The Billionaire University has been found guilty of exploiting its staff at an Employment Tribunal. Rebecca Abrams and Alice Jolly taught Creative Writing at Oxford University for 15 years. They were employed on fixed-term “personal services” contracts. At an employment tribunal this week, a judge ruled that these contracts were Read more…
This is a very upsetting story. It concerns the death of an undergraduate student. Natasha Abrahart was in the second year of a physics degree at Bristol University. She sadly took her life in 2018 — worried about an oral presentation in front of all the tutors & students. The Read more…
There is a human cost to bullying. The people running UK Universities don’t seem to care much about that. They are primarily interested in running the University like a business. So here, we will just look at the financial cost, the bottom line. This calculation should be done properly through Read more…
Here we complement the previous posting with a study of the 10 worst performing Non-Russell Group Universities. Again, we give total number of complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), as well as complaints per 1000 staff (using publicly available estimates of the total number of employees). These statistics are Read more…
Open universities uphold the right to speak and to know — in order to support involvement in governance and accountability of management. The Freedom of Information Act (2000) provides access to information held by your University. This might include grievance data, use of non-disclosure agreements, sexual harassment statistics, retention numbers, Read more…
‘Mr Bates and the Post Office’ has been a harrowing TV series on the abuse of power, as hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters were wrongly sent to prison for theft. This is despite the Post Office middle and senior management knowing of systematic flaws in the computerised accounting system. The substance Read more…
Here is a Youtube video in which no-one is allowed to comment or downvote. It introduces Cambridge University’s “Dignity at Work” policy. We are assured, “There is no place for bullying, harassment, discrimination, sexual misconduct, or victimisation in our community.” It has a total of 8 upvotes after 5 months, Read more…
Below is the pdf of a talk about Bullying in Academia given to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey group. It contains a summary of the work of the 21 Group in the wider context of bullying, harassment and discrimination in academia.
In a recent post, we tackled the myth that bullying is necessary to drive academic staff performance. In fact, the data suggest the exact opposite. Institutions with a historical record of bullying performed more poorly in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. Those with good management cultures performed much Read more…
It is a simple story. Even today, there is a widespread fallacy, in particular among leading universities & their administrators, that bullying is the unfortunate price to be paid for achieving and maintaining top performance. Overbearing heads of department justify their behaviour as a part of their university’s success, without which its top Read more…