Make it easier to whistleblow while you work

Whistleblowers need more support when reporting falsified or flawed research carried out by university colleagues, leading scientists have claimed.

Following the publication by the British Medical Journal of research suggesting that one in eight scientists and doctors in the UK has witnessed some sort of research fraud, a conference on scientific misconduct heard how junior academics were sometimes bullied into silence or had their contracts terminated if they spoke out.

At the meeting in London organised by the BMJ and the Committee on Publication Ethics (Cope), Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, said that "institutional corruption" had resulted in a culture that "penalised whistleblowers".

"I think the problem is that institutions refuse to deal with the problem," said Dr Wilmshurst, who was embroiled in a four-year legal battle between 2007 and 2011 when a now-defunct US medical company tried to sue him for libel after he criticised one of its products.

He cited several cases in which whistleblowers had been discredited and forced out of institutions while those guilty of falsification continued up the career ladder.

Nick Steneck, director of the research ethics and integrity programme at the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research, said many complaints were dismissed too lightly by institutions.

"Some set a very high bar of what the allegation must be - most cases just get ignored," he said.

Observing a "disincentive to whistleblow", he added: "Why do we put junior people in a position where they have to blow the whistle? Most senior people are aware of [the misconduct] - they know and suspect the same things.

"We should have a better whistleblowing process for senior staff."

Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat science spokesman who lost his parliamentary seat in the 2010 general election, said that more independent oversight was needed because universities had a "vested interest" in suppressing cases of malpractice due to fears of reputational damage.

"The temptation to cover it up or not deal with it is enormous," Dr Harris said.

"But it only takes one high-profile case where a patient has suffered for the whole of UK medical research to be put under the spotlight, causing political confidence and the confidence of funders to drop."

Subtler types of research malpractice were, however, more damaging than those few outright cases of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, said Sir Iain Chalmers, coordinator of the James Lind Initiative, which calls for better, more controlled drug trials.

The tendency of journals to publish only "successful" scientific studies with a positive result "created a bias in research, which leads to avoidable suffering and death", he said. Failure to publish those studies that "went up a blind alley" meant that future researchers might undertake similar projects, wasting time, money and even lives.

Sir Iain cited the near-fatal human drug trials conducted by the German pharmaceutical firm TeGenero in 2006, in which participants were left in intensive care as a result of adverse reactions to an anti-inflammatory drug.

This could have been avoided if research on a similar drug had been more widely shared, he said.

"There is a much more insidious influence from minor examples than the 'big bang' examples that reverberate around the world," said Michael Farthing, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex and a founding member of Cope.

However, despite concerns that some professors were "untouchable" in their departments, the idea of a US-style independent external regulator failed to find favour.

Graeme Catto, a former president of the General Medical Council, said the presence of a state regulator would allow institutions to "duck out of their responsibilities" and "would have to have a huge budget".

Professor Farthing said universities needed a more consistent approach to research misconduct, but argued that self-regulation and greater emphasis on prevention was the way forward.

Research Councils UK and Universities UK are working on a "concordat" to agree aspects of policy in this area but, two years on, nothing has been announced.

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

Whistle and we won't be able to come to you, or won't have to after all

Whistleblowers contacted England's funding council 18 times in the past two years, alerting it to allegations that included pressure being put on staff to lie during an audit and the manipulation of National Student Survey results.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England looked into all of the cases, but either decided that no further action was required on its part or was unable to respond to the whistleblowers to follow up the complaints.

Half of the tip-offs were made anonymously.

The Hefce records for January 2010 to October 2011, released to Times Higher Education under the Freedom of Information Act, show that only four complaints were made using the formal Public Interest Disclosure Act mechanism, which protects whistleblowers who speak out against wrongdoing in the workplace.

A third of the 18 complaints related to the University of Gloucestershire in 2010.

The institution had a turbulent year as it sought to recover from a £31.6 million debt. Its vice-chancellor departed and it lost a damaging employment tribunal to one of its managers, Jan Merrigan.

Hefce audited Gloucestershire's student number returns in 2010.

The Gloucestershire complaints that were submitted to Hefce, all made anonymously, included a request "for each member of the finance team to be interviewed alone during the forthcoming Hefce data audit".

A summary of Hefce's response states: "Audit team advised. Request has not been shared with the institution to ensure that the audit is not influenced."

There was also a complaint about alleged "variance in student number reporting and tuition fee recovery". Hefce said that this had "already been prioritised" in the audit.

Another Gloucestershire complaint alleged that "staff [were] told to lie during [the] forthcoming audit". Hefce's response states: "Audit team aware of the factors which may have prompted staff concerns."

Paul Drake, Gloucestershire's executive director of external relations, said the university was "aware of a number of the issues raised by anonymous individuals, but has not been able to respond to them individually as the authors are unknown".

He noted that "some of the concerns expressed date from a turbulent period of the university's past", adding that a "change agenda" had brought about "a more stable institution and positive financial surpluses".

Other complaints submitted to Hefce concerned the alleged "manipulation of the NSS" at two unnamed institutions. Hefce found that no action was required.

One of the formal Public Interest Disclosures concerned Coventry University, where there was a claim that a "company connected with the university" was "alleged to be returning falsified enrolments".

But Hefce said that "no evidence...[was] found during the audit which was instigated" and described the allegation as "unsubstantiated".

A spokesman for the funding council said that judgements were made "in all cases as to what action was necessary, either by Hefce or the institutions involved".

He added that "if necessary, the matter was investigated to give us the information we needed".

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

2011...

• Univ of Texas hires abusive boss sued for creating hostile work environment

• Bullying at Stirling University

• Bullied Macquarie University staff demand an apology

• Legal costs of university in St Andrews v Quigley

• Newcastle uni (Australia) bully claims: Academic says harassment led to illness

• What Killed Kevin Morrissey?

• Bullying at work: the impact of shame among university and college lecturers

• How to get rid of good professors

• University of Salford - Suspension of Staff

• Kingston University: £635,165 on six employment tribunals

• Fresh twist in Fredrics v Scott case

• Legal and other costs - the University of Leicester and others

• Who is the REAL Prof. Hassan Abdalla?

• Dr. Claudius D’Silva

76% white and male? That's today's UK professoriate

Figures showing that 76 per cent of UK professors are white men should prompt the sector to address its "inequalities", according to the head of higher education's equality body.

This year's Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2011, from the Equality Challenge Unit, was the first to look at professors in terms of the "interplay of multiple identities", including both race and gender.

The report finds that in 2009-10, only 0.9 per cent of UK staff in professorial roles were black or minority ethnic (BME) women. But 3.4 per cent of staff in non-professorial roles were BME women. And 76.1 per cent of UK national staff in professorial roles were white males. The ECU said it did not have figures on the proportion of white males among all higher education staff.

The mean average salary of female staff was £31,116 compared with £39,021 for male staff, an overall pay gap of 20.3 per cent, the report notes.

David Ruebain, chief executive of the ECU, said: "The statistics do highlight a stark gap in representation at professorial level. We hope they will alert the sector to the need to act to address these inequalities."

He added that the "success of the Athena Swan programme", which aims to improve the careers of women working in science, engineering and technology departments, "has shown that change is needed at the systemic level to tackle these imbalances".

The ECU is currently running pilot programmes on race and gender with a number of universities, seeking to address cultural problems "such as barriers to professorial status and management positions", Mr Ruebain said.

Overall, 53.8 per cent of higher education staff were women. Yet at professorial level, just 19.1 per cent of staff were women.

An ECU spokeswoman explained that a provision in the Equality Act requiring employers to publish figures on their pay gaps has not been enacted by the government and noted that it "wouldn't apply" to institutions of higher education even if it were put in place. Proposals have been formed in Scotland.

The strongest equality duties are in Wales, the spokeswoman said, where universities must collect data on pay differences for all "protected characteristics" including race and gender and must "have due regard" to the need for equality objectives.

The ECU findings came as the National Union of Students published a separate report on disability hate incidents among higher and further education students across the UK. The report found that 8 per cent of disabled respondents "said that they had experienced at least one hate incident while studying at their current institution, which they believed was motivated by prejudice against their disability".

No Place for Hate recommends that universities "should consider setting a specific objective on tackling hate crime as part of their public sector equality duty"; "raise awareness of what constitutes a hate incident and the negative impact of this behaviour on the victim and others"; and establish strong support networks for disabled students.

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

University of Iowa settles few bullying cases

IOWA CITY, Iowa—
Even though workplace bullying has been identified as a major concern in recent years, University of Iowa officials responsible for informally resolving those disputes are successful in only one in every eight cases, according to data that sheds light on a campus office often shrouded in secrecy.

The Office of the Ombudsperson resolved 8 of 63 bullying complaints brought to its attention by students, faculty and staff between January 2010 and Oct. 5, 2011 and improved the situation in two others, according to data released to an Iowa City lawyer and shared with The Associated Press. The office failed to resolve 13 complaints, and the outcome was listed as "unknown," "unclear" or blank in most of the rest, according to the data, which the university released only after being threatened with a lawsuit.

The data highlights an office whose operations have largely been done in secret since its creation in 1985 and appears to undercut its claims that most employees are satisfied with the service they receive. The office is supposed to serve as "a confidential, neutral and independent dispute resolution service" for the school's 15,000 faculty and staff, according to the university operations manual, but has no authority to order changes if voluntary agreements can't be reached.

Bullying among students has become a major issue in schools following several tragedies involving gay teens, but the issue also is prevalent among adults in the workplace. More than one-third of U.S. workers say they have experienced bullying, the repeated mistreatment by bosses and co-workers that includes verbal abuse, threatening conduct and intimidation, according to a 2010 survey commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute, a group dedicated to combating the issue.

Staff Ombudsperson Cynthia Joyce declined comment on the data and referred questions to university spokesman Tom Moore. In response to written questions, he called bullying "one of the most intractable problems the office handles."

"There are many reasons why a case may not be resolved at the time of the office's last contact with a visitor with concerns about this problem," Moore wrote. "In particular, in the majority of workplace bullying cases, the visitor does not want any action taken by the office."

Critics say the data shows the office favors the university administration and does not do enough to help workers who are mistreated.

"The ombuds office at UI has a long and successful history of resolving conflicts. However, the current atmosphere there is toxic to bullying victims," said attorney Andrew Hosmanek, who has studied bullying in the workplace and shared the data with AP in hopes of changing what he considers an ineffective office. "Bullying victims should be aware that, according to this data, bringing a case directly to the ombuds office is very unlikely to end in a positive result."

Under the current set-up, he said employees may need to pursue a formal complaint, file a lawsuit or consult with a counselor or psychologist to change what he called a "bully culture that has arisen in parts of the UI."

In addition to the low rate of resolution, the data shows:

-- The office made a "low" effort in more than two-thirds of the cases. Moore said that may be because the office simply listened to concerns and helped workers decide on a course of action or that visitors decided to resolve their concerns independently by quitting or transferring jobs, for instance. In complex cases, the office may expend low effort if it is only one of several university offices working the problem, he added.

-- The office made a "high" effort in a single case, which ended by arranging a meeting with a department executive officer.

-- At least five of the complaints later went through a formal legal process, including a lawsuit, an appeal or a grievance.

-- The office redacted the details of each complaint except one: "Significant other of UI grad student is being mobbed at work." That complaint received a low effort by the office and the outcome was unknown.

Hosmanek filed a public records request seeking details on the office's handling of bullying complaints in October after the office's annual report claimed that 81 percent of its visitors left satisfied with the service they received. The report based that claim on a voluntary survey returned by 41 percent of the roughly 500 visitors to the office last year.

The report said complaints of disrespectful behavior, including bullying, have sharply increased in recent years and now involve one-quarter of the office's cases. Against that backdrop, Hosmanek said he wanted to see the data to gauge the office's effectiveness.

Moore claimed many visitors leave satisfied even if the office doesn't resolve their complaints.

University records custodian Steve Parrott at first rejected Hosmanek's data request, arguing the office's promise of confidentiality to those who complain was crucial to its operations. "The office performs no government function, maintains no official documents, and provides mediation services. Its records are confidential and privileged and therefore not subject to open records requests," Parrott wrote.

Hosmanek protested the response, arguing the office was subject to the public records law, served a public function, and did maintain records. Parrott acknowledged the office had records, but claimed they were exempt from disclosure because they were "confidential personnel records" under Iowa law.

After Hosmanek said he did not want names of employees or victims, only data, and threatened to seek legal remedies for an open records violation, Parrott told him there were 63 bullying complaints for that time period. The school eventually released heavily-redacted records from the office's database showing the effort expended in each case, the outcome and whether the dispute later went to a formal grievance or legal process.

"Although the University of Iowa Office of the Ombudsperson position remains that their records are confidential and not subject to disclosure," he wrote, "the Office was willing to share the enclosed documents to bring this matter to a close."

From: http://www.chicagotribune.com

Is a whiter-than-white academy blind to the racial inequality in its midst?

Universities are "oblivious" to racial inequalities and are failing to act on problems because they "see themselves as liberal and believe existing policies ensure fairness", it has been argued.

Andrew Pilkington, professor of sociology at the University of Northampton, stated in a lecture, "Institutional Racism in the Academy", that the "sheer whiteness" of universities often means that "they ignore adverse outcomes and don't see combating racial/ethnic inequalities as a priority".

When the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry was published in 1999, it famously spoke of a police investigation marred by "institutional racism". Jack Straw, the home secretary at the time, broadened the issue, suggesting that "any long-established, white-dominated organisation is liable to have procedures, practices and a culture that tend to...disadvantage non-white people".

In an attempt to remedy these problems, the government introduced colour-blind widening-participation strategies for students and equal-opportunity policies for university staff. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 identified a number of specific duties.

Professor Pilkington drew on research he had carried out for his recent book, Institutional Racism in the Academy: A Case Study, to assess how far universities have risen to the challenge.

The research compares an anonymous "Midshire" police force and a post-1992 university based in the same county. Although there was less racism in the university's "occupational culture", as reported by its black and minority ethnic (BME) employees, it shared with the police force "a taken-for-granted white norm" and was dominated by a white senior management.

The university's employment practices, lack of positive action and the low priority given to race equality also scored badly.

Although universities had undoubtedly addressed equality issues, if only in response to external pressures, Professor Pilkington suggested that "action was particularly evident in the period 2002-03", and had probably achieved more in relation to gender than ethnicity. Subsequent government agendas on themes such as "community cohesion" might also have shifted the spotlight from race.

There remained a great deal to be done and far fewer incentives for universities to devote time and energy to the area, he argued. In widening-participation programmes, "funding letters never mention race or ethnicity but invariably refer to social class or a proxy measure of it", he said, while "performance indicators are wholly class-based".

Pre-entry and access initiatives are given priority over equally vital "interventions once students have entered higher education", he added. And the specific needs of BME learners could drop off the agenda when incorporated into generic widening-participation policies.

Professor Pilkington concluded that "BME academic staff continue to experience significant disadvantage...10 years after the publication of the Macpherson report", while BME students continue to be less likely to be awarded good degrees.

Although adept at finding fault elsewhere, universities "remain oblivious of inequalities in our midst and the need to ensure that our own policies and procedures are evidence-based", he said.

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

A bullying culture at Sydney Uni?

A bullying culture at Sydney Uni? An understandably anonymous tipster claims bullying of staff and students at the University of Sydney is now so rampant that staff openly seek to garner the support of students in their fight against an "utterly stubborn" management.

They write: "Further, students have been driven to the point of suicide or even attempted suicide at the hands of bullying university staff and the stock university response is to engage its hired legal guns (the Office of General Counsel) to shut the complainants down. Further still, the university's perpetual cash cow, the Business School, is awash with bullying of Chinese students, first through the over-representation of such students in academic dishonesty matters, and again the discriminatory manner in which those students are dealt with when they make special consideration applications due to illness or misadventure. Chinese students are often publicly yelled at by lecturers in the Business School: 'You are in Australia now, do as we do!'"

Are things really that bad? We'd love to hear from more staff and faculty on life on campus. Drop us a line or comment anonymously. boss@crikey.com.au http://www.crikey.com.au/tipoff/

By Anonymous

Will Stirling University ever learn...

Stirling University doesn't like bad publicity. However that hasn't stopped them from using their corrupt practices to destroy people's lives. Instead, they try to hide their devious ways from the public gaze. Their lawyer obsessively raises the matter of my blog with judges because it is causing the university and several of its employees considerable embarrassment.

Since 2009, Wikipedia has displayed the story of David Donaldson, who in 2007 was a senior researcher at Stirling University. He removed a colleague's name from her research grant application, and replaced it with his own, attempting to make it look like it was his work. His act of piracy, which required swapping names eleven times, was discovered and he eventually wrote a letter of apology to his colleague, Dr. Rhodes. However, he later unfairly forced her out of her job at the university. She won her unfair dismissal claim at Glasgow Employment Tribunal in February 2009. Stirling University awarded Donaldson a Professorship shortly after he admitted to stealing Dr. Rhodes' work.

A number of attempts have been made to remove the article from Wikipedia. It is bound to be a source of embarrassment to the University. In the talk section for Wikipedia's Stirling University page, a discussion refers to a legal representative for the university asking for the Donaldson article to be removed. The request was rejected.

Times Higher Education carries a more detailed account of what happened.

Of course you must be wondering how an academic gets pushed out of a University by another academic. Dr. Rhodes was subjected to the same sham grievance procedure as I was. HR Director, Martin McCrindle conducted an investigation into her grievance and concluded there was no case to answer. He was backed by Principal, Christine Hallett. When Dr Rhodes told Martin McCrindle that she would prove what happened in court, McCrindle replied saying that she had 'no basis' to make a claim to the tribunal. As soon as she submitted her complaints to the tribunal, which she did as she had no other way of addressing what happened, they declared they wouldn't contest her claims! She won the case before it even got to court!

Their lawyer agreed with the judge when he said that not resisting her claims amounted to agreeing with them. Her claims included the fact that Donaldson's theft of her research had led to her dismissal (the theft for which she had a letter of apology) and a sham grievance procedure to investigate what happened when she found herself forced out. The university changed their reason for dismissing Dr. Rhodes three times. Each time she informed them that the reason was not valid in her case, so they just invented another false reason each time.

Similarly, in my own case, at my appeal hearing against dismissal I advised Martin McCrindle that my dismissal would prove embarrassing to the university and to several of its employees. He replied saying that that was only my opinion. Well, of course it was only my opinion, but I think it was a correct opinion. If my blog isn't causing anyone any embarrassment, then why is the university paying their lawyer to keep going on about it like a broken record? And if they weren't embarrassed by their sham grievance procedure, why would they risk a jail sentence by committing fraud in an attempt to cover it up, Martin?

Will Stirling University ever learn that they can't treat people like this?

From: http://bullyingatstirlinguniversity.blogspot.com

'Prima donna' professors lambasted for failure to mentor

A lack of leadership and the failure to support and mentor junior colleagues have been highlighted in a major study of the professoriate.

Of the 1,200 academic staff from lower grades who responded to a survey commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, more than half (53 per cent) said they did not receive sufficient help or advice from professorial staff.

Only about one in seven (14 per cent) said they did receive enough support.

Asked if they had received excellent leadership or mentoring from professors in their university, 26 per cent said "never" and 36 per cent "occasionally". This compares with 9 and 19 per cent who responded "very often" and "quite often", respectively.

The study was led by Linda Evans, a reader in education at the University of Leeds, who revealed the provisional findings to Times Higher Education.

Working with colleagues at Oxford Brookes University, she collated hundreds of comments about professors from the point of view of "the led", with respondents from across 94 institutions complaining that many professors were remote, unhelpful, haughty, self-aggrandising and poor communicators.

One disgruntled staff member described professors as "prima donnas, bullies and not team players", while another said the "notion of 'professorial leadership' struck a slightly odd note" because he viewed them as "only looking after their own interests".

Another characterised them as "personal glory seekers", while yet another inveighed against "backstabbing assholes who take the credit for other people's work".

Asked about the accessibility of professors to more junior academics seeking advice, one respondent said: "Are you kidding?" Another said they were generally "too 'busy' with 'important stuff' to bother with mentoring".

Dr Evans, whose study is titled "Leading professors: examining the perspectives of 'the led' in relation to professorial leadership", said she was struck by the volume of criticism. "The comments were predominantly negative," she said.

"There were also positive comments, however, so it's certainly not a case of 'professor bashing'. But some academic leaders and management would be quite surprised at how negatively they are viewed."

A lack of clarity over the professorial role helped to create much dissatisfaction, added Dr Evans, with some professors asked to fulfil too many roles.

"It was remarked that many professors are appointed solely on the basis of research and some are almost autistic," she said.

"So why should we expect them to have leadership skills? That was not the criterion on which they were appointed.

"There must be some system of bringing on the next generation of academics, but whether it is done through professors or the wider university is an important question.

"If we are not careful we will be pulling professors in too many directions. They are not Superman - we can't push them into roles they do not want or cannot do."

Defining a professor's remit was also difficult when the university sector contained so many different institutions, she added.

About 87 per cent of respondents said a professor should maintain a publication record above non-professorial staff, while 82 per cent said excellence in teaching should be a requirement.

About 77 per cent said professors should generate a steady stream of research funding, while 52 per cent believed they should have a lighter teaching load than other staff.

However, the comments received in the survey highlight many common gripes.

"I have no idea what professors in my department/college are supposed to be doing," said one academic, adding that "from the looks of things, neither do they".

Another said: "Many of our professors were 'bought' in for the last [research assessment exercise] and have done nothing to contribute to an improved research culture. Some think teaching is beneath them."

Professors were also described as "pointless - they have little or no role outside their own direct concerns" and are "only interested in getting the star on other people's papers and raising research funds with other people's ideas".

"'Professorial' and 'leadership' are two words that in general do not fit together in universities from my experience," concluded another.

"Once promoted to that position, the majority are slowly heading to retirement. Many of them are unknown to colleagues even in their own corridor."

The year-long study will now seek to gain views from professors themselves, with the findings discussed in seminars hosted by the Society for Research into Higher Education.

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

The academic as truth-teller

The logic of the bureacratisation of academia, forcing academics to 'publish or perish' and cut corners when it comes to teaching, has more to do with the marketisation of universities than learning and scholarship.

Sadly, just as the principle of free higher education is under assault as never before, so too is the idea of the academic as a free-thinking intellectual, particularly in the UK. In the first place, rather than being allowed to pursue ideas for their own sake, increasingly British academics are pressured into meeting university and departmental demands for the five- or six-yearly Research Assessment Exercise (lately renamed the Research Excellence Framework). Introduced in 1985/6 as a means of evaluating the ‘quality’ of academic research across the various disciplines, the RAE requires university departments to submit four publications for each full-time member of staff selected for inclusion. Departments are then ranked according to their research outputs, research environment and indicators of esteem by a panel of subject specialists (there were 67 panels for the 2008 RAE). And it is these rankings that determine the allocation of quality weighted research funding each university receives from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), a non-departmental public body currently overseen by the Secretary of State for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. But the pressure to perform well in the RAE has resulted in academics being subject to ever-increasing layers of micromanagement and performance indicators whose logic are more corporate than they are academic. In actual fact, the roots for this bureaucratisation of scholarship can be traced back to the elite US Ivy League business schools and management consultancy firms such as Bain & Company, the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey.

The upshot of this academic drift is that the ‘publish or perish’ imperative is now endemic within academe. And not just any old publication will do. The sheer volume of submissions to the RAE (over 200,000 outputs were submitted as part of the 2008 RAE) makes it virtually impossible for panel members to read through each and every article, which invariably means that common assumptions are made about the ‘quality’ of articles published in top peer-reviewed journals vis-à-vis those published elsewhere. But what this supposition overlooks is all the very good quality research published by those academics who refuse to play the RAE ‘game’. Indeed, it has been argued that only publishing in the ‘top’ journals forces academics to fashion their research around what those journals want, which can result in an unwillingness to push beyond the narrow confines of specialist fields of study and, ultimately, intellectual inertia[11].

Moreover, with sails trimmed tight, increasingly academics are forced to cut corners if they are to meet the next publishing deadline, particularly newly qualified academics who are expected to combine research with heavy teaching loads and endless administrative duties (a problem whose sheer scale and mind-numbingly tedious and pointless nature appears to be exclusively British). ‘What ever you do, don’t over-prepare’: ‘You only need to be one step ahead’: ‘Just cover the basics, ignore the rest’. These are just some of the suggested coping strategies one encounters when starting a new lecturing post. So much for the idea that the university is a place where teaching is carried out in an atmosphere of research, and vice versa. And this says nothing of the way in which the instrumentalisation of research has undermined collegiality by atomising any sense of a collective academic community[12]. It is no wonder that many junior academics, though grateful to finally have got their feet under the desk, find the early years of their careers strangely alienating and dispiriting, not quite knowing where to begin, what to prioritise or who to turn to[13].

Other ‘McKinseyian’ performance indicators include the unyielding pressures academics now face to secure external sources of funding (otherwise known as ‘grant-capture’), which often involves the preparation of long and tedious application forms for ever decreasing amounts of money and worsening odds of success. To compound matters, most academic funding bodies have rolled out award schemes that encourage collaborative research with a non-academic partner, which necessarily means a further narrowing of research aims and objectives. That many present-day universities so prize ‘cultural partnerships’, ‘corporate sponsorship’ or ‘third-stream funding’ in an effort to offset the shortfall in government funding muddies the waters yet further insofar as one sees increasing numbers of academics posturing as ‘consultants’ in the belief that research which has an economic or technocratic function is the surest way to gain promotion. And should the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework go ahead with the proposed 25 per cent weighting for so-called ‘impact’ (the premise being that academics and university departments will need to demonstrate how their research has impacted on and benefited the wider economy and society) the situation will almost certainly become even worse. In terms of the humanities specifically, the effect would be, as recently noted by Stefan Collini, ‘potentially disastrous’, not least because the implication is that academics will ‘be judged and rewarded as salesmen’ and thus forced into ‘hustling’ and ‘hawking’ their intellectual wares[14].

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: as market-driven research and corporate partnerships are accorded even more importance in higher education due to ever decreasing amounts of public funding, it is increasingly likely that we will see yet more universities adopting a subordinate relationship with possibly corrupt and manipulative power elites. This is all the more reason for academics to adopt the position of truth-teller and to question anything and everything that facilitates the growing marketisation of higher education or undermines academic freedom. However, defending the university requires much more than academics representing truth through democratic criticism and moral indignation. Also needed is a much broader social movement comprising all UK university workers, students, other public sector employees and the trade unions. Only then might politicians start to rethink their present assault on higher education, indeed, on the welfare state at large.

In the meantime, it would seem that the onerous responsibility of speaking truth to power has fallen on the student movement. It is they who have taken the upper hand and who are asking difficult questions. And, who knows, if student occupations spread up and down the country, perhaps we will see the uncovering, just as Warwick’s students did, of yet more evidence of ethical wrongdoing. If such a situation were to occur, however, universities will of course accuse students of irresponsible behaviour and do everything in their power to bring them to heel. In fact, there are already disturbing signs that the state itself may yet ‘police’ matters (in and through its many ideological apparatuses) should student dissent intensify. There is no question that those students singled out for ‘public misconduct’ in the months ahead risk all kinds of draconian sanctions, indeed, they run the risk of jeopardising their future careers. And all because they have the conviction to defend the idea of the university as a vital social and public institution. One only hopes that academics will express equal commitment and courage, not just in their writings, but in their actions too.

Notes

[11] See Simon Head, ‘The grim threat to British universities’, New York Review of Books, 13 January 2011.
[12] See Ronald Barnett, Beyond All Reason: living ideology in the university (Buckingham: Open University Press, in association with the Society for Research into Higher Education, 2003), pp. 108-10.
[13] For a full analysis of the changing academic experience in the UK higher education sector (based on survey evidence), see Malcolm Tight, The Development of Higher Education in the United Kingdom since 1945 (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2009), pp. 271-97.
[14] Stefan Collini, ‘Impact on humanities’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 2009, pp. 18-19.

From: http://www.counterfire.org/