Uni protest over Bester
STUDENTS calling on the University of Tasmania to banish a sex offender from campus have held a protest to promote their cause.
The UTAS Women’s Collective had launched a petition calling for Nicolaas Ockert Bester to be removed from the university.
Mr Bester was jailed in 2011 for sexually abusing a student while teaching at Collegiate and again last year for bragging about the crime on Facebook. He is a UTAS PhD student. The online petition which attracted more than 3500 signatures was handed to UTAS management yesterday by about 10 protesters.
But UTAS said it believed in “an agenda of participation and the power of education to transform people’s lives”.
Mr Bester’s presence at UTAS has been controversial and the collective’s president Saffire Grant said it was his inappropriate behaviour on campus that drove the petition.
“We want to see him campus,” Ms Grant said.
According to Ms Grant, Mr Bester was living in student accommodation when he offended a second time and was given a teaching position at UTAS but this was later rescinded.
A university spokesman yesterday said it would not comment further on the case.
Police spoke to Mr Bester after two complaints about his behaviour in the gym at the Sandy Bay campus.
The university said Mr Bester voluntarily handed in his gym membership and agreed not to frequent social off spaces on campus. The university’s decision not to terminate his PhD saw the Tasmanian ombudsman ask for a “better explanation” of its reasoning.
Supreme Court judge Justice Stephen Estcourt has labelled the petition one of “two recent lamentable instances of vigilantism”.
Writing in the Australian Law Journal, he said it was “from a rule of law perspective, most regrettable”.
Ms Grant said the judge’s comments were not helpful.
“It really derails the conversation about having a safe campus,” she said.
University deputy vicechancellor (research) Brigid Heywood has said there was nothing in the rules governing PhDs which precluded Mr Bester from continuing his research.