University reconsidering decision to cancel Charlie Hebdo conference
Queen’s University Belfast is to reconsider its decision to cancel a conference on the Charlie Hebdo massacre after writers and intellectuals accused the college of curbing academic freedom.
The conference on the implications of the attack on the French satirical magazine had been scheduled to take place in June. It was cancelled earlier this month.
But in a statement issued late on Thursday Queen’s appeared to hold out the possibility that that decision might be reversed.
Pro Patrick Johnston, the university’s vice-chancellor, said: “Queen’s is, and will remain, a place where difficult issues can be discussed.
“In line with due process, the university has commissioned a full risk-assessment. The report of this assessment is expected to be completed by Friday 1 May 2015. The report will then inform the university’s decision.”
The conference was organised by the university’s institute for collaborative research in the humanities and was to feature academics, novelists, journalists and commentators.
The institute claimed that Johnston had cancelled the event because of the security risk and concerns for the reputation of Queen’s.
An email circulated by the institute this week said: “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. He is concerned about the security risk for delegates and about the reputation of the university.”
The university earlier denied the cancellation had anything to do with academic freedom, saying the event was cancelled because the organisers had failed to complete a full risk-assessment.
But a number of academics at Queen’s contacted the Guardian to claim that an original risk-assessement form regarding security around the conference had been filled in properly several weeks ago.
One Paris-based Northern Irish author, Robert McLiam Wilson, said the university’s refusal to hold the event made him feel ashamed of coming from Belfast. The author, who writes for Charlie Hebdo, said the decision was “not cowardice or surrender. It is part of a long defeat in an unfought war”.
Another Belfast-born novelist, Glenn Patterson, has entered the row expressing disappointment over the university’s actions.
The author of The International and Burning Your Own said: “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 – which is of course a ham-fisted paraphrase of Seamus Heaney’s oft-quoted ‘whatever you say, say nothing’, and which of course brings me back again to Queen’s and contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo.
“I am not sure what depresses more, that the symposium was cancelled or that most of the voices raised against the cancellation have come from outside the university.”
Source: The Guardians