Librarians aren’t known for causing trouble. But at our elite universities, in the grip of an increasingly unhinged culture of offence-taking, it doesn’t take much to cause trouble nowadays.
This is the news that a library director at King’s College London has been forced to make a grovelling apology for emailing around a photo of Prince Philip. Hot on the heels of that student at Abertay being investigated for saying women have vaginas, this one is right up there with the most absurd campus stories to date.
In a bulletin marking the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, Joleen Clarke, associate director of the university’s libraries, sent a photo of Philip and the Queen opening the Maughan Library at King’s College in 2002. ‘[W]e thought you might like to see this photo’, she wrote to colleagues.
This is all deeply authoritarian and utterly pathetic at the same time
Naturally, a chunk of her colleagues then went completely mental.
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