 The School of Arts came into existence in the summer of 2012 in bringing together four areas of study in SOAS history of art, archaeology, media and music. Institutionally there hasn't been a framework for these four areas of what we loosely call the arts to interact. The School of the Arts will create a forum in which that can happen. We feel that bringing together staff and students who are working in these four different areas we will start to question our institutional boundaries. But we want to ask ourselves whether these are really the best divisions to make. It may well be that in other parts of the world the divisions of Western academic study are inappropriate. In fact, they may even cloud what it is we're trying to look at. So by removing divisions we're not saying the disciplines don't exist. Many students will come wanting to learn about media, wanting to learn about music. We're not going to stop them from doing that, but we're going to say think a little bit about the boundary that you've placed around your subject. Question whether it is an appropriate one, whether it's a meaningful one. It may be that that boundary should be drawn elsewhere. We regard languages as fundamental. All of SOAS is underpinned by very strong regional awareness which of course has to be based on an understanding of the regional languages. SOAS is an amazing place. We have a fantastic library. It's certainly the best in Europe of what it does, Asia and Africa. It would be one of the best in the world. We also have a state-of-the-art museum space, the Brunei Gallery, which has visiting exhibitions usually half a dozen or more in the course of the year. The school also has a collection of Asian and African musical instruments. The school has practice spaces for that. But the school of arts also comes into existence with a commitment from the school to invest in other areas such as technological support, digital, radio, IT labs in which state-of-the-art media, music, history of art and archaeology can be taught and studied. And they would have available to them the whole range of courses taught within the School of Arts, which is an absolutely enormous range of disciplines, also historical periods, contemporary periods, geographical spaces. Languages of course will be very much part of that. There is no other institution in the world that can offer these.