Risk Assessments
Glenn Patterson
I woke yesterday morning to the news that the vice chancellor’s office at Queen’s University in Belfast had cancelled a symposium, due to take place in June at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, on contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo. ‘Incomplete risk assessment’ was the reason given. All day yesterday I kept schtum. Too busy working. At least I convinced myself that was the reason. When I woke in the early hours of this morning I wondered if I hadn’t actually been carrying out a bit of risk assessment of my own.
Part of what enables me to write novels and screenplays is a part-time lectureship in Creative Writing at Queen’s, with an office in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, attached to the School of English. Nearly 90 per cent of professional authors, according to a survey released yesterday by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, ‘need to earn money from sources other than writing’.
One of the things that kept me thinking I was keeping busy yesterday was replying to an invitation to speak at the Irish Theatre Forum Conference, on censorship, funding and creative freedom (I’m involved with the Libel Reform Northern Ireland Campaign). I mentioned in my reply that I have always thought, as a writer working in Ireland, that we wrote against a culture of censorship, whether explicit (the old broadcasting bans) or implicit: watch what you say, you never know who is listening – a ham-fisted paraphrase of Heaney’s ‘whatever you say, say nothing.’
Which brings me back to Queen’s and contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo. I am not sure which is more depressing, that the symposium was cancelled or that most of the voices raised against the cancellation have come from outside the university, or even that a part of me understands why the dissent from within has been so muted. Contemporary citizens’ fears over security take many forms. All the same, though it’s little and it’s late, I wanted to say something.
Comments
This is stupefying. It says in effect that the protection of the university's reputation (presumably in deference to the needs of the 'brand') is best served by quashing free inquiry, including in this case discussion of the very principle of free inquiry.
Indeed. As Marina Warner has explained previously in the LRB, academics are increasingly reluctant to speak publicly in support of their universities. But 'muted' could be the wrong word. I imagine many angry QUB academics, mistrustful of their VC's judiciousness, will have taken to whistleblowing to the press precisely to raise wider awareness of the issue and rouse those louder voices outside. The completed risk assessment (for it was submitted, university administration always requires a paper trail; how else are VCs to personally scrutinise every document for every event to make their important decisions?) will no doubt surface publicly by similar means.
By contrast, an email sent out on Monday to conference participants said that 'The vice chancellor at Queen's University Belfast has made the decision just this morning that he does not wish our symposium to go ahead'. See e.g. The Belfast Telegraph report from Wednesday: http://bit.ly/1JbLHAB