Postcards from the edge: The burning down of a temple of modern academia twice in a row cannot be an accident. It can only be the act of a jealous or incompetent god.
By the way the following words are not mine.
"Strange anniversary (somewhere around) today. It was a year ago today that I was told that I had been fired for advising the Parliamentary Committee that Muriel Gray and the other Glasgow School of Art attendees were lying to them about their own failures that led to the loss of the Mack. Also in my letter of dismissal they mentioned that I had told the press that the school had lied about the cause and spread of the first fire and that they had misappropriated charitable donations meant for rebuilding the Mack towards the buying of another building."
"What is funny about the whole episode was that in the letter of dismissal they did not claim that I was wrong. What I had evidently done wrong was to tell the truth about how corrupt and incompetent they were. What was sad about it was that I had to be got rid of before Muriel Gray came back to retake her post after her second period of hiding from her duties since the fires. So I was fired in the middle of term, in the middle of teaching my bespoke course, which negatively impacted on the education of around 250 kids."
"Move forward a year and honest and loyal staff of considerable tenure are still being hunted down by senior management and fired for mentioning their misdeeds. Senior staff are still leaving (two department heads in the last two months). However, strangely all those responsible for the disasters and the fallout, including Muriel Gray, still hang on for some reason. And we have the longest fire investigation in history still ongoing, with no information available on the outcome or its timing, while at the same time all the participants who can do so, are presently preparing to sue."
"Against this murky backdrop, the insurance money will surface and a Mack-like building will be rebuilt. However it won't be our Mack. With their vile hubris and their patent negligence, they let it go up in smoke, along with their parties inside the construction site, their squandering of resources on trips abroad, their pretend research (nothing authoritative was ever written), their silly redesign trifles and their attempts to subjugate the Mack to their will. And so it is gone and the reputation of the institution is sullied."
"So why are they responsible? They were wandering in and out of the building. They were using a vulnerable historic building when it was a building site. They signed up to a fire plan that relied upon a single watchman finding a fire in a void before it got out of control, in a historic building with ten levels within it. They had no sprinklers working in either of the two fires in 2014 and 2018. They should have put in sprinklers ten years before they did, when they were told to do it."
"They said they couldn't do it because they didn't have the money, while paying for the over-budget Reid Building monstrosity, and subsequently they never got round to doing it until it was too late. And then to add insult to injury, after the first fire and half way through the rebuilding project, the GSA Board decided to instruct the ripping out of the operable but unfinished sprinklers. And then they lied about it. Those sprinklers would have isolated and doused the fire and would have saved the building."
"Perhaps, after all, the Mack just died of shame."
- Professor Gordon Gibb (first posted 2021)
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