Lecture date: 1980-03-04
Alvin Boyarsky addresses the school community.
DVD available at the Architectural Association Lecture Archive.
Transcription:
(…) Built into this contract discussion was the state of art that the school community requested, which was that the chairman was liable to be dismissed forthwith, if he lost the confidence of the school community. I’ve never known in my time here, actually after a lawyer helped me, what that means. And I’m sure it’s a very complicated business, given the various employment acts, but I understand the spirit of it, which means the chairman actually packs up his belongings (…). So that was the sort of head raising operation that is school’s ambition, that there will be a (…) coming in, and who disappears from the scene for a moment less noticed and vanishes. (…) That’s the way I received the communication, and that is the way it’s supposed to be, and the way the school wanted it at that time.
At the end of three years, there was the first babble on what was the chairman elected and how was he elected, and so on and so forth. A very very civilized procedures took place: quite simply that the council asked the student community for advice and the school community met and appointed a committee of staff and students and employees and council members to take part, to sit in a room for a week or ten days and receive delegations from all parts of the school to see whether they were happy or not, and was there an issue or were there series of issues, and they met once or twice to discuss the report, and eventually they had a meeting in a room like this to decide to re-invite the chairman, and that’s what happened, in 1973-74.
A very curious thing happened in 1976, which is why we are gathered here in this rather peculiar situation, which is that the council of the AA, without consulting the school community, unilaterally, decided to dismiss the chairman, and the school community didn’t accept this and voted to reappoint the chairman, and then voted no confidence in the council. So the council did not risk to withdraw its legal prerogative on not to reappoint the chairman, a (…) took place, a very peculiar feature of the (…) was that the council wrote to all the members of the association all over the world (…) information, which were making the case against re-appointing the chairman. Eventually, new council elections took place, the existing council was designated, and the new council re-elected, and I was invited to do what the school community wanted. So, very very special arrangements were made so there would be an interesting, and open, and honest conversation about the reappointment or not of the chairman. And I insisted, that was one of my requests, that the school community be brought into discussion, because I could not see it returning to pre-1971, where the council, without necessarily knowing this rule, could make decisions of that sort. In the meeting with the committee, staff, and students and council members, this feature got spelled out, sort of… the ballot, yes or now, chairman, whether you agree or not and so on.
What was finally arrived at, I had mine misapprehension about that because I know the statistics of the schools, and I know very well that kind of procedure is probably not good enough to make it possible for most people of the school community to have an intelligent point of view, because almost half of them are new each year. After a two years period, there is not much memory of what’s all about. So I’m slightly unhappy, nevertheless, I think that the procedure I spelled out might not have been handled in a more elegant way, I think there might be a way in which conversations of a general sort that might be taking place, and about the time that curious documents and events which emerge and have circulated and so on, which are characteristic of an unhappy state about this place, but that in fact an interesting debate might take place about where the school is at the moment and whether dramatic changes are required or not.
I’m in that curious position, I’ve been around for eight and a half years, which is a hell of a long time, for me, and possibly for you. And I’m not certain whether—regardless of what my instincts are, or what I would like to do for the next five years or whatever, I’m not sure whether it’s good for the school or not, to have someone like myself, and not just myself, but a hell of a lot of members of the staff to begin with have a certain not allegiance to the chairman office, but simply they represent generations of people who have been here for quite some time. I don’t know, and I don’t know what you think, whether it’s time to actually go through the motions of lifting generations on Bedford square or whether that conversation should be put of
