University worker claims that she was 'bullied and harassed' into retirement

A university computer assistant who was diagnosed with epilepsy claimed she was “bullied and harassed” by her line manager and pressured into applying for early retirement.

Jennifer Tucker, 61, appeared at a Bury St Edmunds employment tribunal yesterday where she is claiming she suffered age and disability discrimination by her employer St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Her part-time job was helping deal with computer problems for students and faculty members.

Ms Tucker, of John Clark Court, Cambridge, said she had started taking medication for her epilepsy in January 2010, when she received an appraisal form from her superior Stephanie Clarke. It contained seemingly damning remarks about her work, which had never been raised before.

She said: “I felt frightened, vulnerable and shocked. I had no memory of many things Stephanie was referring to and rather than raise these as untruths, I accepted.”

Ms Tucker, who had a brain operation in 2002 to clip an aneurysm, said in her statement to the tribunal that she took her first degree aged 46 and a post graduate diploma at 40.

She said a series of development meetings which followed her appraisal were oppressive and more like a trial.

She said: “I was being routinely criticised and demeaned, and my views and evidence ignored.

“I believe they used my condition knowingly to intimidate me in the hope that I would leave a job I could and did do well.”

Stephanie Clarke said in a statement to the tribunal that she had difficulty managing Ms Tucker, who was unwilling to accept that there was any shortfall in her performance. She said she had not known of Ms Tucker’s epilepsy until February 2010, although Ms Tucker claimed she told her much earlier.

She said: “The claimant can be rude to me and to other members of the college.”

Jane Stevens, the Master’s secretary, said she was astounded at her line manager’s comments about Ms Tucker. She said: “She was being bullied in the workplace but management refused to believe it or preferred not to accept her well documented complaints.”

The hearing continues.

From: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk

Please sign Open Letter to NC Supreme Court re: Ginsberg v. NCSU

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

At North Carolina State University (NCSU), shortly after Dr. Terri Ginsberg made supportive political comments at a screening of a Palestinian film in 2007, she went from being the favored candidate for a tenure-track position to being denied even an interview. Her efforts at redress were summarily rejected by NCSU and two courts. A jury should be permitted to decide whether NCSU's real reason for firing Dr. Ginsberg was its hostility to her political views, but this legal right has been denied. We urge the Supreme Court of North Carolina to review Dr. Ginsberg's case and to reverse the lower courts' decisions to dismiss it. On this basis, faculty at NCSU and elsewhere may finally exercise their legal right to academic speech on the topic of Palestine/Israel and, as such, to their full human rights as scholars, teachers, and intellectuals in the academic community.

To support this request to the NC Supreme Court, we invite academic faculty and students worldwide to sign our Open Letter as an e-petition at this URL:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/open-letter-to-nc-supreme-court-ginsberg-vs-ncsu.html

We expect to submit the Open Letter with all signatures received by February 7, though signatures received later would still be helpful.

You are also encouraged to send your own letter to:

Supreme Court of North Carolina
Clerk's Office
P.O. Box 2170
Raleigh, NC 27602-2170 USA

Thank you for your support,

British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) http://www.bricup.org.uk/
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) http://www.usacbi.org
Center for Constitutional Rights http://ccrjustice.org
Jewish Voice for Peace-Westchester http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jewish-Voice-for-Peace-Westchester-Chapter/201574026528540?v=info
WESPAC Foundation http://wespac.org/
Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) http://www.codz.org

What is going on at the London College of Communication?

First there is the article in the Times Higher Education about 16 courses being shut down. The closures include four bachelor's degrees, one master's programme and 11 foundation courses, six of which have "top up" options that allow students to convert them into full honours degrees with an extra year of study.

Then the University and College Union plus others called on Professor Kemp to resign.

Now we hear that academic staff are too scared to talk as some of their best colleagues have lost their jobs by daring to voice their opinion. Bullying and intimidation tactics?

Abuse of Phd students

I was a Phd student in the US and went through a similar experience. It is like a hazing process that lasts 4-5 years. Perhaps they were just whipping us into shape, and maybe I learned from it, but at the time it did not feel good, and I'm not sure if it is the most effective learning environment. I witnessed heavy handed punishments for the slightest infractions, abusive and insulting emails and phone calls, mutinies against individuals, and a soviet era style code of silence in the face of this abuse. All faculty and administrators would stick together if a student complained, and there was no authority to report them to. Students would not even talk about the bullying because they were too scared. And there was nowhere to go because we were trapped for 4-5 years, dropping out would have meant wasting all that work it took to get this far, and you need them to graduate and sponsor your thesis, and transferring is not an option. They really do have the upper hand. And the males do seem to get it worse.

By Anonymous on PhD students suffer from bullying supervisors

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