This is the response of Cambridge University to the article in The Observer.
Of course, any survey has sampling error and biases. The results always need careful interpretation. However, many of the responses in the University Culture Survey give grave cause for concern at the effectiveness of the University’s anti-bullying policies.
Participation in the University Culture Survey was patchy. One reason is that the University claimed that the survey was anonymous. However, each individual got an individually identifiable link. This means that it is in principle possible to match each response with the email address to which it was sent. The survey was therefore not anonymous (though it may have been confidential). This led a number of people to fail to complete the survey.
In some departments, this defect was well-known and depressed participation rates. Astronomy is the department with the low total response rate.
In Astronomy, there are also regular staff surveys. They paint the same picture of a department in which individuals have been raising very serious concerns over bullying for some years without effective action being taken. The participation rates of the Departmental Staff Survey are very much higher & show the same as the Staff Culture Survey.
We agree that all surveys need careful scrutiny, but there is plenty in the University Culture Survey that gives cause for concern and suggests that many university policies are not effective enough.
12 Comments
Denial on display · 15 April 2025 at 14:23
What an utterly pathetic response from the university.
A 23% response rate will produce an accurate picture of what is going on at the university so long as there is limited sample bias, making that 23% representative of the general organisational culture.
Plus, we already know that figures for dissatisfaction are likely biased _downwards_ by the refusal of so many departments (many known widely for their internal bullying culture) to release their results.
If the completion rate were closer to 35-50% (a realistic upper limit for any staff or student survey) we might expect the figures to appear worse.
And even worse yet if former staff were allowed to have their say.
ProfPlum · 15 April 2025 at 14:28
It is a breach of GDPR to describe a survey as anonymous when it is not.
Morons · 15 April 2025 at 14:47
They are total fucking idiots. Why are we run by such morons?
Consider the facts.
The data offer a 23% sample of staff with dissatisfaction rate of 73% (how bullying handled).
Immediately that sets a sample anchor they cannot shift. I.e. even if we could top up the sample to hit 50% of staff (up from current 23%), still the plausible estimate range for dissatisfaction with bullying procedure would remain in a range of 65%-80% (bullied/unhappy staff).
In other words, a huge bullying scandal no matter how you crunch the data.
This is obvious to anyone who has taken introductory statistics, and we would fail our students for such a pathetic and mathematically illiterate excuse for their failings.
Isn’t it time these idiots got jobs at a university a bit more on their level?
Excam · 15 April 2025 at 15:15
So let me get this straight. The university is refusing to share the raw data on privacy grounds, even though they were asked to anonymise it fully before sharing (also with respondent ids removed)
But they are holding on to a version that allows them to monitor the opinions of each individual ataff member without their consent?
Atropa · 15 April 2025 at 16:39
A new low. This is as bad as the Post Office Scandal
OldProverbial · 15 April 2025 at 18:28
It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt
Eileen Nugent · 16 April 2025 at 01:42
There is now a legal obligation to regulation work-related stress. Bullying/harassment is a sub-type of all organisational work-related stress regulation problems. When this legal obligation was defined data should have been collected to allow an analysis of the initial state of work-related stress regulation in the organisation at the time the legal obligation was introduced to check if the university was compliant with the new legal obligation and if not to take action to bring the university into a state of compliance. That would involve gathering data to assess not only on the rate of complaints with a work-related stress element but also patterns in complaints indicative of organisational faults and the efficiency of complaint resolution processes. Since that data is required to comply with a hard legal obligation – health and safety obligation – as with any other health and safety obligation a response rate of 100% is expected.
The university wouldn’t accept a 5% response rate on laser safety regulation among those experimenting with lasers, 100% of people in that position are responding on laser safety regulation. Can’t accept a 5% response rate on an data assessing a subtype work-related stress regulation – something every individual continuously & actively does – something that can go wrong when additional significant unnecessary stressors beyond an individuals control are suddenly placed on an individual and there is no way to reverse that situation. When work-related stress does go wrong it can have serious consequences for an individual – permanent disability, death.
It’s important to have accurate data that reflects the reality on the ground. It’s important to know the exact scale of the problem. It is very difficult build accurate picture if the university is not equipped to interact directly with individuals in difficult situations in ways that actively minimise the generation of unnecessary stress and limit the stress impact to that incurred in initial situation being raised. It’s very difficult to build an accurate picture if individuals in difficult situations fear interacting directly with the university because the interaction could nucleate a situation where the work-related stress effectively becomes unconstrained i.e. where relations completely breakdown and it’s not possible to reason with the university or get them to respond.
Eileen Nugent · 16 April 2025 at 02:46
The university accused me of harassment for persistently raising concerns, perhaps sending >1000 emails that mostly went unanswered was excessively persistent. I was never informed of the details of the harassment charges & those charges were never withdrawn. Now I have to inform every prospective employer that this type of accusation has been made against me by a former employer and give them as accurate a picture of the context as I can – it’s an awkward situation to have to disclose to a prospective employer.
As a member of Regent house and a Charity Trustee I had legal obligations to raise the health and safety concerns I had in relation to multiple organisational process types – examination processes, employment processes, grievance processes, concerns processes. Organisations seem to recognise no reciprocal legal obligation to provide a rational response to any concerns raised in relation to organisational processes, there was therefore never any way to discharge the legal obligation. That then generates a situation where individuals are left with accumulating concerns of increasing seriousness with no discharge mechanism for legal obligations that are continuously increasing in weight.
This leads to a situation end up being trapped in a complex set of regulatory kinetics that generates significant amounts of work-related stress and years of forced labour [concerns raising effort through internal and external regulatory processes] to comply with a set of legal obligations. If you survive the health impact – don’t end up permanently disabled or die a stress-linked death – it’s not impossible to find some kind of work after a situation like this, you can build up some self-employment, some organisation might take a chance and hire you but your never going to be on the “most desirable employee” list if you end up in a situation like this & you lose most if not all leverage you might have built up throughout your career as an employee in any hiring process after this type of situation.
Eileen Nugent · 16 April 2025 at 03:25
The problem seems to be that a new legal obligation has been introduced to improve organisational standards in combatting a newly recognised problem but the regulatory machinery I.e. the processes that would enable organisations to comply with it and regulators to effectively regulate on it have not yet been built – there has been no regulatory preparation of any practical value that can readily be applied in a live situation. That seems to be why it’s such an effort to raise this particular type of concern, this seems to be why many organisations cannot cope when these types of concerns when they are raised, that is why it’s so much work to get anywhere raising this type of concern and why the stress cost of complying with these legal obligations is exceptionally high because to make any progress at all with this fundamentally new type of concerns you first have to build the processes & regulation to handle it before processing the concern itself. Can’t build one-sided regulation so it’s much more difficult if organisations will not interact directly with individuals on concerns of this type because individuals building processes and regulation left to infer organisational constraints and make assumptions about constraints which makes concerns raising harder work, slower, less accurate, more stressful and leaves individuals in this position where there is no end in sight.
21percent.org · 16 April 2025 at 06:23
“The university accused me of harassment for persistently raising concerns, perhaps sending >1000 emails that mostly went unanswered was excessively persistent”
What is the name of the person who made this accusation?
In the context of a grievance, harassment is a criminal offence. It’s a very serious accusation.
It’s not one that should be made against someone raising health & safety concerns. The action that you were taking is whistleblowing, or more formally making a disclosure in the public interest.
The scope of the whistleblowing policy is listed on the university webpages here. We can see that “a risk to the health or safety of any individual” is listed.
As a whistleblower, you should have been protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1988) as noted here. Whoever raised the false accusation against you of harassment has actually broken the law.
The correct operation of the whistleblowing policy in the university is the responsibility of the Registrary and the Academic Secretary.
“Now I have to inform every prospective employer that this type of accusation has been made against me by a former employer and give them as accurate a picture of the context as I can – it’s an awkward situation to have to disclose to a prospective employer”
We don’t believe that you have to do this.
The University is the defendant in a month-long whistleblowing case that is coming to court in June 2026.
Eileen Nugent · 16 April 2025 at 10:57
Regarding the harassment claim it’s unclear (a) who the other legal party in any claim would have been had that progressed (b) whether it was a mechanism being applied to push back against correspondence that was seen as excessive and unwanted and unmanagable which would typically automatically classified as of a particular type of behaviour irrespective of situation it arose in i.e. if a careful situational analysis was not done (c) what the university position on this would be now that the concerns have been defined with more clarity that I was capable of at the time due to ongoing health problems – cyclical mental health breakdowns due the accumulating stress of there being no obvious way to exit the situation.
The problem with these situations is that there are always reciprocal responsibilities to be met. You are asking for minimisation of unnecessary stress and that incurs reciprocal responsibility to consider the amounts of unnecessary stress you are potentially generating. That requires a more direct and less formal interaction with other parties which is what you would expect because these are human rights issues and the approach in that type of case is more direct and less formal probably for this practical reason – the increased requirement for active stress regulation. If an organisation doesn’t understand this type of concern and others in the organisation also don’t understand it there is a high chance you end up in one of these really stressful positions where it’s very difficult to comply with the reciprocal responsibility to minimise unnecessary stress and this type of unnecessary harassment charge can then crop up. It can be a sign that the organisational as a whole is not set up to deal with this type of concern and that the stress of the situation has then propagated to another individual in the organisation who also then has no obvious exit from an resolvable situation that is now generating significant amounts of stress for them. This type of problem could be solved by the organisation having more direct interactions and less formal interactions with all parties in this type of situation.
When I say I have to discuss this with a prospective employer I don’t mean I am legally obliged to do that I mean for my own peace of mind I have to do that. I don’t want to work for an irrational employer that doesn’t understand work-related stress regulation to the extent they could not practically implement a sensible solution to a problem in a live situation. If you discuss a situation like this and a company still hires you it means they have the ability to understand and implement rational processes and there is then less chance of a reoccurrence of this type of problem. It’s a way to avoid undesirable employers. I have now learned how to make money without any employer – if no other employer hires me I won’t go broke.
I am not taking this into an employment tribunal. It’s not the right thing to do in my particular situation because of the health constraints. There is a legal obligation to take action to mitigate employment losses in any employment dispute. There is an even greater legal obligation to take action to mitigate health losses in this type of situation. A long stressful legal process may not be the right path in the context of the case. It’s not the right path in my case.
I may never have access to any legal analysis other than the one I did myself without access to a legal professional. The lack of access to a suitable legal process that is capable of handling situations like this is something I have already raised concerns about. It’s been nearly four years and I am nearly finished raising concerns through all internal and external channels. When there is never going to be any closure or any final judgment other than your own it’s necessary to find ways to move on. I could avoid mentioning anything to a prospective employer but when they ask why I left my last paid employment this is the reason I left so it becomes difficult to omit any mention of it.
If I am honest I have stopped caring about things that when you carefully think them through don’t actually matter. If an employer doesn’t understand these issues and cannot engage in a rational discussion of them then I don’t want to work for them. Can’t push yourself to your maximum potential in one of these irrational employers that cannot self-regulate on employment and work-related stress. You spend all your time working around known organisational problems that no one will fix or trying to fix organisational problems and encountering obstruction. That then takes time away from on the task that you were contracted to do. Pay more stress impact and more health impact in these organisations for less real world impact, less success, less rewards of all types.
Eileen Nugent · 16 April 2025 at 13:36
When you are a college fellow and member of Regent house because of the governance obligations those roles bring and the flat governance structure of the university you are left in a position where you have to be prepared to push concerns through the system independently regardless of what the rest of Regent House does.
It’s also not an option to try to force compliance of a reinstatement or re-engagement order when you occupy these particular roles in the university – governance is built on trust and confidence – if it’s not possible to maintain that with the organisation that you occupy a significant governance role in then it’s not possible to occupy that type of role in the organisation irrespective of how that breakdown in trust and confidence has arisen. Other types of role in the university are different and the same constraints don’t apply – there are positions where one party seeking legal enforcement of a remedy e.g. re-engagement order may be the right solution to the problem.