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The 21 Group – Guest Post by Wyn Evans

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc with tags 21 group, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Institute of Astronomy, Neil Wyn Evans, Wyn Evans on October 26, 2023 by telescoper

Here’s an important piece by Professor Wyn Evans of Cambridge University relating to the theme of harassment and bullying which I’ve returned to several times on this blog. I strongly support the creation of the 21 Group and agree with the recommendations made in the post below. Indeed, I have myself made a similar suggestion in the context of sexual harassment that the people involved in investigations of such cases…

…should not be employees of the university in question, as they would come under pressure to hush things up – which clearly happens now. It seems to me that far too many institutions prioritize limiting reputational damage over doing the right thing for their staff and students.
https://telescoper.blog/2019/06/12/investigating-sexual-harassment-in-universities/

Now over to Wyn.

—o—

My article on Whistleblowing in the UK Universities is in The Times Higher Education Supplement this week:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/investigating-serious-abuses-must-be-taken-out-universities-hands

Whistleblowing is ineffective in the UK Universities. There is no protection for whistleblowers. Any whistleblowing investigation is run by the university without properly independent scrutiny.

Self-directed investigations make no sense in an organisation in which poor behaviour has been tolerated for a long time. We have seen this in the scandals in the Post Office, in the NHS and in the Metropolitan Police.

The Universities are no exception. Organisations that investigate themselves exonerate themselves. They look for rugs enormous enough to sweep everything under.

Universities need an independent Ombudsman to look into serious complaints.

This already exists for complaints by undergraduates. It is the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education.

https://www.oiahe.org.uk

If a student or a former student is dissatisfied with the handling of a matter by a University, then they can appeal to the independent adjudicator.

Postgraduate students and university staff do not have any such rights. We are regarded as ‘service providers’ rather than ‘paying customers’ in the monetized world of higher education.

Vice chancellors and senior managers from Cambridge to Maynooth pontificate that world-class universities are about ‘the people’. That’s where it ends. Senior management are indifferent as to whether the people in universities do actually work in an environment that promotes respect, dignity, safety and equality.

Pressure groups are needed to drive organisational and cultural change in the UK Universities.

So, we have founded the 21 Group

Our name derives from the fact that in a staff survey, 21% of employees at the University of Cambridge reported that they had been subjected to bullying or harassment in the workplace.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/07/third-cambridge-university-staff-experienced-bullying

The 21 Group operates nationally and offers support for staff in UK universities who are experiencing bullying, victimisation and harassment in the workplace. Amongst other things, we are running a national survey of bullying in the UK Universities.

Sadly, we have nothing to be proud of in astronomy. The only systematic survey of UK astronomy was carried out by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2020-2021. They obtained responses from over 650 people.

44% of respondents had suffered bullying and harassment in the workplace within the last year.

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/survey-finds-bullying-and-harassment-systemic-astronomy-and-geophysics

A figure of 44% is grotesque. It is almost a half of all respondents.

The Royal Astronomical Society deserves full credit for conducting the survey and publishing the results. What is sad is that the UK astronomical community has not made any discernible efforts to improve matters since its publication in 2021.

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Bullying: How to Survive (a Guest Post by Wyn Evans)

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc with tags Athene Donald, Bullying, Cambridge University, Neil Wyn Evans, Wyn Evans on August 30, 2023 by telescoper

Professor Wyn Evans is in the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.

–0–

My article on Bullying in the UK Universities is in The Times Higher Education Supplement this week.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/bullying-feature-uk-research-universities-not-bug

It is a bleak assessment. If you are being bullied or harassed, either move University or get a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer, join a trade union who will supply you with a lawyer.

Whatever you do, don’t pin your hopes on your University’s shallow pretence of a grievance procedure.

Three years ago, Unite, UNISON and UCU carried out an investigation into bullying at Cambridge University. The survey found nearly one in three had either been the victims of bullying and victimisation or had witnessed it in the previous 18 months.

Over half thought there was no point in reporting it, as either nothing would be done or the perpetrator would retaliate. It is a grim reckoning, but all too realistic.

Whilst preparing my article for THES, I came across an earlier, shocking article by Prof Athene Donald in The Guardian.

Prof Donald describes an incident in her career when she was already a senior Professor. The title says it all: “I reported harassment and was silenced – and I’m a senior academic”.

Though this incident occurred some time ago, nothing much seems to have changed at Cambridge University.

If someone like Prof Athene Donald DBE, FRS and Master of Churchill cannot get the system to work, then a postdoc or a graduate student will certainly not. And a member of the professional services support staff will have zero chance.

Prof Donald has diagnosed the problem accurately.

“Likewise, if direction from the top suggests that the complainant is more expendable than the accused, there may be a subliminal steer towards finding in favour of the latter. It is too easy to conclude that the evidence is not strong enough to prove anything definitively, and the professor lives to bully the student another day”

The bully is normally much more valuable to the University than the victim.

In UK Universities, allegations are usually investigated by Human Resources departments. They are not even at arm’s length from senior management. They are readily susceptible to the “subliminal steer”.

It may not even be subliminal.

The default of all organisations is to protect themselves. If they are allowed to investigate wrongdoing themselves, they will seek to mitigate any negative outcome by casting the organisation in the most favourable light possible.

It is no surprise that the Countess of Chester Hospital and the British Museum — two scandal-hit institutions in the news this week — carried out investigations that exonerated themselves.

Bullying or harassment is thus much better dealt with by an independent body with real power — a University Ombudsman — who can genuinely assess any wrongdoing, even by senior people (they are usually the bullies).

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The Gaia Sausage

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags GAIA, Gaia DR2, Gaia Sausage, Milky Way, Neil Wyn Evans, Royal Astronomical Society on March 10, 2019 by telescoper

I had to undertake a top secret mission on Friday, which turned out to be much less exciting than I’d hoped, but at least it gave me an excuse to catch some of the Royal Astronomical Society Open Meeting followed by dinner at the RAS Club. I actually sat next to the Club Guest Michael Duff, the eminent theoretical physicist Michael Duff who gave a nice after-dinner speech.

An artist’s impression of the Gaia Sausage. The Gaia fork has not yet been proved to exist.

The last talk at the RAS Meeting was by Neil Wyn Evans of Cambridge University in the Midlands on the subject of the `Gaia Sausage‘ (which, as you can see, has its own Wikipedia page). The Gaia Sausage is so named because it is consists of a marked anisotropy of the velocity distribution of stars in Milk Way, which is elongated in the radial direction (like a sausage) indicating that many stars are on near-radial (i.e. low angular momentum orbits). This feature has been revealed by studying the second data release from Gaia.

The work Wyn described in his talk is covered by a nice press release from Cambridge University which links to no fewer than five articles on it and related topics, which can all be found on the arXiv here, here, here, here and here.

The most plausible explanation of the Gaia Sausage is that it is a consequence of a major collision between the Milky Way with a smaller galaxy containing about 10⁹ stars about 8-10 billion years ago, as illustrated in this simulation.