For the moment the story is not going away, though I think it should. In fact, it should never have turned up in public anyway. It has been suggested by some commentators that UCC lecturer Dr Dylan Evans had no choice but to make his case public. I just cannot see that. There is always a choice. The discipline imposed on him was a confidential matter, and if he felt he was treated unjustly he had several avenues by which that could be addressed, including at least one that he has in fact adopted. He had not exhausted all appropriate remedies.
Instead he decided to press the higher education community’s hot button and claim he had been denied academic freedom. But as we know from the documentation that he has (quite wrongly) made public, this was not an issue of academic freedom at all. Nobody in University College Cork, from the President down, has at any point suggested he can not work on, be interested in, read, write, publish and disseminate studies on the sexual habits of fruit bats, or indeed anything else. The complaint was about the manner in which Dr Evans presented the article to the complainant. The investigators found that what he did amounted to ‘a joke with sexual innuendo’ and that ‘it was reasonable for [the complainant] to be offended’. In fact, Dr Evans’ statement in the letter he circulated widely and which was published in the Huffington Post that ‘external investigators concluded that I was not guilty of harassment’ is grossly misleading, suggesting that he was cleared of any wrongdoing. He wasn’t.
We are not asked to judge any of this. Maybe the complainant was too sensitive, maybe she didn’t demonstrate openly to Dr Evans that she was uneasy. Or maybe she was completely right in her assessment. That’s not a matter for us. But for Dr Evans to pick all this up and place it in the tray marked ‘academic freedom’ is dishonest. No issue of academic freedom is involved. What he has done by making all of this public is to use the ultimate weapon in the academic armory to attempt to silence a colleague who has raised a personal issue through the university’s procedures. And what lots of no doubt honourable people have done is to allow him to proceed with that plan by backing a campaign they could not really have understood. Since people started raising doubts about Dr Evans’ case, another 500 or so people signed his petition.
This episode has not been good for the academic community. I am not suggesting Dr Evans is in the wrong regarding the original issue. I have no idea whether he is or whether he isn’t. But he is most certainly in the wrong as to how he has pursued his case in public. And a few thousand people have shown an extraordinary lack of judgement in backing him without having any real knowledge of the circumstances (though some, including Stephen Kinsella of the University of Limerick, have very honourably re-considered their stance). But through all that, we have let down those who may at some point in the future want to protect their personal space and dignity.
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