Prof. Richard Barnett
Vice-Chancellor
University of Ulster
Professor Patrick Johnston
Vice-Chancellor
Queen’s University Belfast
BBC N Ireland
Dear Vice-Chancellors and BBC
My name is Paolo Moderato and I am Professor of Psychology at IULM University in Milan, and President of IESCUM, a non profit organization particularly committed to develop effective and sustainable services for children with autism and their families.
I write to you out of concern about the treatment of professionals in your community who have done much to help other communities across Europe promote an effective science of behaviour for the treatment of autism.
Here is a link to a forthcoming summit on autism to be held in Belfast.
When an American colleague forwarded details of the summit to me I wrote to Profs. Karola Dillenburger and Mickey Keenan to wish them well with the summit. I was aghast learn, however, that neither of them, nor their colleagues, had been informed of this summit. I consider this to be an appalling indictment of how politics in Ireland have contaminated scientific debate. How can one university (Queen’s University of Belfast) give an honorary degree to a leading figure in the science of Applied Behaviour Analysis (Prof. Gina Green) and the other university (University Ulster) give an honorary doctorate to a person who does not actively involve leading professionals from that university who teach this science.
Many of us across Europe are indebted to the initiatives that have come from colleagues in N. Ireland. These links give testimony to these initiatives and this current debacle only serves to highlight the anti-science obstacles facing parents of children with autism in Ireland.
http://www.stamppp.com/news.html (Prof. Keenan headed this project and I was involved along with others from Iceland, Norway, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden.)
This is such a serious issue that I am circulating this letter to colleagues all around the world. Your universities will now be in the spotlight for others to see how UK universities manage this terrible turn of events.
Yours expectantly,
Love, Peace & Science