Student speaks out on CTCCS controversy

A Master’s student has spoken out about her alleged ill-treatment by Warwick’s recently closed Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies.

In an exclusive interview for the Boar, Regina Akel, who holds a PhD in English Literature, linked the department’s conduct, which she says has “not been up to academic standards”, with her opposition to the closure of the Centre.

Akel was told on the 28th of January that she had failed her MA, yet the department told her that the decision had been made the previous November. This delay of nearly four months was compounded by a delay in the list of observations about the dissertation which has still not been sent.

The Postgraduate Office informed Akel that she is the only MA student in this situation and all the others were assessed on time and were able to graduate.

Akel claims that the person marking the paper was waiting until she left the country to produce her assessment, “forgetting that by doing do, she was breaching academic regulations.”

She alleges, “I see a connection between my opposition to the closure of the Centre for Translation and the rejection of my dissertations. After all, all the academics that opposed the closure were made redundant.”

The University said the delay is due to a personal bereavement in the supervisor’s family and the fact that they only received the dissertation in October.

However, when the Boar spoke to the Students’ Union, the Education Officer, Sumaiya Khaku, said, “The treatment she received was unfair – she should have been told sooner. One would assume that she [the supervisor] would have left someone in charge of her work.”

Akel has further alleged that one of the academics already made redundant was victimised repeatedly by the authorities for forwarding an email of hers to an academic who would have been her external examiner but had not been appointed yet. They accused the academic of “endangering the results of [her] examination.”

She said, “In the last two years the ethos of the institution has changed for the worse because it has become dictatorial in its decisions and ignores the feelings and needs of the academic community.”

Disaffected academics have commented on a recent Times Higher Education article which details the redundancy blunders. One anonymous poster said “I am also a PhD student at this centre, now moved somewhere else, but I and other students are too scared to speak up … The affair is terrible. It is a disgrace.”