Maynooth in the News
I was in a meeting this morning at which it was mentioned that the recent launch of the Euclid satellite has generated quite a lot of publicity in the news media for Maynooth University. There’s a piece in the Sunday Times (Ireland Edition), another in Silicon Republic, and an online feature for RTÉ Brainstorm as well as a radio segment on Morning Ireland and another on NewsTalk.
Maynooth University plugged these items in on the “Maynooth in the News” feed on its main webpage, along with many other items that show the University in a good light.
Conspicuous by its absence from that feed, however, is the biggest story surrounding Maynooth University in recent days, namely the appalling decision by the President to scrap elections to the Governing Authority of the University in favour of having representatives chosen only by the President. This is just one example of the increasingly intransigent and authoritarian management of the University. Can anyone justify the complete disenfranchisement of the staff of the University from the Governance of the university? Or that an Executive body should select the Board to which it is supposed to be accountable?
I know I’m not the only person employed by this University who thinks this decision is a terrible one – my Union, IFUT is strongly opposed- but it has been already been imposed and now we have no say. At least you can read about, e.g. here in the Times Higher.
One story you can’t read about however concerns the outcomes of Maynooth University’s “Staff Climate and Culture Survey” which was carried out in 2022 with the promise made to participants that results would be published in early 2023. No such results were every communicated to staff and all mention of this survey has been wiped off the University’s web pages. I don’t know why this happened, but I venture to suggest that if the results had been good the Maynooth publicity team would not have hesitated to publish them.
Since the Management of Maynooth University has chosen to close off any internal channels by which academic and other staff can communicate their views, it seems that the only means of communication open to us is via the external media. Perhaps the Times Higher will run a story on the Curious Case of the Missing Staff Survey?
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In the Dark 
July 13, 2023 at 10:02 am
One story you can’t read about however concerns the outcomes of Maynooth University’s “Staff Climate and Culture Survey” which was carried out in 2022… I venture to suggest that if the results had been good the Maynooth publicity team would not have hesitated to publish them.
While the machinations you expose at Maynooth are indeed deplorable, what do you mean here by ‘good’, please? Perhaps many scientists at Maynooth and elsewhere are unconvinced by the hysteria over climate and the drive to send us back into the Malthusian trap from which the Industrial Revolution allowed humanity to escape. Nobel physics prizewinner John Clauser, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in physics for testing the Bell inequalities, has recently stated his scepticism. Would Greens deny Africans, in lands that are currently planning to industrialise, the opportunities that fossil fuels have given us? And if electricity generated by nuclear fusion became available and cheap next year, would Greens welcome it or not (i.e. what is their real motivation)?
Antarctica had its coldest winter on record in 2021 (sensors have been there since the 1960s); November 2022 saw record Arctic snow cover for any November since observations began; in 2022 Sydney had its lowest annual maximum temperature (32.2°C) since observations began in 1859, despite subsequent urbanisation; the amount of free-floating Arctic ice at the annual September minimum was falling early this century but rose again after 2012; the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef was falling but in the last few years has soared to near-record levels.
Nobody disputes that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Disputes are over (1) the extent of amplification of the CO2 greenhouse effect in a wet planet such as ours; and (2) whether the CO2+H2O greenhouse effect explains the temperature observations, or if further physics is involved (solar variation; variable flux of cosmic rays, which cause a cascade of particles in the atmosphere that act as nuclei for cloud formation; or something else).
July 13, 2023 at 10:33 am
The survey is nothing to do with the Earth’s Climate. It is to do with the general mood or atmosphere in the institution.
July 13, 2023 at 10:35 am
Great ambiguity!
August 3, 2023 at 2:14 pm
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