George Bain (academic)

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Professor Sir George Sayers Bain, a Canadian by birth, was President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland from 1998^[1] to 2004^[2].

While not without success, for example in pushing Queen's further up the research league table, Bain's tenure was dogged by a persistent and high-profile letter-writing campaign in the Belfast press against the axing of long-standing departments like Geology, Classics and Irish Studies.^[3] He also suffered a blow in 2001 when the University of Ulster out-performed Queen's in the very top grades awarded in the research selectivity exercise, even if Queen's overall performance was quite good. Perhaps his most public failure was the £60 million "Lanyon II" campaign to create a new 'student village'.^[4] The pressure-group "QUB Watch" also kept him under relentless scrutiny over the closure of the Armagh campus,^[5] and over what it considered his failure to reduce the number of cases of religious discrimination being taken against the university by members of staff.^[6]

[edit] Independent Review of the Fire Service

Bain was asked to chair a Government-funded Independent Review of the Fire Service in 2002, it was wide-ranging and placed fire and rescue services in the UK under close scrutiny - it led to strike action by fire-fighters, shortly before the report's publication, although the FBU and fire and rescue services had been in tense negotiations for a year before. Sir Anthony Young and Professor Sir Michael Lyons co-authored the review. The Bain Review was presented to the Deputy Prime Minister on 16 December 2002 ^[7], but a position paper was delivered earlier ^[8]. Sir George said "Taking into account the very generous pension entitlement, the holiday arrangements, the good job security, firemen are actually not badly rewarded. The recruitment and retention figures back this up. There's about 40 applications for every vacancy in the fire service." ^[9]