The 21 Group is indebted to Dr Emily Baker for contributing a new section to the 21 Group webpages on Employment Tribunals for Beginners. This is the definitive “HowTo” on holding your University to account in the Employment Tribunals if they are guilty of discrimination, unfair or constructive dismissal, wage theft or failure to protect a whistleblower. There is a host of practical advice in the article to those who may want to fight back.
As Dr Emily Baker puts it, “Higher education institutions leverage a uniquely powerful position in the careers of their employees. They are gold-plated institutions that attract gold-plated individuals. In any event, individuals who work at those institutions are gold by association. On commencing their employment, they have access to jobs, grants, resources and skilled labour they would not otherwise. Such jobs, grants, resources and skilled labour are the essence of career progression in academia. Institutions are clearly wise to this and they can name their price accordingly, or so the insidious mentality goes. The institution can foster certain practices employees should be expected to just put up with because to work there at all is considered a privilege. If you don’t like it, well, many will flock in their droves to take your place.”
An employee versus a University is a David versus Goliath fight. Universities are wealthy. Supply of academics hopelessly outstrips demand in the job market. Rampant casualisation means fewer & fewer people have secure academic jobs. So universities start off in a strong position in employment disputes. They are Goliath.
Nonetheless, there have been a string of University losses at Employment Tribunals over the last couple of years. David has regularly beaten Goliath — for example, in McCambridge v York University (2023), Miller v Bristol University (2023), Jolly & Abrams v Oxford University (2023), Phoenix v Open University (2023), Abrahart v Bristol University (2023), Harvie, Lightfoot & Lilley v Leicester University (2024), D’Arcy v Leicester University (2024) and Leaney versus Loughborough University (2024). Employment Tribunal decisions can be searched for and examined on the HM Courts website here. In fact, claimants against Universities statistically have an excellent chance of winning, as shown by the infographic at the top of the article. (We particularly note & applaud the resilience of Dr D’Arcy who represented herself and defeated Leicester University’s highly paid KC, winning substantial damages for unfair dismissal).
Even if you lose, as in Connolly v Cambridge University, it still provides an opportunity to put your case to a wider audience (see the Daily Telegraph and our blog posting). The supervisor who plagiarised Dr Connolly while she was a PhD student was named in the press. Cambridge University won this case, as the Tribunal concluded that the University had done nothing wrong legally. However, it is clear that the University behaved very badly towards an early career researcher from an ethical standpoint. Cambridge University’s Human Resources department embroiled her in a 4 year grievance procedure before concluding that Dr Connolly had been correct all along.They took no action against the supervisor (Dr Connolly was represented on a no win-no fee basis at the Tribunal by a generous lawyer).
The 21 Group believes that the mistreatment of employees in the higher education sector is widespread. Absolutely nothing will improve unless the individuals who are wronged fight back. So we are in favour of more academics taking universities to Employment Tribunals, if there is a good case & internal methods of redress fail (they usually do in universities). So, we hope Dr Emily Baker’s article inspires more people to hold to account those who run our universities and preside over the casual and common mistreatment of staff.
4 Comments
Theophrastus · 9 November 2024 at 23:23
With respect I think you are missing the main issue here, which is not about the law, but rather, basic human ethics.
A common feature of failing organisations is caring more about “legal risk” than basic moral commitments to staff. Typically, they have also lost sight of their “core social purpose”, which in higher education means fostering young intellectual development, innovative research, and societal knowledge needs.
That is exactly what we see here.
Firstly for example, the central ethos of our profession is to aid the career and academic growth of younger scholars. Legally provable or not, plagiarising student work is an appalling violation of our unwritten “code”. It should always be investigated and sanctioned immediately. And even if the concerns were not upheld by third parties, what harm would it do to acknowledge and credit our students in our publications? Many colleagues do so all the time, so why would any scholar not want to act generously in this way?
Secondly the administrators who dragged out the torture of an emerging scholar – rather than fairly assess and redress her concerns at the moment they were raise – should be fired immediately, as this violates the core ethical code of an academic to foster the wellbeing of younger scholars and researchers.
In short, what we have learned is how at no point do our university administrators consider the ethics of their actions, nor the values for which our institution is known. They thought instead only in terms of what they could get away with were they ever held to account. Sadly the result has been to undermine our reputation for standards of excellence and I fear in this case deservedly so.
21percent.org · 9 November 2024 at 23:48
Agreed 100 per cent
Pete · 10 November 2024 at 17:05
It is not just ethics, but also the brand and standing of the university.
In my university (I teach business studies in LA – so a long way from Cambridge England) I would be totally stunned had we ever let something this go public with the same disregard as you folks over there.
As I reinforce to our MBA grads each year, reputation takes decades to build, but just moments to destroy. And if your starting point is that you are a company (or school) with a great brand built up over decades or centuries – like Cambridge Uni – every minor scratch becomes an existential risk.
Because that is all it takes to tear you from the top of the leaderboard to the middle — and fast.
So whoever ran this case wasn’t just ignoring ethics, but really, your basic self-interest and survival as an elite institution.
Now there’s also going to be this link to plagiarism and poor standards and on the Internet nothing disappears. A year, five years, ten years from now this exposure is still going to be out there and serve as reference point. If you think about the billions of dollars or pounds of annual cash flow from student fees, grants, foundations etc. and the cost at the margin if people associate Cambridge with plagiarism and mistreatment of students, that damage is crazy.
Anon · 24 November 2024 at 14:17
Pete, I think that when it comes to Cambridge and Oxford, there is a arrogance stemming from both their survivorship of almost a millennium, as well as their reputation as elite institutions and pillars of the country. It’s like that other “beloved” and bloated British institution, the monarchy: it can and does get away with absolutely anything.
That said, this is a problem that’s rife in higher education in the UK and is by no means limited to the bloated Oxbridge universities. For example, look at smaller and less prestigious universities like the University of Kent and Bristol, which have had issues with student suicides (Natasha Abrahart and Jessica Small) due to bullying / mobbing—cases that have made it into the national and international press. They too, as institutions, don’t seem to care about the reputational costs of their actions, and there only seems to be concern in hindsight.