Sir, - As a trade union officer, as a member of the Senate at Queen's, and incidentally as one of the targeted staff, I can assure Dr William Reville (October 2nd) that there is no eerie silence in Belfast about the restructuring of Queen's. There were many media interviews around the time of the Senate decision in early June, but the matter was pushed aside by other momentous happenings in Northern Ireland. Access to the media is controlled by the media, but my file of press cuttings contains more than 30 A4 pages and there has been a vigorous debate in the letters page of the Belfast Telegraph.
Criticism by the trade union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), has been long, loud and detailed. There are no representatives as such of the union (nor of the departments that are to close) on the Academic Council or Senate, but there are individuals with a trade union background. I can assure you that at Academic Council and the other main committees I voiced detailed opposition as did many others, but these bodies are dominated by line managers who owe allegiance to the vice-chancellor. At Senate the trade union officers and some other academics had to declare an interest as targeted staff and were debarred from voting by the code of practice for governing bodies. Senate was swayed by the implicit threat that the newly appointed vice-chancellor would resign if his plan was not passed as a complete package, and many false analogies were drawn with the package of the Good Friday Agreement.
As the case of Dr Clifford illustrates, the label "research inactive" is a slur on many academics. What it means in the context of the QUB plan is that some manager, often remote from the subject, has made a subjective judgement that the individual will not have produced by 2001 enough papers of the required quality for inclusion in the Research Assessment Exercise, the rules for which are not yet known. The plan is to replace such staff by newly recruited staff with papers for inclusion, although it is doubtful that many of these can be found. Equally dubious information was used to decide that the four departments were not viable, despite vigorous protests from schools and the community. In the case of my own department, Statistics and Operational Research, the protest resulted in the concession that the subjects will continue to be taught, but they still want all the specialist staff to leave and not be replaced.
Nobody has been dismissed - yet. All those targeted were asked to respond by September 30th to an offer of early retirement or severance. My guess is that about 20 have decided to go. The rest feel that they wish to continue to contribute to Queen's and in that they have the support of their colleagues. Many have specialised in teaching, student care and other forms of administration and if they leave, either the work will fall on the colleagues who concentrated on research, or the students will suffer. Already many students have no adviser of studies because that person left on September 30th.
The plan got through Academic Council and Senate because it proclaimed a research boost for Queen's and there was a promise that targeted staff would be handled sensitively and that their non-research contributions to the institution would be taken into account. The implementation of the plan has been appallingly crude and has alienated many who had supported it in theory. We share Dr Reville's concerns about academic freedom and are also worried about the future of small subjects and the proper balance between teaching and research.
Should there be any move to make staff compulsorily redundant the Association of University Teachers will call for a national academic boycott of Queen's University, and would hope that our colleagues in the Irish Republic would give us their support. - Yours, etc., Paul D. Hudson, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in Operational Research, Queen's University, Belfast 7.