How Best to Tackle Bullying?

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

How can we make the university sector a more pleasant place to work? Bullying and harassment (whether of a sexual nature or not) are, it would appear, endemic across the higher education sector, for staff and students alike. Every survey highlights the issue as a major problem, deterring many from continuing in the path they had set their heart on and perhaps expended many years of effort in an attempt to find their niche. Both Amanda Solloway, the Science Minister, and Ottoline Leyser, as CEO of UKRI, have placed research culture prominently in their respective agendas, although that phrase obviously encompasses far more than these behavioural aspects, most notably extending to the precarity of employment endured by many early career researchers.

Universities need to find ways of ensuring that that those at the receiving end of unacceptable behaviour feel confident in the system available to them to come forward and report abuse and, equally, that offenders are identified and sanctioned appropriately. I fear few institutions would currently have confidence their processes satisfy either of those statements, even if they have plenty of optimistic sentences on their websites.

The University of Cambridge has launched a new ‘Change the Culture’ strategy today, with the aim of moving this agenda forward within the University. The full policy runs to many pages of definitions and detailed steps to be undertaken, but the key points are simple enough:

  • A new, confidential reporting system (Report and Support) where any staff member or student can report inappropriate behaviour of other staff or students either anonymously or formally with contact details. By collecting data and anonymous case studies it will be possible to get a better idea of what is going on.
  • The University has had for many years a so-called Dignity at Work policy, and this will be morphing into the new staff Mutual Respect Policy and Code of Behaviour. No one should be any doubt about the University’s expectations around behaviour.
  • Grievance Policies will be stream-lined to provide clearer and quicker process for resolving incidents of inappropriate behaviour. Alongside this there will be enhanced support services for those who have either experienced or exhibited inappropriate behaviour and new staff training resources.

This is all well and good, but of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Time will tell how well these new policies work. I believe the ‘Breaking the Silence’ campaign, launched here four years ago, has had some significant impact across the University as regards the incidence, reporting and handling of sexual harassment cases. A more recent campaign has provided bystander training specifically aimed at students, teaching them how and when to intervene, in particular with regard to such sexual harassment and assault. I attended one of the training sessions and was tremendously impressed by the thought-provoking films, demonstrating where intervention could have made all the difference. For student attendees the initial briefing was followed by role plays, so that they could practice different ways of stepping in before matters got out of hand.

Practice in such situations does indeed make perfect, and I’m sure we could all practice intervention to good effect when it comes to the more minor but intensely damaging types of bullying that too often goes on. As I’ve said before, observing bullying and doing nothing amounts to being complicit. Of course gender may sometimes play a part – too often young girls are taught not to be confrontational however shocking the behaviour they are facing – but bullying can just as well be carried out on males, by both men and women. Whatever the new University policy does and does not say, it really is down to all of us to ensure that there is zero tolerance for unacceptable behaviour.

I have written often enough about bullying in the past, most notably here, where I followed up on a piece I had written in the Guardian. Any policy will stand or fall on whether people feel safe coming forward to report behaviour. Too often I have been approached by people – typically staff – who feel that, even if they have complained to their line manager, their grievances have not been adequately addressed. Usually these people are not complaining about a single instance of someone losing their rag or behaving aggressively towards them, but long-running and systematic demeaning behaviour which undermines the individual’s confidence and ability to act. There is always the suspicion that the powers-that-be will support the more established individual, perhaps the one with the big reputation who brings in the funding. Those at the receiving end of bullying can end up feeling they are dispensable and unimportant. Letting such behaviours continue, however, permits that toxic culture to persist.

So, I will watch with interest to see if this new policy turns out to have teeth. I certainly hope that it does. But, aside from individuals having the confidence to come forward, what will be done to perpetrators? As long as bullies find that bullying pays, they are not likely to change their ways. Does being sent to a speed awareness course make it less likely a driver will speed the next time they hit the motorway? I don’t know the answer to that, but if it does, is there any way of introducing ‘bullying awareness’ classes. Can we introduce the equivalent of points on a license – 6 points and you can’t be promoted for a year or two, say? Or (for full professors) not allowed to apply for any funding for twelve months? That would cause people to sit up and think, but I’m sure it’s a policy that would be hard to get through the requisite committees.

It seems to me, too often, investigations end up hurting the putative victim far more than the perpetrator and, if the new campaign is to work, that must change. Wellcome have introduced a policy whereby anyone with an allegation of bullying upheld against them may find their grant applications rejected. It would be good if other funders followed suit with something similar, because that kind of sanction is exactly the sort of thing that would directly impact on potential aggressors and might lead to a change in behaviour. I don’t know how many instances of this policy being implemented have been recorded. The only case that I’m aware of led to the resignation of the person concerned, a woman of colour. It strikes me as an unnatural coincidence that this is the case. Why was she singled out when it is hard to believe there weren’t white men who were at least as guilty? Is it simply that people are less likely to raise a complaint against that majority than a racialised minority?

Agreeing on the problem, and the scale of the problem, is insufficient to solve it. I will watch what happens as a result of today’s launch at the University of Cambridge with great interest and fingers crossed for real progress to be made.

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Where are the Women of Yester Year?

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Athene Donald

A few weeks ago I wrote about Mary Astell, a woman from the seventeenth century whose interest and reading in natural philosophy/science was, as has recently become clear, much greater than had previously been attributed to her. I am intrigued by how women in different spheres are now being rediscovered, or their efforts being accorded more respect, than previously. We can’t reinvent the past, or create women who never existed, but it does seem a bit tough that some of them have simply been forgotten, despite all they did in their own day and, in many cases, the recognition they received for those efforts at the time. The campaign to ensure more women – across many different spheres of activity – are recognized by the ‘blue plaque’ scheme, particularly in London, is an indication of belated awareness of many different sorts of contribution by notable women who ceased to be noted. Next month, for instance, the nutritionist Elsie Widdowson will be celebrated with a blue plaque in the village of Barrington just outside Cambridge.

BBC Radio3 has now made a ‘thing’ out of playing music by women composers only on International Women’s Day each year. I am sure as little as 20 years ago one might have found BBC producers saying such an event would have been impossible as there were only one or two women whose music was up to scratch (or perhaps whose names they knew at all). When I was growing up, the names of Fanny Mendelssohn (Felix’s elder sister) and Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann’s wife) would have been the top two women mentioned in this context, although I believe they were primarily seen as performers rather than composers in their day. And they were always referred to (e.g on Radio 3) in relation to their more famous family members, in the way that I have just described them. These days their music is quite often heard, and pretty impressive I, for one, find it. But there are far more female names heard regularly on the radio now, just in the regular occurrence of things, not simply on a single day each year. That, I suppose, is progress!

There are of course many contemporary composers whose music could be played, ranging from Judith Weir, the first female Master of the Queen’s Music (though there has never yet been one of the King’s Music), appointed in 2014, through someone I overlapped with at my all girls’ school, Sally Beamish, to Erollyn Wallen, who composed a fanfare for Churchill College when she attended a Feast in the College a few years ago; all women working in the UK (though the last was born in Belize). Women composers from the wider world include Bulgarian Dobrinka Tabakova, and the Russian-born Australian Elena Kats-Chernin, both of whose music I have recently listened to with great pleasure having previously been unacquainted with them. That is, unless you count the music from a Lloyds TSB Bank advertisement which the latter wrote as part of her ballet Wild Swans; that ad seemed to get a lot of airtime some years back. However, the more you look the more of such women you find, and it is good to hear them turning up regularly on Radio 3. And turning up in the general way of things, without comment about how exciting or rare it is to find a woman composer after all.

However, it is the fact that women from the past are now being played so much more that I am fascinated by. Their music was always out there and yet it clearly wasn’t regarded as ‘manly’ enough to warrant being played. The grande dame of these must be Hildegard of Bingen, whose religious chants and plainsong are so simple and yet so moving. The Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi, also a singer, seems to have been regarded as a bit dubious over the centuries because she was suspected of being a courtesan. Thus, despite having published more music than any of her contemporaries, her name seems to have languished for generations.

Americans Amy Beach and Florence Price were appreciated in their day, in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but then seem to have been forgotten about for years. The latter, who was black, was the first American woman to have a major work played by a first rank orchestra (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), in 1933. The UK could boast Rosalind Ellicott, from the late Victorian period, and the suffragette Ethyl Smyth a little later, whose anthem The March of the Women became the movement’s anthem. Perhaps she was regarded as dubious because of that association with those tiresome, militant women but she seems to have been dubbed with the ‘too manly to be a decent woman composer’ label, so reminiscent of the modern double standard for professional women: behave like a man and be frowned upon, behave as a woman ‘should’ and be trodden upon or regarded as likeable but not competent.

I don’t know how many other professional areas there are, in which there were many women active in the past whose names have simply been written out of the record. Some professions were of course formally closed to women, such as the law and medicine from the 18th century on. Before, no one thought to codify such a formal forbidding since it wasn’t expected women would ever try to enter such professions. The move away from early female midwives to professional men who attended childbirth, may well have led to many more maternal deaths than necessary because of the way they felt obliged not to touch women or carry out proper examinations. The battle to get the medical profession to accept women  as nurses (Florence Nightingale had quite a hand in that), let alone as doctors, was long and hard fought. Some of these struggles are described with verve by Julia Boyd, my predecessor-at-Churchill-but-one’s wife, in her enjoyable book The Excellent Doctor Blackwell. I feel embarrassed for describing her in that relative way, because she’s an author of note, but that’s how I’ve met her. Of course, before Blackwell came the army doctor who ‘passed’ as a man throughout her professional life, James Barry, no mean feat to fool so many military folk for so long, with her secret only discovered at her death.

All of this shows how short-changed women have been over the years. For all those composers (and music was at least acceptable for a woman to spend time on, unlike cutting up dead bodies to learn anatomy) who are resurfacing, whose music is being heard and enjoyed, how many more are still unknown and are yet to be (re)discovered? And what of other spheres of activity?

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Giving Due Credit

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Athene Donald

Due Credit

When I was setting out as a young PI, the standard thing to do (on acetates, once we’d moved on from 35mm slides) was to acknowledge co-workers – students or postdocs, or wider collaborators – via a simple list at the end, with affiliations as appropriate. These days, mini mugshots on the relevant slide are de rigeur. It is very nice to see the human face behind exciting results.

However, whichever way it’s done, what matters is that it is done. Because upon occasion, even if the whole act of acknowledgement doesn’t get omitted, individuals may do. Too often, that implies bad behaviour, bad faith, on the part of the senior scientist. Let me give a couple of examples. I once observed a senior scientist, now dead, give his talk in honour of a prize he’d just been awarded, carefully listing every person he’d collaborated with in whatever capacity – bar a couple. Both female as it happens (although in my experience gender is not necessarily a contributing factor), and substantially more junior than him, albeit already independent researchers. Both people he had had pretty public fallings out with after extended and fruitful collaborations starting during their student years. It was noted by others in the audience with some revulsion. It was shocking behaviour, and yet there were – of course – no consequences for him. He was the one winning the prize; they were ‘merely’ being short-changed.

I find this kind of behaviour deeply depressing. It is just one way in which the established scientist feels they are untouchable, as they indeed almost invariably are, and can get away with whatever they feel like. It involves no active aggression, bullying or harassment, and yet the damage may be substantial. It does not have to involve women or even junior scientists. On another occasion I watched a different (male) senior scientist give a conference talk about his work with industry. He was very proud his fundamental work had such relevance to manufacturing; indeed, that was rather the thrust of his talk. Yet the industrialist I was sitting next to, who was funding the work, someone I too had collaborated with, turned to me in disgust at the tenor of the talk in which team members – both from industry and academia – were being written out of the presentation. No acknowledgements to the wider team, it looked as if the work was almost entirely down to this single senior scientist. The industrialist felt such dislike of the behaviour, which was clearly of a long-standing pattern in his eyes, that he admitted follow-on funding for the project from his company had all but been cancelled because of the professor’s behaviour.

Why do people do this? Why do they feel it necessary to take all the glory, or withhold other’s fair share, when they – as senior professionals – don’t need it. Furthermore, no one is going to be fooled that the professor was spending long hours in the lab, rather than sitting on committees, running a department or devising new teaching courses. Few professors are going to be doing the legwork of lab or computational work, even if they are the ones who have to write the grants to fund the work and exhort their team to better things. In an ideal team, everyone plays their part, even if not necessarily equally. And everyone should be appropriately credited.

Ottoline Leyser, as UKRI’s CEO, and Amanda Solloway, as the Science Minister, talk a lot about research culture. What will and should they do to stop this particular sort of inappropriate and unattractive behaviour? How will whistleblowing be made easier and less painful for the whistleblower? Should my industrial colleague have stood up in the Q+A and challenged the professor’s behaviour, pointing out how Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe should have been credited with carrying out the finite element analysis, and Ann Smith and Tom Brown the experimental studies? After all, he was close enough to the project to know exactly which students and postdocs had done which part of the work. If he had, no doubt an embarrassed silence would have fallen upon the room. That sort of thing simply isn’t ‘done’. When the first professor I mentioned had omitted the names of Dr X and Dr Y from their credits, when many in the room knew this, should I have stood up and challenged him (goodness knows, I’d challenged him enough in private on other matters) and said how come those names were omitted?

In this particular case, I had indeed raised the issue behind his back in a different context, by pointing out to a (different) prize-giving committee he had a reputation of not giving due credit. My intervention was not appreciated – even though I did it privately and discreetly to the chair of the committee – and I was brushed off, essentially told that it didn’t matter. But it did and does. Not giving credit where it is due means those written out lose street cred, impact and citations, and hence their own prospects are damaged. Said professor duly won the highly prestigious prize.

The trouble is, our cultural norms make silence the name of the game, so that the victims continue to suffer. Speaking up when one knows the truth of the matter should be everyone’s responsibility. Yet, even for those of us with standing, there is a cost to such speaking up. Without such matters falling necessarily under the usual terms of whistleblowing – although in some cases omissions, particularly on papers, will be straying close to research integrity territory – we who call out bad behaviour are in danger of simply being dismissed as troublemakers. I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I did. I do feel more noise should be made about those who don’t always give credit where credit’s due. I think, given a room sprinkled with people who can spot what is going on, it should be possible to introduce a scientific form of sending to Coventry, of marking down future grant applications and refusing to allow such people conference slots. I fear this is just a pipe dream of mine.

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Red Tape

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Athene Donald

The announcement of a review of bureaucratic red tape in universities may bring either a smile of relief or a hollow laugh. Why are universities (and funding bodies) so entangled in this nasty stuff? Is it because they love to hire lots of makeweight administrators regardless of need (I think not!), or is it because the Government imposes endless layers of regulatory checks and balances? Once upon a time, before Margaret Thatcher’s suspicions alighted on academia (if you aren’t aware of this history, I recommend Jon Agar’s Science Policy under Thatcher to fill you in, an open access pdf), there was less determination to scrutinise academics’ every move. It wasn’t academics who dreamed up ‘impact’ as something we all needed to have if we were to be funded; it wasn’t the bench scientist who thought the REF was a desirable way of measuring university outputs and thereby creating some of the myriadleague tables we are now plagued with. The design of forms for research grants is just another example of evolution rather than intelligent design.

So, it is hard not to believe some good might come out of this recently announced review. Who wouldn’t want to cut red tape? However, it does rather depend which particular bits get cut. To give an example of a particular form I’d love to see simplified, one that I cited to a senior UKRI employee recently, I’m all for scrapping the format of the referee’s form for UKRI. It comes in many parts, which tends to lead to a lot of tedious repetition – tedious for both the referee to write and equally for any soul who has to read it before a committee meeting – but that fragmentation often ends up making it extraordinarily difficult actually to express a coherent and accurate assessment.

Once upon a time, a referee form simply asked for the grant to be judged in free-form text, so one could more easily say this bit is good, that bit is bad, but overall it’s likely to be illuminating/rubbish or whatever. Now, the requirement to address numerous specific criteria means that a distorted perspective can so easily accidentally be transmitted, and words need to be dreamed up to cover issues that perhaps aren’t so relevant to a specific grant. I’m sure the intention behind the form’s creation was good, and probably driven by concerns about issues that too often got overlooked such as researcher training, but it’s overly complicated and not fit for purpose in my view. Time for some pruning back, I think.

The news that the link between Athena Swan and funding was to be broken with no clarity about what might ensue predates this recent announcement but – as the Athena Swan Review Group recommended a year ago (I was a member) – there is no doubt that the Athena Swan process needs its bureaucracy lightening. AdvanceHE seems to be moving slowly and, I might say, confusingly towards implementing the Review’s recommendations. The tardiness towards introducing a more fit-for-purpose application procedure is to be regretted. Nevertheless, whatever shape the process may take in the future, as with the referee forms I mention above, some things are much harder to capture than others. This was the reasoning behind the Review’s recommendation to implement a culture survey, so that the lived reality in a department could be captured and assessed.

To give an example of what fundamental behaviours will never be caught by a form of metrics and good intentions, let me cite an example of sickening public behaviour I watched on a webinar recently. This was not organised by an academic institution, although academics were involved, and many minorities would recognize with a sinking heart the behaviour I observed. A panel discussion was the particular format of this webinar, with a white male chair, who was a non-academic, and two men and two women as the panellists. What ensued was that the women were persistently interrupted by the chair, the men never. One of the women tried to intervene to shut the chair up when he – yet again – jumped in to silence the other woman. As a tactic it didn’t work; the chair was impervious to this attempt. The male panellists did nothing.

That, as I say, was not a meeting in an academic setting, but it is too easy to imagine exactly the same occurring in a department meeting. Indeed, one hardly needs to imagine it because many readers will have seen something similar at first hand. It infuriates me that it is the women who have to attempt the corrective measures, while the men sit complacently – or blindly – by. My first ‘excuse’ for the chair was that he was simply old (he certainly looked it!) and out of touch with current social norms. A quick Google about him, however, indicates he’s somewhat younger than me, so I feel less forgiving.

Men as allies has become something of a ‘thing’, but at times like this it is crucial that they step in to ensure all voices are heard equally. It was outrageous for the chair to treat half of the panel as second-class citizens by virtue of their chromosomes. But, no amount of form-filling by a department will capture such noxious behaviour, particularly if it happens to be the head of department talking down those who don’t conform to an expected ‘cis white male’ norm. All one can hope is that processes such as Athena Swan, once they are tidied up and our recommendations carried through, facilitate the honest dialogue about what goes on in a particular institution to highlight inappropriate and damaging behaviour.

Getting rid of red tape could be wonderful. I’ve highlighted one example of where simplification of forms could really help (in my experience) and one where no amount of form-filling will necessarily capture reality. Every reader will have their own favourite examples. I worry, though, that as long as this Government (indeed, any Government) feels academics are not to be trusted – viewed as too radical, or at least as containing too many ‘well-meaning Guardian readers against the bomb’, to quote an old CND badge – forms will continue to be a staple of our lives, forcing us to jump through hoops, provide numbers of dubious utility and never, unless it is in the mythical beast that will be ARIA, just allowed to get on with our jobs using some common sense and constructive imagination.

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Burnout

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Athene Donald

As we ‘celebrate’ the anniversary of the UK’s first national lockdown this week, reflection seems in order. Things that seemed unimaginable last March, we now take in our stride, in the sense that we simply get on with them. Coming to terms with them is a different matter. For all those who’ve lost family and friends, inevitably things will never be the same. Grieving their loss will continue to be a heavy burden to bear. For those who haven’t seen some of their closest relations or pals during the past year, but with that possibility conceivable in the months ahead, circumstances permitting, there will still be much grief at what has been lost. As for those who’ve lost their jobs, for students of whatever age whose education has been disrupted, for the joys of youth (or indeed of any age) that have been upended and left in tatters, there is so much to mourn.

In academic establishments up and down the land, Zoom burnout is pervasive. We’ve sat staring at screens till our eyes and heads hurt, our backs and legs are stiff and our brains frazzled. Zooming friends for a chat no longer seems such an attractive option, when it is just another screen of pixels to stare at, however much the support and gossip received may be welcome. We’ve adapted and committed to trying our outmost in these far-from-ideal circumstances, working long and hard to keep universities functioning as best they can. A College can provide much support, from food to good wifi, even libraries (Churchill’s is open in a restricted way) for those students who are here, with tutorial advice always to hand at the end of a screen.

I’m sure the community is divided into those who believe spring is a positive time of rebirth and those who see this anniversary of lockdown as simply commemorating a year of misery. My mother always used to regard spring as the cruellest time of year, because new beginnings in Nature just reminded her of all that she hadn’t achieved and never could (she did, after all, leave school at 14, and in later years I could never persuade her to embark on an Open University course). For many years she was trapped in London with caring responsibilities, and not able to get out to breathe the country air or hear the cuckoos and chiffchaffs arrive, things that meant so much to her. That sense of being trapped in an urban environment is one that feels all too familiar to me currently: no opportunity to visit the sea, no mountains to relish and – even in the best of times – to my knowledge, no cuckoos within the city, although I’d expect to hear chiffchaffs soon.

bee in spring flowers Mar21 Bee visiting Chionodoxa at Churchill College today

But I will try, harder than ever, to believe in the spring-as-rebirth motif this year. Take the bee I saw today in the College grounds as a positive message. The hope that the successful vaccination roll-out and the most recent lockdown really does mean that normality seems more than just a distant dream. Cambridge term has now ended and, although it doesn’t mean the mass exodus of students in the usual way, it does – thankfully – mean fewer committee meetings to pin me to my screen. There are many challenges to keep us all on our toes, but I will try to remember my own advice of last year ‘In time of crisis, be kind.’ For all those who have been struggling with productivity (I’m inclined to think everyone will be nodding at that point), we need to remember that being kind extends to ourselves as well as everyone else.

As the Master of a Cambridge College, this past year has been intense. Decisions have had to be taken on the hoof with incomplete information, particularly in the first few months.  I am deeply grateful to the wonderful team and sense of community spirit around me. But just because we’ve all been trying to jump through ever-changing hoops as government directives have come and gone, it doesn’t mean the normal work of the College can stop. I have not had to adjust to on-line teaching, because I’m retired and no longer teach. (Although last summer, I did have to undertake online examining as part of my swansong from the department, and tricky I found that. In those early days we were still getting to grips with on-line marking of scripts, sharing screens and virtual whiteboards, not to mention the incompatibility of Microsoft Teams when wearing different institutional hats, something that is totally frustrating.) But all the usual round of decision-making committees continues, and some particularly challenging and unusual circumstances have made this term more complicated and worrying than most for me. Such occasions, when both ‘sides’ choose to see the one in the middle as an enemy, are part of the uncomfortable reality which can rear up unexpectedly for anyone in a leadership role.

I hope the Easter vacation, such as it is, will give all of us time to pause, to smell the metaphorical roses, to curl up with the novels that we’ve wanted to read for months, even if we still can’t see the grandchildren/grandparents/godchildren/best friend and other much loved but now distant people in our lives.  Burnout may be pervasive, but it needs to be factored into the lives we lead. It means we must treat ourselves, and everyone else, with kindness, to escape the burden imposed by incessant emails by venturing out into whatever fresh air is to hand, savouring the warmer weather and lengthening days. Every time I hear a blackbird or dunnock sing, I take heart.

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