The Church Times reports: Lid comes off Christ Church dispute. Do read the entire article if you can.
After recounting recent events (see previous article and in particular Update 3) it has the following new information:
…In response [to the latest Christ Church statement], Dr Percy issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon denying the accusation and citing a police statement. He writes: “For the avoidance of doubt, the Dean dealt correctly with three historic cases of reported sexual assault in the academic year 2016-17, and the information on these were shared with the appropriate college officers at the time. One of these individuals had already made a report to the police, which was already known to the college officers concerned.
“A fourth historic disclosure was made by an individual who had never reported the matter to the police, and only agreed to talk about the alleged assault on the condition that there was no further disclosure. Their position of this individual has not changed.
“No person making a disclosure was still a minor — all were over 21. Three of the cases took place before 2014, prior to the Dean taking up office. None of alleged perpetrators posed a safeguarding risk.”The Dean goes on to state that, in 2017, he raised concerns that college officers were ignorant of their safeguarding duties, and were untrained, something borne out by an email from Professor Johnson at the time, quoted in The Times.
Am I the only one who suspects that the college’s idea of mediation is really an attempt to get the Dean to leave in exchange for some sort of settlement so that the college can then suggest that the Dean’s departure fixes all problems ie that the Dean was 100% at fault?
“Although the college has always presented the dispute with Dr Percy as a row over his remuneration, The Times traces it back to issues of safeguarding, and attempts by the Dean to persuade the college to become compliant with its legal safeguarding responsibilities” – (Church Times article) Herein lies the now too-obvious truth. Although the Governing Body has bent over backwards to insinuate that the origin of its dispute with Dean Percy was his ‘demand’ for extra remuneration; the REAL reason was the execution of his incumbent responsibility to ensure the safety of the people whose welfare his status called… Read more »
In most non-collegiate universities there has been a trend to take welfare and safeguarding out of the hands of academics and put it into the hands of specialists. Tutors are responsible for academic progress, and the moment it crosses into welfare (and, by implication, safeguarding) it’s passed to a dedicated team who are, crucially, not academics. Academics were untrained and, almost by definition, people who had survived their progress through universities, so it makes a lot of sense. It has not been quite the silver bullet that was hoped for. The line between academic and welfare concerns is nothing like… Read more »