The Personnel Division held a series of workshops last term with representatives from all staff groups to consider how the School might move towards a managing diversity strategy in recognition of the range of staff employed by the School. Key issues arising from these workshops include communication and further guidance with the recruitment and selection process. Lay governor Kate Jenkins and Professor Henrietta Moore are about to launch a managing change project which will involve research into how other organisations address the problems of managing organisational and cultural change. Alcoholics who refuse to recognise their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum deniability'.
Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors.
Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene. States of Denial is the first, comprehensive, study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. Arising from the Council Awayday held on 31 October 2000, the School's Council recently met to finalise arrangements for taking the issues identified at the Awayday forward. Council has emphasised the need to consult widely throughout the School community on these very important issues.