it comes to implementation.

As the week ends and the triumphal shouts from supporters of the now-saved ANU School of Music subside, it’s time for a little calm reflection, for as Huckleberry Finn almost said, “We’ve been there before.”

Briefly, after the interim vice-chancellor of ANU, Prof Rebekah Brown, revealed that due to higher-than-expected voluntary separations, staff attrition, retirements and vacancy management, the university’s financial position had improved, the Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Prof Bronwyn Parry, announced that no structural changes would be made to the School of Music, which would feature a new “Performance Plus Hub”.

As well, she said, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Australian National Dictionary Centre had been saved for the time being, through philanthropy.

Such welcome news has been greeted as a big win by the Friends of the School of Music, the Advocacy Roundtable for the ANU School of Music, and Canberra Symphony Orchestra, all of whom have fought against the proposed Renew ANU plan to subsume the school to within a new School of Creative and Cultural Practice.

Chair of the Roundtable, Robyn Hendry, acknowledged the pressures Australian universities are facing but applauded the university’s decision to maintain the school and to introduce a new hub that supports one-on-one tuition, ensemble work, group learning and live performance.

Rachel Thomas, CEO of the CSO, praised the decision to open a new Major in Music Practice, saying it was the result of “our community coming together to fight for an institution they hold dear… It is also due to the willingness of the university to listen to what we were saying.”

In short, People Power seems to have triumphed, but as in other movements of the same kind, the devil is often in the detail when it comes to implementation.

The idea of a music practice hub looks like a positive step, but it’s a lot easier to destroy a music school than to rebuild one, and in the lead-up to the Renew ANU announcement, many fine instrumental teachers have fled to the outside world, leaving a vacuum.

Some former staff have opted for redundancies, others have been turning up in national touring gigs. Most are making do, but you don’t have to have a very long memory to know that the ANU has form.

In 2012, it did its best to axe 32 School of Music positions, though the National Tertiary Education Union achieved a partial backdown. Nonetheless, 13 respected (and famous) music lecturers left voluntarily.

So acrimonious was the dispute at the time that cellist and former CityNews artist of the year, David Pereira, took to these pages, writing: “I rebuke them for their indecency and for their arrogance; I rebuke them for their managerial inexpertise and their ignorance; I rebuke them for their vandalism.”

Gradually the school picked up the pieces, then in October 2016 after a review and community consultation by Andrew Podger, the former ANU vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, announced a $12.5 million strategic investment in the School of Music, committed over five years.

But Schmidt’s successors were hard at work devising what would become Renew ANU, a multifaceted document that showed the creative arts and humanities just how little they were valued.

It is now time for those planners, who were so ready to dissolve the School of Music, to refocus their minds and the words from the Advocacy Roundtable and the CSO show that they will have many offers of help.

But it is hard not to predict that a few years down the track, we will see yet another assault on the more inspired parts of our national university.