Risk in higher education can never be eliminated entirely.
There is no amount of registers, action plans, and horizon scanning that can stem the tide of the unpredictable and malign that stalks the corridors of our higher education institutions.
Of course, these corridors are within our own control. Indeed, the history of the western literary canon is the history of the banishment of risk until it returns in ever more dreadful ways. Readers of Wonkhe may be familiar with Theseus and the Minotaur. Unable to contain the Minotaur safely within his kingdom and unwilling to kill his wife’s son, Minos, the King of Crete, banishes the Minotaur to a labyrinth where it feasts on visitors. This is until Theseus, armed with a twine to find his way out of the maze, kills the Minotaur.
It is a story of hubris, and heroes, and adventure, but it is also a dynamic risk management process. Unable to kill the Minotaur it is simply moved out of sight and out of mind until a solution presents itself ordained by invisible external forces. Like the item of the risk register that has no obvious solution but marked high danger and high likelihood presumably Minos could have left the Minotaur to roam the labyrinth forever and kept his fingers crossed that it did not bring down his Kingdom. He got lucky but nobody is lucky every time.
