The IoA Whistleblowing Case
Regular readers of this blog may remember a couple of posts (here and here) about an Employment Tribunal taking place in Bury St Edmunds in relation to the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) at the University of Cambridge. The claimant in the case was Professor Neil Wyn Evans.
Well, the Employment Tribunal has completed its deliberations and the result is a decisive win for Wyn Evans. You can read more about the judgment here, but the salient points are visible here:
You can see that of the 14 complaints raised by the claimant, 11 succeeded and 3 were dismissed. Now that the judgment has been delivered it is possible to name all the respondents, including the name of the person initially redacted here, Prof. Richard McMahon.
You could call this a Wyn Win situation. (Sorry.)
I’d like to offer my personal congratulations to Wyn Evans on the success of his case. I know this has been a very difficult and stressful episode for him and he deserves enormous credit for pursuing the case to its conclusion. The decision by the University to pursue this case is incomprehensible to me.
It remains to be seen what the consequences will be for him and the respondents. The judgment (details here) refers to “systemic failures” in the University’s handling of the matter. These raise serious questions about governance and the operation of Human Resources at Cambridge University, to add to the questions already being asked in the light of the Jason Arday fiasco. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the end of line for the Vice-Chancellor, but that in itself will not be enough to put things right at Cambridge University.
P.S. Here’s the anonymous guest post on this blog in 2022 that aired the complaints for the first time:
In the Dark 
August 12, 2026 at 9:49 pm
Unlike Peter I do not know any of these people personally, but this has been a tragedy and a grotesque waste of talented people’s research time and energy – and also money in some cases. Suffice it to say that I voted for Wyn Evans as VC. I hope that the result helps some people in their recovery from depression and others to reconsider their behaviour.
‘Human Resources’ is a phrase used routinely nowadays in large organisations – I do not mean to single out Cambridge University – but it is horrible. That is how the Nazis viewed people.
Re Arday, one should not expect too much from a professor of the sociology of education, but the university made a mistake in standing by him after Nathan Cofnas’ exposure. Arday stated that he never lied and was resigning to seek a ‘time of healing’. Did his doctoral thesis include the usual declaration that except where stated the work was his own, and if so then does he stand by it? Healing might be needed by the students who requested alternative supervision and were accused of racism. For Arday, contrition would be appropriate.
August 12, 2026 at 11:05 pm
Another aspect of the Arday saga is that over a year ago a Times Higher reporter was onto the case, but said journal was scared off by the attentions of the legal firm Carter-Ruck. One presumes Cambridge University employed them to do that, which I find serious objectionable behaviour. Due diligence was lacking over the appointment but what happened afterwards was even worse.
August 12, 2026 at 11:25 pm
I can’t remember which investigation of Arday was shut down by the police (!) and which investigation was threatened by Carter-Ruck (at whose behest?) Did Arday himself lawyer up?
August 12, 2026 at 11:29 pm
I wonder how many other professors of sociology, if subjected to similar levels of scrutiny to Arday, would be found similar culpable?
August 13, 2026 at 12:18 am
The Sokal Hoax is starting to look more like a preview than a satire.
August 13, 2026 at 9:20 am
I’d like to know how the plagiarised material in his PhD thesis was not spotted either.
August 13, 2026 at 9:34 am
Do you mean by Liverpool John Moores when it was submitted, or by Cambridge when deciding to appoint him?
Do remember that this is sociology…
August 13, 2026 at 10:28 am
I meant Liverpool John Moores. They had the responsibility for awarding the doctorate. The examination process did not identify the serious issues with the thesis.
August 13, 2026 at 3:23 pm
Sociology could be an interesting and important discipline but as it is currently practiced it is neither.
August 13, 2026 at 6:09 am
It was the THE investigation where Carter-Ruck’s letter to the journalist’s employer (THE) was sent and the same investigation where a police officer told the journalist to stop contacting Arday because it was negatively affecting Arday’s mental health.
August 14, 2026 at 10:06 am
This morning I received my weekly email from the Free Speech Union, of which I am a member. Here are some words from it:
“who paid for the solicitors Carter-Ruck to write a letter to Times Higher Education to stop its journalist Jack Grove asking questions about Arday’s qualifications and life story – a letter that successfully killed off Grove’s proposed piece by warning that the “apparent attack” on their client may be “racially motivated”?
“Was it Arday himself? Was it Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project…? Or was it Cambridge University? …no university should be hiring lawyers to threaten a newspaper and journalist raising perfectly legitimate questions about one of their staff.
“Second: who reported David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and then Grove to the police when they started raising similar questions?…
“In Harris’s case, the police decided to take no action. Grove, however, was… advised by a Metropolitan Police officer to cease his investigations on the grounds they were damaging Arday’s mental health – after the police had spent four months investigating. It isn’t, of course, any business of the police to tell journalists who they can and can’t ask questions about…”
August 13, 2026 at 9:44 am
What if you ask AI to rewrite something in a way that AI plagiarism detectors will not detect?
August 16, 2026 at 7:08 pm
@telescoper.blog Prentice, and the HR dept, need replacing.
Note Akua Reindorf on the wrong side, again.
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