A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) is a formal request made by an individual (the “data subject”) to an organization, asking to access the personal data the organization holds about them. This request is a key right under data protection laws.
When a person makes a DSAR, any organization such as a University must provide the following:
- Confirmation that personal data about the individual is being processed,
- Access to that personal data, usually in written or electronic format,
- Details about the processing, such as who it’s been shared with.
Organizations typically have 30 days to respond to a DSAR, though this can be extended in certain situations. Most universities have a webpage telling staff how to make a DSAR. Cambridge University’s is here.
If information exists and the university fails to provide it after a DSAR, then this is a violation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Cambridge is very secretive. It is near the top of the universities ranked according to complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for breaches of GDPR, as blogged earlier. It is actually top of the universities for the most serious complaints of all, where the ICO takes action, noted here. The university and its information officer (Dr James Knapton) have already been taken to court for failure to comply with GDPR and had to acknowledge fault.
” Sued University of Cambridge and Dr James Knapton, Information Compliance Officer, for refusing to disclose an employee’s personal data in breach of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) resulting in a pre-hearing settlement and the provision of previously withheld information.” [Cambridge Legal]
This case is in the public domain as the University (unusually) failed to negotiate confidentiality terms as part of the settlement. There are other cases which can’t be mentioned.
Right now, there is an ongoing investigation into someone very senior at Cambridge University.
Prof Tim Harper (Head of the School of Arts and Humanities) was appointed as Responsible Person. As part of the investigation, he needed to get information regarding a meeting between Prof Nigel Peake (Head of the School of Physical Sciences) and others in Summer 2021. A letter about the meeting was sent from Prof Peake to Prof Harper.
Prof Harper then was led into an error. He did not disclose the letter to the complainants. Failure to disclose evidence to all parties is a very serious matter. It has been at the heart of a number of great miscarriages of justices in the British judicial system.
Subsequent DSARs to Prof Harper and Prof Peake also failed to disclose the letter. This compounded the original error by placing both Heads of School in violation of GDPR legislation. The letter was eventually provided after its existence was demonstrated by other evidence. A complaint has been made to the Information Commissioner’s Office about this withholding despite a DSAR. Such complaints are public information and accordingly we are free to divulge it here.
My understanding is that the university and its information officer have already been taken to court for failure to comply with GDPR and had to acknowledge fault. Invariably the records they fail to release are those showing the actions of senior HR figures, so as to implicate naive professors as the source of all wrongdoing. As the cases of Professors Bullmore and Wagner show, they are more than happy to let us suffer the consequences as long as their own actions remain secret [Poster on ‘Prancing Butchers’ thread here ]
Analogous to the examples given by the poster, it is Prof Harper who is carrying the can for the mistakes of others.
Those acting as Responsible Persons in Cambridge HR investigations are very often not told the whole truth or are manipulated by access to partial information. Often, it is fair-minded and kind-hearted academics (like Prof Harper) who are seduced into acting as Responsible Persons by the argument that they are being public-spirited or that it is for the good of the university. This is not true. Instead, the role is dangerous and it is likely to backfire as you are often being manipulated by powerful actors behind the scenes.
We recommend that no — absolutely no — responsible academic ever participates as a Responsible Person in a Grievance procedure. This is needed to bring the system crashing down.
62 Comments
Irresponsible · 26 February 2025 at 05:02
“Responsible Person”—now there’s a title that inspires confidence. It conjures images of fairness, integrity, and a commitment to truth. One might reasonably assume that their duty is to assess matters with an impartial eye. How charmingly naive of me.
Having had the misfortune of dealing with two such Responsible Persons—one for my grievance and another for my appeal—I have since come to understand their actual responsibility: shutting down grievances with ruthless efficiency.
Even when an external investigation confirmed that I had suffered stress related mental heath damage, they miraculously managed to argue—with straight faces—that this was in no way work-related despite provision of medical evidence. But why let facts get in the way when the real mission is to protect the institution?
Let’s be clear: these Responsible Persons are not mere bureaucratic functionaries lost in procedure. Oh no. They are seasoned political operatives, well-versed in the art of serving their true masters—HR and the University—while ensuring that fairness remains nothing more than a decorative concept.
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 10:28
Highly irrational organisational behaviour in relation to work-related stress cases. Find out if the individual has lots of significant stressors that fall within a closed personal loop (e.g. divorce) or a vulnerability to a serious mental health condition. If they do, take that as a licence to ignore all the significant work-related stressors the organisation is generating for them, stressors that eclipse the total of all the other significant stressors in their life. The organisation then feels “entitled” to jack up the even more significant stressors that fall within a closed work-related loop and increase the overall probability of a death. If the individual does not make it, the organisational then points to and places blame on any significant stressor that falls within a close personal loop or the mental health vulnerability. Organisational irrationality of the highest order possible.
NoMoreLies · 27 February 2025 at 13:22
When every internal process has been corrupted or shut down, the only remaining option for victims is to call out their bullshit in public.
That is happening now, and it is long overdue.
TheMethadrineBat · 26 February 2025 at 05:51
The Responsible Persons are either (i) dishonest players in the game of university politics, (ii) people who want something from the university (eg promotion) and so are guaranteed to be pliant or (iii) people who are simple-minded and easily manipulated.
The term is classic doublespeak familiar from other despotic regimes.
21percent.org · 26 February 2025 at 07:14
Is the term “Responsible Person” used elsewhere eg in other Russell Group Universities?
Or is it just another bit of charming Cambridge exceptionalism ?
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 10:44
There is a problem at the level of the organisation. Individuals cannot fix the problems being generated now irrespective of whether an individual is genuine in their attempt to fix them, irrespective of the amount of self-interest contained in their motivation for trying to fix them, irrespective of what they are prepared to do to try to fix them, unless the problem at the level of the organisation is fixed, individuals cannot fix these problems.
InfoGalore · 26 February 2025 at 05:53
I had never heard of a DSAR until I found myself embroiled in a battle over an allegation of research misconduct. Once exonerated, I was advised to request all “communications” involving those who had a hand in my months of suffering. It was an eye-opener to witness the sheer duplicity of these individuals—some pretended to care about my well-being while secretly discussing my reprimands, scrutinizing my contract, and plotting behind my back. Although I was eventually cleared, this experience has left me with a deep sense of revulsion toward academia. I’ve walked away from a job I once loved, unable to trust anyone, especially the so-called “collaborators” who were responsible for my ordeal.
21percent.org · 26 February 2025 at 06:06
Oh yes
Everyone should do a DSAR. It is a real eye-opener as to what is actually going on.
Anon · 26 February 2025 at 11:03
DSAR material is extremely useful, but you need a strong stomach to get over the instances where colleagues lap up slander and join a witch-hunt.
You need an even stronger stomach to get over the instances of conscious and targeted cruelty towards the “victim”, mostly by HR, particularly when it is already known that the “victim” is vulnerable or stressed.
In a recent DSAR, I found my HoD requesting that references to people should only be made via initials because “I’m afraid there is a history of freedom of information”.
Of course, the use of initials didn’t prevent the material from finding its way to me, and I now know (on top of yet more concerning HR recommended processes) that my HoD is happy to interfere with GDPR and encourage others to do likewise.
Was that on HR advice too?
Who’s looking like the bad guy now?
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 10:10
Sorry that you had to go through this experience of an allegation of research misconduct when there were no problems with the way you were conducting your research. Universities want every researcher to be open about any potential problems with their research conduct and they seem to think they can get this with a closed investigative process. The probability of getting someone to be open about anything with a closed process – i.e. one that lacks transparency – is much lower than for an open process. Had the investigative process been more open the university would more quickly have been able to sort cases where there is no problem with what the individual is doing, such as your case, from cases where there is a problem and an individual does require some organisational feedback to change the way they are conducting their research before the problem identified spirals out of control and becomes more of a problem for the individual themselves and everyone else. In your case, the lack of any problem to investigate would have emerged more quickly, the breach of trust would not have occurred and academia could have remained a potential future option for you.
Guruji · 26 February 2025 at 08:58
Teddy bear involved in several cases as the useful dupe who can be twisted to string up another professor on false accusations or bully junior members of staff who called out HR or HoDs for misconduct
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 09:31
There are extremely significant problems with how the cases of individuals have recently and are currently being handled in the university – the people systems – and with the governance machinery that should have the capacity to correct any errors in the people systems. In the presence of such organisational faults is it possible for extremely difficult situations to be generated for individuals in the university without there being any individual intent. In the absence of high organisational information transparency in relation to such cases, the individuals who are being asked to act in relation to the cases often do not have enough information to identify and properly manage the true conflicts of interest in the case [self interests, interests or all other parties, interests of the organisation as a legal entity in its own right]. That lack of organisational transparency in relation to them, increasing the probability of failure to manage the true conflicts of interest, has consequences of varying severity for different the different parties in the cases, in rare cases the situation can be lethal for one party in the case. If the case begins with an element of individual intent – plagiarism, bullying – or that enters into the case at any point – e.g. attempt to cover up a previous error – a case can rapidly become completely intractable internally and generate significant amounts of work-related stress for every individual connected to the handling of the case.
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 09:43
I have no interest in what these individuals said in relation to my case. No useful information there, no solutions to these problems there otherwise they would have solved the problems, a pile of legal garbage.
Hansard · 26 February 2025 at 10:00
There was all the evidence needed to sack an especially abusive HOD in 2022. He did not do that, and the result is a ton of further acts of abuse of much greater magnitude.
Sad but true: Those who bury mistakes, will eventually be buried by them.
Martin · 26 February 2025 at 10:39
The operation of GDPR in universities (Cambridge & elsewhere) needs careful scrutiny
It seems to work largely to suppress damaging information about powerful individuals in the universities, i.e. exactly how it is not meant to work.
This actually prevents problems being fixed, and instead they snowball until they end up in the public domain.
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 11:00
The whole organisation is losing power. It is not able to avoid generating difficult problems for individuals and it also cannot efficiently fix any of the difficult problems being generated for individuals. That continuous waste of organisational energy, is an overall loss of organisational power.
Anonymous · 26 February 2025 at 11:29
Very true. It would be shocking to quantify the amount of scholarly energy that could be devoted to teaching and research which is instead wasted in stupid HR games. They have destroyed our careers and the university’s potential. This is why we no longer have time to apply for grants or finish publications.
21percent.org · 26 February 2025 at 11:45
The destruction of a number of highly creative research groups by HR is a strong contributor to the university’s decline in research (as measured by UKRI grants or ERCs).
Some of the groups have moved to the US, some have moved elsewhere to our competitors, some have been broken up, some are still entangled in endless HR processes.
Sad to say, there is real malevolence and incompetence behind some of this
As regards money, a substantial fraction of the operating deficit has been contributed by our expensive HR failures.
Anakonda · 26 February 2025 at 15:10
In one department alone that I am familiar with there is more than £100m of obstructed donor and endowment funding, not cumulatively, just in the past few years
Across the university the figure would easily run to the billions of pounds.
Then nothing of the cost of wasted time, human energy, talent and potential that the regime of bullying, obstruction, envy and incompetence generates.
Meanwhile:
why are some of the brightest young minds of the future currently unemployed, traumatized and struggling after experiencing abuse at our university, and what is the cost of that for the UK as a whole?
Nobody · 26 February 2025 at 15:44
Anakonda — I presume this was also one of the departments under the “teddy bear”‘s authority?
(the mention of “endowments” gave it away)
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 12:09
No one wants to be in one of these difficult situations. No one wants to have anything to do with trying to fixing one of these difficult situations. They are a complete waste of organisational energy. I left because I didn’t want to waste any more of my health on yet more of the same irrational legal garbage. I am giving the university information that relates to an organisational fault because I think this is worth doing – the aim is to increase the probability of others being able to work unhindered by the same organisational problems – I look forward to a higher rate of new discoveries coming out of universities when they manage to fix these organisational problems .
I have no grievances against any individual who handled my case. It was possible to see that a subset of individuals who handled my case did genuinely care about what happened to me but it was also clear that the scale and kinetics of the organisational fault meant it would continuously pull an individual under irrespective of how many individuals genuinely cared unless there was an individual who genuinely cared and could also recognise and counteract the defective organisational dynamics at play in the individual case.
I will not spend any more energy than is necessary to comply with the legal obligations to raise concerns that I acquired during this ongoing difficult situation. Obviously no one can speak for any individual in any individual case other than the individual themselves, every case is different, it’s up to every individual to decide what remedy they wish to pursue and how they wish to pursue the remedy. Fortunately I have been able to recover my health after exiting this difficult organisational situation. I placed most value on my health throughout this whole difficult situation as it is continuously maintenance of health that maximises your future prospects at all times in these difficult situations. I stopped caring about the rest of it. Others have not been so fortunate, for some these difficult situations have resulted in permanent disabilities and in rare cases these difficult situations and the constrained stress generated in them have resulted in their a death.
Eileen Nugent · 26 February 2025 at 12:25
No one wants to be in one of these difficult situations that could have been avoided.
No one wants to be involved in fixing one of these difficult situations that could have been avoided.
No one wants to be disabled by one of these difficult situations.
No one wants to go to court to get compensation for the disability induced by one of these difficult situations.
No one wants to end up living on state benefits because they encountered one these difficult situations that one organisational fault generated and which the other another organisational fault prevented the rectification of leaving them in the same difficult situation for years – decades.
Everyone would much prefer to live the life they wanted to live in a state of maximum health and not the life they were forced to live in a state of sub-optimal health induced by the actions of an irrational organisation.
Chronos · 26 February 2025 at 12:26
we know the names, we know the faces
the rest is a question of time
tick tock
Wronged · 26 February 2025 at 17:54
The Responsible Person on a Grievance against me saw her job simply to top and tail
A letter was sent from HR to her. She topped it (replaced the header with her header) and tailed it (replaced the HR signature with her own). The entire text between the top and the tail was not written by her, but by HR.
When it was all revealed to be bogus and a put-up job, she wailed “but I’m not responsible for this” (as found through a DSAR).
Actually, you signed the letters, you Irresponsible Person.
You made yourself responsible by signing letters not written by you. That is what the signature means. It means I approve of this message.
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 03:32
The situation you describe sounds extremely painful and I am sorry you had to go through it. Very little thought is being put into the handling of these situations. Often people worry about acting beyond their powers in these difficult situations but the reality of these situations is that no one in the organisation has been allocated any powers to deal with them otherwise it would not be possible for these difficult situations to drag on for years before still ending up in an employment tribunal and for the university to lose against individuals with no formal legal training representing themselves.
Were a life to be actively at risk in a similar situation to the one you describe above, anyone who encounters that situation is dynamically allocated the power to deal with the heath and safety aspect of the situation, the power to demand a work-related stress risk assessment be put in place, the power to raise concerns with a national regulator in the absence of any effective organisational work-related stress regulation. No one should be put through the unnecessary stress of a prolonged bogus put up job.
Resignations Now · 27 February 2025 at 13:33
What you are describing here (signing letters that were prepared by others with malicious intent) is an act of professional misconduct and should lead to sackings.
Similar behaviour in many other professionals (e.g. medicine) would be considered a gross violation of the professional code of conduct.
The same is true in academia. An academic is called upon to provide a professional opinion based on their knowledge of academic standards, the institution and the individual.
Any individual found to have signed a document preprepared by HR must immediately resign.
21percent.org · 27 February 2025 at 13:48
This is of course what happened in the Post Office Scandal
Ministers from a number of political parties signed letters drafted for them by the Civil Service (eg Ed Davey, Pat McFadden) .The ministers later discovered that they were being lied to. From the point of view of the Civil Service, this tied the Minister to the official line and forced them to defend an indefensible policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/18/pat-mcfadden-says-he-should-have-questioned-post-office-defence-of-horizon
“Davey and McFadden – now a member of the cabinet and a predecessor to Davey as postal minister under the previous Labour government – both said that ministers were reliant on accurate and truthful briefings from civil servants. Both said they would have acted differently in their dealings with the Post Office had they known the truth.”
We have no sympathy for Davey or McFadden. If you sign a letter, you are taking responsibility for the contents.
The same happens everywhere in Cambridge University. Any DSAR will find numerous examples of letters drafted by others and then signed by someone else. It blurs accountability and means no-one takes responsibility for very serious mistakes.
The dangers of this should be apparent to all. We agree that individuals who have signed letters drafted by others such as HR should be asked to resign. (It will include almost everyone who has ever acted as a Responsible Person)
+ · 27 February 2025 at 14:02
Actually it is much worse than that, because it violates standards of professional integrity.
A minister is supposed to oversee the work of the civil service in their department, but in practice it is the latter who has to prepare most of their planning and communications, as they have secretarial duties to do so.
It is entirely different when it comes to signing one’s own name and authority, as a member of a professional body (doctor, lawyer, academic), to a document that was prepared by an individual lacking in such authority and with malicious intent. This is gross professional misconduct not only for reasons of negligence (lack of due diligence) but because it undermines the integrity of the profession as a whole.
21percent.org · 26 February 2025 at 18:13
This case is quite remarkable
https://iclg.com/news/22314-university-ordered-to-pay-professor-more-than-gbp-1-million
Edinburgh University forced to pay £1.3m to a Professor at Employment Tribunal for wrongful dismissal after 10 year battle.
Professor Roya Sheikholeslami experienced sexual discrimination at what seems to be a highly misogynistic Department of Engineering. She raised concerns and was ultimately dismissed.
This is straight out of the Cambridge University playbook, “Raise concerns, HR will attack you”
The total cost to University of Edinburgh when legal fees are taken into account will be > £2.5m
And in this incredibly misjudged saga, Edinburgh University obviously thought they would win the Tribunal otherwise they would have settled. Instead, huge damage, a PR disaster and massive costs.
And in all this, was anyone held accountable? Like the Director of HR at Edinburgh University, or the Head of Legal Services. Or any of the misogynistic Engineering professors.
Justice · 27 February 2025 at 01:16
Name and shame can be highly effective, once the names and misdeeds are actually out there.
The problem with the legal route is the information doesn’t get out and then gets NDAed. We saw with the MeToo movement that this was the only way to being systematic change in the end, after years of failing to do so by other means.
21percent.org · 27 February 2025 at 05:37
NDAs are a big part of the problem.
It is why the corrupt system continues, as senior wrongdoers in the university (eg in HR or UAS) can use public money to buy themselves out of trouble.
There are ongoing cases in Cambridge as serious as the Edinburgh one.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 04:50
Universities are used to NDAs giving them control of the narrative in any individual case because they typically have more resources than the individual to continuously enforce one. In these cases the NDAs give individuals control of the narrative because the individual can choose to share their story [sensitive information in relation to themselves] in the public interest and universities can’t do anything to stop something which is overwhelmingly in the public interest. Universities cannot justify the reciprocal action of sharing the individuals story as it contains sensitive information in relation to an individual. It is then the individual who has the power to enforce the NDA in these situations and not the University. The public interest element of the situation inverts the narrative control of an NDA. NDAs don’t benefit the university in these situations, they benefit the individual.
If they stick an NDA on a settlement agreement in relation to these issues, sign away if you feel like it, they are giving you control of the narrative. The reality is an NDA is largely defunct in these situations since it is the nature of the situation that determines the legal position on disclosure of information relating to the situation, an NDA could have no impact on that legal position in some of these situations in which case it is just a psychological trick to increase the probability of silence in relation to something rather than a means to legally enforce silence in relation to something.
21percent.org · 28 February 2025 at 07:30
“In these cases the NDAs give individuals control of the narrative because the individual can choose to share their story [sensitive information in relation to themselves] in the public interest and universities can’t do anything to stop something which is overwhelmingly in the public interest.”
Not sure this is right.
If you break an NDA, you’ll find yourself in front of a judge in a civil court facing a claim for damages.
If you’re poor and can’t pay damages, then they’ll get an injunction to prevent you from continuing to share protected information moving forward.
Violating an injunction is a criminal offence and you’ll be in gaol if you don’t follow the court order.
Whatever, we would not recommend violating an NDA without some seriously heavy lawyers on your side. For sure, you’ll end up in court even if you can successfully plead “public interest“.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 14:31
To be clear I am talking about cases where the root cause of the legal claim is not longer an employment claim its a free standing human rights claim that has arisen in the context of employment i.e. these exceptional cases where they have already put an individual through up to a decade of unnecessary unregulated work-related stress that has created a significant risk to life. In these cases individuals acquire a legal obligation to others to raise health and safety concerns through a prescribed set of persons within an organisation and then external to an organisation.
The organisation could then try to getting an injunction, make an individual pay damages, putting the individual jail for breaking an NDA but if they have already mentally tortured the individual for a decade to the extent they acquired a legal obligation to others to raise health and safety concerns in relation to the organisation that strategy is not without risks for an organisation. A seriously heavy lawyer is not needed to argue article an ongoing article 3 EHCR violation [mental torture] in the European court of human rights [free at the point of access, no legal representative needed at point of access, legal aid should case be accepted on merits], they would need a seriously heavy lawyer to legally argue themselves out of an article 2 ECHR violation if it all goes wrong during that process because of the continuous stress generated for the individual lead to a preventable death. An article 2 ECHR violation is a bigger criminal offence than violating an injunction in relation to an NDA. In seeking to enforce the injunction in such cases all they would then doing is increasing the health and safety risk to the individual in tandem with obstructing the raising of health and safety concerns, the legal kinetics of these health and safety cases are very different to the legal kinetics of an employment case. The potential costs – loss of life – are different to the typical costs at play in an employment case.
I agree with the advice not violate an NDA without some heavy lawyers as heavy lawyers [if you can afford them] dramatically reduce the stress of the situation by giving ongoing precise legal advice helping individuals to avoid legal moves that will create significant stress – health risk – during the ongoing situation. I asked for no settlement in relation to my case. I signed no NDA in relation to my case. I acquired a legal obligation to others to raise concerns and it was not an option to not comply with it, every action I took was in relation to minimising health risk and complying with the legal obligations to others I acquired in the situation.
How was I supposed to get a heavy lawyer to comply with these legal obligation to raise concerns to others. I didn’t have the financial resources to get the continuous professional legal support that I would have needed to deal with the legal obligations to report the concerns that this organisation continuously kept generating me by not addressing concerns. Look at what the heavy lawyers the university hired knew about dealing with this type of situation, it is not clear they knew anything of practical value about how to handle this type of case otherwise they would have solved the legal problems for the organisation at source. Forced to take your life in your own hands and to go forward into the complete unknown.
Organisations could try to get an injunction in relation to NDAs in these situations, they could go to court and talk about criminal offences in relation to NDAs, try to get individuals jailed in these situations. Judges won’t open themselves up to situation where they could make a significant contribution to an article 2 ECHR violation. Prisons are full of criminals that pose a real risk to the public, and they know the workload and the high legal costs involved of an article 2 ECHR coroners inquest.
These organisations are going to start encountering some serious resistance to them dumping all their serious unsolved organisational employment and health and safety problems on the rest of society. Extreme resistance because that is the right thing for the rest of society to do in these situations. To force organisations to deal quickly with the source of these situations [organisational faults] to minimise the risk the organisation and all individuals in the organisation and to not allow organisations to continuously generate and then smear public health risk over the rest of society. No more dump, dump, dumpidy dumping workload on the rest of society. No more wasting of societal resources.
To be extra clear – I have no formal legal training and nothing in any blog on any website constitutes legal advice.
21percent.org · 28 February 2025 at 15:32
Agreed, the whole legal system is biased towards the wealthy
What makes it worse is that the perpetrators of misdeeds in universities are then supported by public money.
For example, Prof Sheikholeslami was victimised by Edinburgh University for raising concerns about sex discrimination. She had to fund her own legal case.
The perpetrators in Edinburgh University, who victimised her, could use public money
Now that the funding of universities is a matter of public debate, we need to make sure that MPs, Ministers and the public know how universities misspend public money in fighting to cover-up misdeeds. It’s an absolute disgrace.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 15:00
Eventually they will realise it’s a case of starting to treat people fairly and reasonably again i.e. taking organisational care to minimise the stress of these difficult situations. Not generating a serious case – dragging case out for a decade – that could create strong health and safety legal obligations for an individual to other individuals to raise concerns. Note these are legal obligations an individual could recognise in their own situation which an organisation would then have to recognise but not legal obligations an organisation could demand of an individual in any given situation.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 18:06
Universities are making assumptions that all those who happen to have suffered from severe mental ill health at some stage or who have a genetic vulnerability to these conditions are weak and they can all therefore easily be silenced using an NDA. These assumptions are incorrect.
Severe mental ill health strangles into a state of unconsciousness and beats to a coma and into intensive care out of boredom, it physically tortures and repeatedly rapes for the fun of it and it spontaneously kills because it felt like it.
The types of silencing techniques universities typically employ in employment cases – NDA, injunction to enforce an NDA, threat of jail to enforce an NDA – are tame in comparison to the other silencing techniques an individual might already have been directly or indirectly exposed to.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 18:43
Universities could do themselves and everyone else a favour by putting in place systems that reduce the probability of employment errors, improve their capacity to correct employment errors quickly, increase organisational ability to regulate work-related stress and reduce the probability of the emergence of severe mental ill health for all individuals in the organisation.
The only calculations they currently seem to be doing are – financial employment calculations that they are constraining with employment law. The calculations they should also now be doing in any serious case are – stress, health and safety calculations constrained by human rights law. The fact they are not doing the latter type of calculations to manage the all the risks at play in a serious case means they are now playing with organisational fire.
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 03:58
The university of Edinburgh hired an individual who was in a state of performing at a globally competitive level into an engineering department. They promised the individual undeliverable levels of support and then dropped them in a department with very little practical support and demanded they set up a lab from scratch on their own. Most of their co-workers assumed gender was a factor in their selection for the role and they were therefore unable to do the role. They therefore treated them the way people usually treat people who are genuinely incapable of doing their role, they avoided them. They got a legal injunction to stop anyone interacting with the individual, they then took all the resources the individual needed to do their research away from the individual. When the individual got sick, instead of fixing the problem, they took on the individuals workload damaging their own health and left the individual in a state of ill health. Eventually instead of fixing the problem they fired the individual for being in a state of ill health and now an employment tribunal has asked them to pay the individual their wages up until retirement.
This is the problem with assuming someone cannot do a role, it prevents them from doing their role. Irrespective of how someone gets a job, coworkers should be open to the individual being up to the job, otherwise it will never be possible to find out whether they are up to the job. If the individual was capable of doing the same role immediately before they were hired, logic would suggest they were capable of doing that role immediately after they were hired and there was no reason to doubt their ability to perform. These are the costs of all forms of unnecessary discrimination, the human impact is extremely high and in terms of organisational efficiency it’s a complete disaster.
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 13:39
The traditional view of systemic corruption seems to be that a system is corrupt because corrupt individuals are embedded in the system and once all the corrupt individuals are taken out of the system and replaced with new “non corrupt” individuals the system will be fixed and all the systemic corruption will disappear forever. I think there is a deeper problem that this, the system itself has behaviour determined by its processes e.g. financial processes or people processes, these processes are constructed with finite amounts of information and therefore are an inaccurate representation of reality, these processes can also make assumptions e.g, about people some of which subsequently turn out to be inaccurate. When this happens, false information about people is generated in the system. The system itself then becomes corrupt i.e. starts to generate and contain significant amounts of false information and once the system becomes corrupt that false information about people can propagate through the system and start corrupting any individual in the system. If organisational behaviour is permitted to degrade i.e. care is not taken to fix any problems that organisational processes are generating for real people [improve accuracy and exception handling capability] and prevent future reoccurrence of the same problem for future people, there will be a uniform degradation of the baseline behaviour of individuals in the organisations when averaged over the whole organisation.
When the external environment of an individual changes, behaviour must change to continuously compensate, the individual must adapt. When the external environment of an organisation changes, behaviour – organisational processes – must change to continuously compensate, the organisation must adapt. In order to respond to environmental shifts efficiently and safely an organisms needs a mechanism to redistribute any internal stresses generated to prevent any critical internal mechanism reaching a point of failure and taking down the whole organism. The more rapid the environmental changes, the faster the organism has to redistribute stress within the organism. It’s the same for an organisation which is why this system of education-related and work-related stress regulation is needed, to increase the robustness of the whole organisation during times of more rapid environmental change, to allow whole organisations to respond to external challenges in a safe and efficient way that offers maximum protection to all of the individuals in the organisation and to the organisation itself as an entity.
Resignations Now · 27 February 2025 at 13:47
Eileen: I agree. It is not simply the corrupt individuals that need to be called out, but corrupt practices. The individuals have to go in order to make an example for others, and because any individual too steeped in a particular system is unlikely to durably change.
Once it is clear that individuals had to resign for engaging in institutional misconduct, the institution itself changes, because from that point forward the next person knows not to behave in the same manner.
The example of academics signing letters prepared by lawyers or by HR is an excellent one.
Imagine if a lawyer, when asked for a professional third party legal opinion, submitted to a court a letter they had not read but which had been written by an academic who they knew had a conflict of interest. It would be immediate grounds for dismissal from the profession, and likely a lifetime ban.
If you would not let lawyers or HR write your journal reviews or grant reviews to funding bodies regarding individuals you know they had a grievance against, why would you let them do the same in any internal university process or before a tribunal?
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 05:26
Most people trust HR and legal know what they are doing and if HR and legal did know what they were doing it would not matter who wrote the letter because what was written in the letter would be accurate. Unfortunately HR has not read the rapidly shifting HR landscape accurately and Legal has not read the rapidly shifting legal landscape accurately, now they don’t always know what they are doing, now what’s written in these letters is not always accurate and it does matter whether people form an independent judgement these issues and write their own letters or simply sign off on something someone else has written because it could all end up in court and everyone would then have to defend letters they signed but did not write something which every judge will take to be the sign of an irresponsible person.
I would put more focus on changing the processes and seeing which individuals can adapt to the new processes and less focus on forcing individuals to go to make an example of them. The example in this case could be an organisational change process that maximises positive organisational change whilst minimising negative impact on individuals in the organisation. This is just my sense of what would be more effective in delivering rapid organisational change and quickly putting a stop to the human impact of these organisational faults. It goes with saying there may be cases where it’s clear someone needs to go, in these cases the situation determines what needs to happen.
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 05:41
This is insight generated internally but being given by someone who is now external to the organisation. These are all decisions for those in the organisation, the views of as many of the individuals who have been impacted and wish to give them should be taken into account because there seem to be a very wide range of organisational problems and therefore there will be a wide range of insight into these problems, something which if gathered will better enable the organisation to find the right way forward.
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 13:59
If Cambridge is going to continue its pattern of bringing in external leadership from half way across the globe to solve its internal problems, at some stage it is necessary to define what the internal problems are, and then to let those who the organisation has chosen to lead, lead.
Juvenal · 27 February 2025 at 14:09
The aim of “bringing in external leadership from half way across the globe” is precisely the reverse — it is not to solve its internal problems.
It’s been very successful
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 14:46
I think they wanted someone, anyone, to come in and just rescue them all i.e. solve all these internal organisational problems for them and spare them all from having to pay any of the costs of organisational change. I think a significant part of the problem was that the internal problems were not well defined otherwise they would have realised that what they were asking of this external person – spare them all the costs of significant organisational – was fundamentally impossible. It’s impossible to tell how successful this strategy of bringing external leadership from half way across the world will ultimately be – every leader is in some sense an unknown quantity – they go into an organisation as one person and come out of the organisation as a different person.
Eileen Nugent · 27 February 2025 at 15:01
Its the same for us all, we go in to an organisation one person and come out a different person with the governance structures of the University of Cambridge seared on some bit of our mind sitting alongside some episode of Peppa pig our kid wanted to watch over and over again for some reason unbeknownst to us.
FatherTed · 27 February 2025 at 07:59
A massive HR fuck-up at a university. Who would have believed this, eh?
Edinburgh also had a major disaster when students, postdocs & suppliers weren’t paid following rollout of a new payroll system
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-63557795
A massive IT fuck-up involving HR. Who would have believed this, eh?
Eileen Nugent · 1 March 2025 at 01:14
Universities are all trying to get these HR information systems in place to get to a more efficient organisational state – the intermediate organisational states are generating levels of clusterfuckupery never before seen in universities – who knows what the final organisational states in universities will be.
FatherTed · 27 February 2025 at 07:19
You do realise that the mental image of Tim in tiny yellow bathing trunks brandishing an enormous ice-cream will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Anonymous · 27 February 2025 at 19:48
That does sound traumatic, but some perspective is required. It is not so to the same degree as seeing people you hired broken down in to tears, receiving a suicide letter full of question marks, or having to attend the funeral of a colleague, whom you know had been bullied very severely during their final months.
21percent.org · 27 February 2025 at 19:52
If you are willing and able, please tell us about this upsetting matter in confidence at contact@21percent.org
Eileen Nugent · 28 February 2025 at 00:17
It’s hard to believe it before you see it, then you see it and you no longer have to believe it because it’s there happening right in front of your eyes.
ProfPlum · 27 February 2025 at 14:15
Hope we are all looking forward to the All Staff Meeting at 4.00pm 🙂
Will post the most ridiculous statements here
ProfPlum · 27 February 2025 at 17:03
“For MyHR, we did some important testing of the underlying IT. We discovered what we have in place won’t support MyHR, so it’s been put on pause until we have fixed the IT. Testing was valuable as we discovered it doesn’t work”
This for a project that has already been in progress for many years.
Hmmmmmmmmmm · 27 February 2025 at 17:31
“Testing was valuable as we discovered it doesn’t work”
Errr no. The point of a beta test is that you do it prior to signing contracts and wasting oodles of time and money
it is basic project management…. Is there no accountability at all in this place?
Feels sometimes like the people running this place are the failing students of the class (“the dog ate my laptop”) …..
…but then of course in terms of academic background that is a factually accurate description I suppose….
21percent.org · 27 February 2025 at 18:05
Agreed, basic project management failure at a really elementary level. Who’s responsible?
“Andi Hudson, Director of HR, is pleased to announce that the University’s new HR and payroll system will be called myHR and will launch in the summer of 2024. myHR is being introduced as part of the University’s HR Transformation Programme (Processes and Systems).” [Bulletin Date 3rd February 2023]
https://www.hr.admin.cam.ac.uk/new-hr-and-payroll-system-myhr
Now postponed to an indefinite date in 2 or 3 years time.
Eileen Nugent · 1 March 2025 at 00:59
This seems to be a HR information management system but presumably HR already have access to all the information possible in these serious employment cases, the ones they have litigated to death, and there is still no solution forthcoming to them. All well and good to commission a HR information system but if nothing useful is then being done with HR information when available then the commissioning of a HR information management system in itself is not going to solve the organisational HR problem. The university has a computer science department full of talented computer scientists – and yet it has no functioning HR information management system.
Juvenal · 28 February 2025 at 07:14
” Feels sometimes like the people running this place are the failing students of the class (“the dog ate my laptop”) … but then of course in terms of academic background that is a factually accurate description I suppose…”
Many in university senior administration are failures. Failed lawyers, bullying HR personnel, useless administrators, finance officers who can’t do arithmetic, crappy academics.
In HR/legal, we get the rejects from the private sector.
If your conclusion after 4 or 5 years on myHR is “Testing was valuable as we discovered it doesn’t work”, then you are not fit to do a PhD. Yet, these people are earning 6 figure sums and running very large and ever-expanding departments with big budgets.
It’s very difficult to get an academic job at Cambridge, lots of competition and the number of academic posts is flat.
But administrative posts at the middle and senior level in universities have increased by leaps and bounds over the last decade. Far easier to get a job reimagining some professional service decades in the future. And better paid.
Eileen Nugent · 1 March 2025 at 00:08
I think it’s important to be careful in the analysis of the situation here. Academic ability and the ability to deliver exceptional care for other individuals don’t necessarily go hand in hand. In filling any role it’s important to assess the critical skills necessary for the role. At the level of administering set HR processes the primary consideration would not be academic ability, it would be the ability to genuinely care about other people, to sense when there is a problem for other people, and to work constructively towards finding a solution to the problem with the people concerned. This is a particular type of human ability universities haven’t yet got around to measuring or classifying as an academic ability.
At the higher levels of HR in a large organisation such a university, different considerations in terms of critical skills for the role do apply, because that position requires the ability to manage care at the level of the organisation – oversight of the systems for delivering care that can handle a wide range of different types of cases that could be generated in the organisation – something which requires the ability to understand and manage complex organisational risks. At that level academic ability – increased capacity to understand different types of complex information – does then come into play but even at this level that academic ability has to be coupled with the ability to genuinely care about other people. This position also requires the ability to sense when there is a problem for other people, to work constructively towards finding a solution to the problem with the people concerned, but it requires an enhanced ability to do this to deal with the most complex cases.
In a HR role it is the ability to genuinely care about other people that is always central to that role. Genuinely caring about other people does not mean never dismissing anyone or never dealing with any difficult situaton e.g research misconduct, it just means that any action taken in relation to an individual is always taken with care i.e. an open minded investigation of issues is conducted, genuine attempts to remedy a situation are made, any errors detected are corrected as quickly as possible.
If an organisation sets a legal precedent – not comply with a re-engagement order from an employment tribunal – that the whole organisation has then taken as a licence to not care about generating or remedying any serious employment situation, this could make it very difficult for HR to function in the way HR should function going forward. In general it can also be more difficult for HR to function the way it should in an academic environment that in some other types of work environment. The entire academic system is built around continuously motivating large numbers of individuals to pursue a particular career path whilst simultaneously continuously resisting all the individual efforts to pursue that career path until all but the most determined individuals are driven out of academia in various types of uncontrolled exits. That system makes it harder for HR to pick up on cases where the organisation is extra specially fucking with an individuals life in an illegal way that is likely to get the organisation into significant legal difficulties as opposed to the normal level of fucking with an individuals life that now seems to be typical of academia.
I agree that life was made relatively more difficult for academics in general, and for academics on temporary contracts in particular and relatively less difficult for those in other types of posts in universities [better pay/conditions combination] but even the lives of those in positions that were once relatively stable in comparison – administrative posts – can be made extremely tough very quickly now, fired and rehire of all administrative staff has been applied in at least two departments in the university. The whole system is unstable now, whole organisations are unstable now, anyone can be impacted by these instabilities now. The situations created can be extremely difficult for any individual irrespective of the role they occupy.
Your main points, the current working conditions of academics are unsustainable and there are not enough high quality stable academic positions in academia in general and in Cambridge in particular to motivate large numbers of exceptionally gifted young academics to attempt to pursue an academic career in Cambridge any more, are important points.
Omerta' · 28 February 2025 at 12:25
It seems there are a large number of scandals which surround the History Department and cognate fields such as languages or archeology. It is a common thread among the O’Reilly and Connolly cases and now Teddy Bear also.
Inevitably, I wonder if there remains yet another perpetrator in their midst still waiting to be exposed.
Ommemmerd · 4 March 2025 at 03:15
Sometimes you don’t have to dig very deep to find the evidence of collusion