As decision time approaches, who is right about scrapping the classics department at Queen's University Belfast, asks Denis Tuohy - a DUP councillor or a Nobel laureate?
In the cultural life of Belfast two determined campaigns are being waged, one of which aims at bringing honour and distinction to the city, the other at preventing a disgrace. The first has to do with becoming European Capital of Culture in 2008. Within the next few weeks Belfast will find out whether it has made the UK shortlist. Winning the title would bring significant financial benefits, particularly in tourism, but the boost to public morale, after decades of despondency, would be at least as great a prize. The co-ordinating group, Imagine Belfast, is in overdrive these days, with help from many quarters including Belfast City Council, the Tourist Board, the Laganside Corporation, the Arts Council and of course Queen's University.
Ah yes, Queen's University. By an embarrassing coincidence Queen's is itself the target of the second campaign. A few months ago its management announced a decision which is utterly at odds with Belfast's Capital of Culture ambition and might even tip the balance against it. There was a press release in June about the university's new academic plan, "Building on Success". At the end of a paragraph listing new investment in various branches of the humanities came a throwaway sentence which, presumably, few were expected to notice and fewer still to care about. "The teaching of classical languages will cease due to very low demand."
But many have noticed and many care deeply. The sense of shock and dismay, stretching far beyond academic circles, has been passionately voiced in the letters pages of The Irish Times and newspapers in the North. A pamphlet containing a digest of that correspondence, together with an appeal for the decision to be reconsidered, has been sent to every member of the Queen's University Senate. At their meeting on Friday they can bow to the short-sighted vision of vice-chancellor Sir George Bain and his executive, or they can show their commitment to the good name of the university and the cultural values of Belfast itself.
Put simply, the central argument against scrapping the classics department is that classical studies are the cornerstone of European culture. But the architects of "Building on Success" either don't understand that or don't care. What matters to them are numbers. That is the sole reason, they say, for their decision. All right then, let's talk numbers. There is a "very low demand" for classical studies, according to the vice-chancellor's June announcement. The communications office told me that meant "single figures". But according to Dr Maureen Alden, a lecturer in Greek at Queen's, about 35 students were taken into Year 1 in Greek, Latin and Classical Studies in 2000-1. In 2001-2, the intake actually increased to 75.
Now you would expect such a damning contradiction to be publicly disputed by the vice-chancellor's team. But what beggars belief is the statement of Sir George: "Here you had a situation where no students were being attracted yet £150,000 was going on the infrastructure." Can you fathom this Lewis Carroll logic?
The numbers nonsense is part of a wider complacency. The Builders on Success have been behaving as though they never expected a public challenge and don't know how to deal with it. A recent edition of Queen's Now, the in-house management newspaper, carries an interview with Prof Ken Brown, pro-vice-chancellor for academic planning and resources. "In the wider world," he says, "the general public is largely indifferent [to the classics decision\] and there is a deafening silence in those parts of the university where the proposals have gone down well." Now it's not hard to understand why unaffected staff with jobs to protect are keeping quiet, but to describe the wider community as "largely indifferent" suggests the professor doesn't read the papers.
Mind you, he does when it suits him. "The situation," he claims, "was put into perspective" by Belfast Councillor Sammy Wilson, who apparently said in a press interview that "what Northern Ireland needed was more plumbers and fewer academics". The councillor is entitled to his view but should it carry more weight with a pro-vice-chancellor than that of, say, a Nobel laureate? Seamus Heaney has told Queen's that it would be a backward move to rob students and the community of the inheritance of classical languages. And alongside Heaney about 500 other protesters, many of them from that "largely indifferent" general public, have so far signed a petition asking the university senators to reconsider the decision.
Here's something else for them to ponder before their Friday meeting, something that connects with Belfast's attempt to become European Capital of Culture. The judges who will choose the UK winner are chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, for whom I worked as a reporter during his time as a television executive. Television, however, is not the only link between us. We are both classics graduates, he from Oxford and I from Queen's. Sir Jeremy remains an ardent classicist whose acquaintance with Latin and Greek, as he recently told me, enhances his understanding and enjoyment of so much else in European literature. Not long ago he was pleased when a visiting cousin complimented him on the classical texts in his library but embarrassed that he hadn't read them lately.
So that's the man who will soon decide, with his fellow judges, whether Belfast has what it takes to become European Capital of Culture. If I were a member of Imagine Belfast, the group that's working so hard to make it happen, I would now be telephoning Queen's University senators and asking if we were all on the same side.
Denis Tuohy, a Belfast-born classics graduate of Queen's, is a writer and broadcaster