Investing in Education and the Levelling Up Agenda

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Athene Donald

Early years provision has suffered during austerity, and is continuing to see cutbacks, as Polly Toynbee pointed out last week. Yet children who fall behind at the outset of their education will find it very difficult to catch up later. If letters and reading are a mystery at 5 or 6, let alone at 7, how hard it will be to get decent grades at GCSE without a huge amount of support and 1:1 teaching which, sadly, few state schools are able to provide. To imply that early years’ investment in education is less important than at university, as David Willetts did in his book A University Education, strikes me as naïve. The child who struggles with studying because of their difficulties with reading, will simply not be able to get to (or aspire to) university.

I always feel worried with the messaging that, if a university such as my own would just get its act together about widening participation, then social mobility would flourish. It is too easy for politicians to put the blame on universities, over which they can – currently – exert less direct control than on schools. It ignores the fact that students need to be able to thrive at university and we cannot remedy those problems caused from systemic disadvantages right from birth. It also ignores the fact that collectively my own university, for instance, already works hard to ensure it admits people from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible. Indeed, I suspect, when the statistics are finally fully available, it will become apparent that, one side-effect of using the CAGs (Centre Assessed Grades) rather than OFQAL’s allegedly ‘mutant’ algorithm for A levels has, at Cambridge, actually worsened the various widening participation statistics I mentioned previously.

This would be consistent with the findings of a recent UCL study which showed

“Among high achievers, where under-prediction is most common, the team found 23% of comprehensive school pupils were underpredicted by two or more grades compared to just 11% of grammar and private school pupils.”

Thus, for Cambridge entrants who will belong to this high-achieving cohort, using predicted grades is likely to be more advantageous to the kid from Harrow or Winchester than the one from a random comprehensive. This runs perhaps counterintuitively to the public outcry about results, but mine is not the only college where the finding seems to hold true that the widening participation statistics were (just a little) less impressive after the government’s U-turn on A level results.  (Note, the UCL study notes other outcomes for different ability cohorts.)  This is not to say that bias against the state school child has not been a significant problem with Cambridge admissions over the years. However, at least in the majority of colleges, I believe those days are past.

The mantle for social mobility has been placed on the shoulders of universities by the government, with the Office for Students demanding ever more stringent measures of widening participation. But there is a limit to what universities can do, when so much of the damage to a child’s education lies far earlier in the system. As Stefan Collini has recently argued in an illuminating article, that

“One of the most obvious [contradictions] is between our de facto endorsement of a bitterly class-divided society and our fantasy that universities can not only escape the consequences of this but can positively correct it.”

The idea that, simply by admitting more students to universities, the ills of austerity and more – the ‘more’ now including of course the effects of the pandemic in reinforcing gaps in educational provision and hence attainment – can be obviated is, like Willetts’ position on early years’ education, naïve.

It is not reasonable to think that universities are the catch-all solution to social mobility. We should be thinking much harder about what our educational landscape looks like at every stage and in every format. Collini, in the same article I cite above, argued that

“One reason why further education is the Cinderella sector is that the parents of those who tend to go into further education are nowhere near so powerful and noisy a voice as the parents of those who tend to go to universities.”

I think that understates the problems regarding the further education system. It isn’t just that the parents aren’t vocal, it is that the politicians themselves do not recognize how that self-same ‘bitterly class-divided society’ impacts directly on this long-neglected ‘Cinderella’.

University – historically – was the preserve of the middle class (and indeed the aristocracy) while those lower down the pecking order had to be content with apprenticeships and vocational training, at best. Whereas universities have (socially) opened up, the attitude towards further education has remained mired in an unhealthy neglect of the vocational route due, at least in part I believe, to our historic class divisions and societal attitudes towards what would have been seen as manual labour. Artisanal may have become a positive attribute for gin-making or pottery, but still being an artisan may be taken as a negative descriptor by some.

This problem was even more explicit in the days of my childhood; indeed it still is in a few English locations. Then the division into those who might ‘make it’ and those who definitely wouldn’t, was highly visible through the 11+ exam. The fortunate few who passed were creamed off to grammar schools; the rest bundled off to an ill-resourced secondary modern. However, hidden though this tension may have become by the widespread if not universal comprehensive school system, it seems as if much of the content of that legacy remains, just for a slightly older age group.

Philip Augar explicitly identified this problematic legacy in his Review of post-18 Education, stating

“Further education is the poor relation to higher education and its position has been weakened and undermined by reductions to its budgets and a complex funding architecture.… The system accentuates the perception that routes into higher education that begin in further education are inferior to the A-Level/ undergraduate degree option.”

Just as Polly Toynbee pointed out that cuts in early years’ provision is at odds with the government’s stated ‘levelling up agenda’, so are the weaknesses in the existing FE provision.

One of the phrases I learned when I chaired the Royal Society’s Education Committee was ‘absorptive capacity’: an organisation’s ‘ability to identify, assimilate, transform, and use external knowledge, research and practice’. It requires, not just lots of whizz kids at the top of technical companies making smart acquisitions, but a robustly capable workforce at all levels who can adopt and adapt new working methods as technology develops. In the context of the technical/technician workforce – who, one might think, are likely to be the products of apprenticeships and FE at least as much as the university sector – Paul Lewis, in a report written for the Gatsby Foundation, has spelled out the importance of these technicians for driving innovation via their absorptive capacity.

It is as true in university research as in industry that technicians are crucial to facilitating many strands of ground-breaking research. Perhaps these people are the ones running the equipment on which so many PhD theses rest – an NMR or PCR machine perhaps – or the ones developing small gizmos without which the data cannot be collected. In my own area of research, I well recall how important the workshop technicians were in building sample-holding cells that were capable of delivering the results we wanted. A student could describe what was wanted, without having the faintest idea about which materials would withstand the experimental conditions (such as heat and pressure) let alone carry out the requisite machining in the workshop.

We should be investing in the training of a technically-skilled workforce, even if they can’t differentiate or integrate some horrendous function sufficiently accurately to pass an academic exam, or remember or even care about, the Krebs’ cycle. We should recognize the value these people bring: to themselves, to others and to our economy. With the ESRC’s new Productivity Institute just launched, I look forward to seeing research into how these different training routes contribute to innovation and productivity. Given that universities cannot, whatever this government may think, solve social mobility and its best friend, levelling up, we need to think much more broadly about what can be achieved and delivered in the wider educational sphere and then fund it appropriately.

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Pandemic Staycationing

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Athene Donald

As far as I’m concerned, this is not a year for travelling for a holiday. Indeed, given some of the recent events, there hasn’t even been time to take any sort of extended break. However, we have been taking days off to get some healthy exercise, on bike or foot. Staycationing is, I know, all the rage, so I’m just on trend (for once). And very pleasant it is to get out and about, at least when the weather isn’t either scorching hot or the country is being ravaged by apocalyptic thunderstorms.

What I’ve found strange, no doubt just another weird consequence of the pandemic, lockdown and our current extraordinary way of life, is how much every time I go out my thoughts wander off to far distant memories. Why, when cycling out into the countryside north of Cambridge and hearing jackdaws (hardly an unusual sound, even in the city) was I suddenly transported back to childhood holidays in Cheshire? I suspect in my early home in London there were none around; perhaps the visit to my great uncle’s house was the first time I’d noticed hearing them. What I cannot remember is whether this was before or after the 1962-3 winter, that winter known as the Big Freeze when snow lay on the ground till early March having first fallen (in London) on Boxing day. I do know I associate their call with the sound I heard when stones were thrown on the ice of the frozen ponds on Hampstead Heath that year.

Elsewhere, seeing a ruined farm building, my mind went back to all the bombsites that still occupied so much of the London of my youth. Somewhere near Kings Cross, on one particular site, my mother and I encountered a black redstart, to our great pleasure. I think they found these derelict areas suitable for their nests. A quick Google suggests, national rarity though they now are, they may still be found in that vicinity, even though the bombsites are long gone.

Collared doves are of course common across most of the country now. That wasn’t so in 1962 when one turned up in our London garden. It was so rare that most of the bird books we possessed didn’t even show us a picture to help our identification (no Google then to help us out), but we did eventually work it out. Now, no one would get interested in such an arrival in their garden, beautiful though they are (despite their maddening repetitive call), but somehow seeing one as I cycled past took me back to that childhood excitement.

I am sure there is some reason why this distant past is so intruding on my present. Perhaps it is an attempt to remember a time when life was safe and ‘normal’. Clearly bombsites are not a good record of that in a logical sense, but to a child that was just the way my world was. There were bombsites all over the London I recall. My mother, being part of that world when bombs in London were a daily occurrence, would regularly talk about those years, and walking through thick wartime fog in the blackout.

My brain – if not yours – is finding weird ways to try to cope with the new normal. The impact of the pandemic intrudes into my dreams, which is hardly surprising. What I resent more is the way it also intrudes into my reading. It doesn’t matter which novel I pick up, I find myself thinking: the couple shouldn’t be holding hands/getting into a cab together/eating in a restaurant, they aren’t from the same household, they’re putting themselves at risk. This is just annoying. That was then and this is now. And now is not a comfortable place to be.

Staycationing does offer some opportunity to get out and about in a desultory attempt to get more exercise. I am baffled why, since I no longer go up and down to London at least once or twice a week, since I don’t even have to cycle around Cambridge to get from one meeting to another, let alone attend the regular diet of college dinners (and I don’t just mean in Churchill but all over the collegiate university) that seems to go along with my job, time seems in even shorter supply than usual. I had hoped that, given the absence of formal dining and entertaining, I would be eating a healthier and lower calorie diet leading to the shedding of a few pounds. Unfortunately, the concomitant reduction in cycling seems on the contrary to have had the opposite effect. I may not have succumbed to eating frozen key lime pies straight out of the freezer, as seems to have beset one Guardian columnist, but clearly loss of exercise has won over the loss of formal dinners. The absence of extra time I can probably attribute to the plethora of additional problems to be solved when all our tried and tested protocols have to be torn up and new ones devised on the hoof. I’m not just talking about Admissions here, but everything the College does. Wonderful team of staff and Fellows that I have in the College, nevertheless I do feel I need to be on top of what is going on, even if they are the ones doing the heavy lifting on writing all our new plans.

It seems my brain is cluttered with a distant past which has come back into focus. At the same time, days rush by without much rest, yet the time I do spend on reading novels – as opposed to protocols about households, or returning students, or how to give a supervision remotely – is troubled by the mental clash between behaviour in real life up until about March 2020, and what is deemed acceptable and wise now. Sometimes it feels a battle to try to remain grounded and as content as possible.  It often feels as if life has always been like this, the passing months just a blur of nothingness while we’re left standing still waiting for life to start moving forward again. Simultaneously, many of us have never had to work so hard learning new skills we’d never sought nor wanted to pick up. We all look forward to that uncertain date when face coverings, Zoom (or its near relation, Teams) and crossing to the other side of the street when another pedestrian approaches you, are not our daily fare. When greeting friends with a hug and being able to offer them a cup of tea, or something even stronger, while sitting at less than two meters is, well, just normal once more. In the meantime, it seems the old normal and the new normal will continue to clash and interweave in unexpected ways in my brain.

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Reflections on a Mad Week in Higher Education

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Athene Donald

Readers from the UK can hardly fail to have noticed the confusion across the HE sector caused by last week’s A level ‘results’.  I recall how many people had been voicing fears during the past months that the disadvantaged would be further disadvantaged by the proposed process. It is clear that last month the House of Commons Education Select Committee recognized these anxieties, appreciating that bias and unfairness might result from the intended process for assigning grades, although their concerns appear to have had no effect on those in power. As the head of a Cambridge College, I know how worried the admissions team were about what the knock-on effects would be for our own applicants.

What follows are some personal reflections on the process (not necessarily views representative of the College as a whole; I had no part in any of the decisions made about individual students). The whole system, obviously most particularly for the students involved and their teachers and families, was placed in an incredibly difficult and unsatisfactory situation. Some righting of the wrongs the so-called algorithm imposed has now occurred after the Government did a U-turn: home students’ grades as determined by their schools and colleges (CAGs – Centre Assessed Grades) are now being used, not those that the algorithm spat out. However, reaching this decision so slowly – 5 days after the initial results were made public –  in itself caused huge stress and it now opens up a whole set of new problems that will work their way through the system over the coming weeks, months and indeed years and put huge stress on many thousands of individuals, be they students or university staff.

I feel a huge amount of sympathy for this year’s cohort, who have been so hammered by the process, whose confidence and hopes have been knocked back even if in many cases they are now reinstated, at least in part. For some a considerable period of uncertainty may remain; for others the damage to morale and trust may be lasting. It is hard to imagine there won’t be long-term effects of this tumultuous week for all of them, whatever their final position may be in terms of their aspirations. We are not out of the woods yet either. Many decisions are still to be made as the consequences of the revised results become apparent: on space in labs and lecture theatres; on accommodation; on people trading up; and, of course, universities left with uncertainty about their capacity and/or viability. Remember, all decisions about offers were made earlier in the year having plenty of time to factor in capacity considerations while operating under the many necessary constraints, and this careful thought has now been thrown out of the window by the last-minute changes. The constraints remain; the numbers may end up being wildly out of line with them.

In a college such as my own, admissions are always taken extremely seriously. We scrutinise many different factors in reaching decisions about whom to make offers to in the first place. Churchill has a proud tradition of admitting a high proportion of state school entrants, but we will only admit those who we believe are likely to thrive on their courses. We also feel that interviews have limited use as an indicator of future success. Historically we used AS results as a strong indicator when we decided on who to make offers to. All our analysis showed that there was good correlation between AS and later university exam results. Of course, we no longer have (in England) AS data to look to, which is why many subjects set their own assessments either prior to or at interview.

Although we are proud of the relatively high proportion of state school entrants we admit, the reality is that state versus private is a very crude metric, one which we – and, I believe, the University more widely – would prefer to move away from. We know there are students who attend private schools up to GCSE and who then move to state schools for A levels. We know there are scholarship students from disadvantaged backgrounds who attend private schools. We know state schools vary hugely in their intakes and their facilities. Some are grammar schools, some comprehensives and some are 6th form colleges and so on. Each school will have different strengths and weaknesses. The admissions team in my college know the schools intimately, as it were, and can factor in these different considerations along with every other piece of information we have to hand – submitted work, any subject-specific tests taken, teacher reports and predicted grades etc – when considering individuals before we decide whether (in January) to make an offer or not, along with the precise details of the offer we make.

However, we naturally make more offers than we expect to be fulfilled. This is true every year. In most subjects the so-called ‘cover ratio’ – the number of offers to places we wish to fill – is little greater than one. This is not true in mathematics where many more offers are made than there are places. Let me pause and consider maths in a little more detail, because it makes a huge difference to the picture of why we didn’t immediately accept all offer holders from the state sector (#honourtheoffer as it was termed). For the Cambridge maths course (unlike Oxford) there is an additional hurdle to entry: the STEP exam (Sixth Term Entrance Paper), which comes in several parts. This is because the Maths faculty do not believe A levels provide sufficient differentiation to identify the students who will thrive here. STEP exams have been in use for many years. This exam was sat this year by all maths offer holders via proctored online sessions. These results are safe, not determined by algorithm, and so we have always been confident that those offer-holders – state school or not – who failed to meet the required standard in STEP were treated fairly in not having their places confirmed.

For everyone else, there was a huge amount of individual scrutiny last week if their offer was not met under the government’s original algorithm. We certainly did not at any point follow this algorithm blindly. Any college whose position I am aware of has done the same thing: acted with great flexibility, thoughtfulness and care. Admissions teams will have talked to individuals and tried to help them understand the outcomes.

Another practical matter that is now going to be played out as we receive the CAG scores is limits on numbers and hence on accommodation. First of all, before the U-turn, we were mindful of the numbers cap that the government had imposed on universities – again this was in conflict with #honourtheoffer as we, collectively across the University, would have massively exceeded our cap by accepting all state school offer-holders. Along with the U-turn on grades (although not actually simultaneously, thereby leaving an hour or so of ‘what now?’ in admissions’ teams minds) the cap was removed. But we do have space limitations. In some cases, this applies to courses; in medicine, in particular, numbers are set by the government at national level across the sector and, as I write, discussions are underway on this figure but a cap (although possibly higher) seems likely to remain. In other cases it may be due to space limitation in teaching spaces across the university (laboratories are a particular concern even without factoring in social distancing due to the pandemic).

In this College, as opposed to these issues across the whole University, we promise every student accommodation on site for the duration of their course if they want it – not all colleges are able to do this, but we have invested in accommodation to make this possible ­ – and we are not going to renege on that promise. It matters to many students. That practicality obviously puts an upper limit on numbers, made trickier this particular year by PHE guidance on household sizes and how to cope with the pandemic for the next academic year. Again, because of the nature of our accommodation that has fortunately barely affected the numbers we can admit, although some colleges are facing more severe limitations on accommodation than we are.  Some students may need to be asked to defer; some may even prefer to do so given the uncertain position we are currently in.

We are also concerned, although we are now in a position where we have less ability to do anything about this, that there are conflicting commitments to different cohorts which we would wish to try to balance. With larger numbers being admitted this autumn than we would expect (although, again as I write, we don’t yet know exactly how many above our preferred target) the knock-on effect next year is a substantial concern for us.  As others have written in the press, next year’s UCAS applicants – whose education, we should recognize, has been severely impacted already due to the loss of a whole term of school attendance  – are not only directly impacted through the lack of recent teaching, but are now potentially up against those in the year above who may be guaranteed deferred places in universities across the country. This is a position none of us wanted to be in: intergenerational justice is definitely at risk.

I am deeply perturbed and angered by the stresses the A level students of 2020 have been put through, as well as the consequences for 2021. Any individual institution, such as my own, will have been doing the best they can under these circumstances, with an extended period of furiously hard work for all concerned. For Churchill College we could see that our careful scrutiny of all the information we had under the original set of results meant that we would have had a cohort starting this October which is academically strong, but also very diverse. Moving away from the crude state/private sector divide, there are other measures of disadvantage which we can see we are ‘scoring’ (as it were) well against. One of these is the so-called POLAR4 quintiles, which is a measure of postcode disadvantage. POLAR quintiles 1 and 2 represent those areas (40% of the total demographic sit between these two quintiles) which have the lowest number of university attendees; admissions from these quintiles are particularly high this year. There are other so-called ‘flags’ of multiple deprivation which we care greatly about; admitting students with two or more of these flags is another way of ensuring we are not simply reinforcing prior advantage. Churchill will continue to work hard on all these fronts whatever crises are thrown in our direction. More statistics about the initial cohort that we were expecting to admit can be seen on our web pages, but there is absolutely no doubt we had a group which demonstrated, once again, our commitment to widening participation. We cannot yet know what the composition of the final class of 2020 will look like.

Whenever the dust settles, I hope many will look at the whole process to work out how such a fiasco can never be allowed to happen again. Many universities will have been, and will continue to be, under enormous strain. This is, let us not forget, on top of a pandemic, when the delivery of teaching has already had to be completely rethought, and we can expect more changes as the conditions change. All staff have had to make huge conceptual leaps – for instance how does an establishment such as mine cope with quarantine, feeding students safely and with social distance, preserve sufficient community to ensure students’ mental health is protected and comply with the public health guidelines as they evolve. Underlying many institutions will be concerns about financial health and long-term viability. To have such a bungled exam results’ season on top of these other massive concerns will have felt like the last straw to many, but the camel’s back must not be broken!

 

 

 

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Active Silencing

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Athene Donald

Aggressive. That’s such a useful put-down. As in

“I think there were several very vocal, dare I say aggressive residents that, in my opinion, regardless of what work was being carried out or not, they still would have had reason for complain.”

In this case, the aggressive folk being referred to are Grenfell Tower residents who were complaining about, guess what, fire safety. These words were apparently spoken by one of the leads for Rydon, the contractors charged with replacing cladding and looking after fire safety when he gave evidence to the ongoing enquiry. Aggressive, as in, we needn’t worry about what is being said, these people are just out to cause trouble so we can safely ignore them. An analysis of the way people making complaints can be silenced and ignored was recently posted on the Bennett Institute for Public Policy blog. Written by Gill Kernick, a Safety and Management Consultant, it is a searing indictment of what went wrong in the run-up to the catastrophe at Grenfell Towers, but the parallels with so many other sorts of incidents and silencing – not just in safety aspects – are manifest.

There is a list of damning tropes that are used to put down inconvenient people, male and female, black and white. Sometimes these comments do, specifically, refer to gender or skin colour. Think of the phrase ‘angry black woman’, possibly more commonly used in the USA, but certainly also used against women in this country, as model Naomi Campbell or campaigner Reni Eddo-Lodge can testify. Michelle Obama discussed this in her leaving interview with Oprah Winfrey, carefully saying

‘”You think, that is so not me! But then you sort of think, well, this isn’t about me, this is about the person or the people who write it.”

That’s a useful way to try to distance oneself from the pain of the accusation, but hard to do. Eddo-Lodge, in her book Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race spells out

“The ‘angry black woman’ phrase says more about whiteness and maleness than it does about black women. It speaks to a status quo that recognises its own simultaneous suffocating dominance and delicate fragility – of the reality of its increasing irrelevance over time, and a compulsive need to stop that looming change.”

But, until that dominance disappears, that trope will be used in an attempt to silence the women who should. in the accuser’s view, merely smile and submit.

Silencing of women – as Mary Beard has so powerfully argued in her book Women and Power ­­ – has a long history. It is still going on. Harvey Weinstein notwithstanding, when it comes to powerful men using their dominance to harass and bully, their victims, typically but not necessarily women, are usually too frightened to complain formally. After all, the aggressors are relying on being able to provoke that terror and response. It applies in academia too. I heard this week of yet another powerful (white) man who has a string of informal allegations against his name, but not a single person is willing to come forward and lodge a grievance with the authorities.

One can hardly blame the victims. They know full well that it is only too easy for them to be labelled as troublemakers – another convenient put-down which will have the effect of silencing them. But, possibly even worse, they may have their future careers blighted. Where there is a power imbalance or the possibility of a quiet word being said to the perpetrator’s cronies, it has to be a very determined or angry person who will speak up. As the National Academies’ Report on Sexual Harassment of Women reported, one victim was told by the person investigating her complaint that

“I sounded just like his ex-wife…maybe if I stopped whining so much I would have more friends…And then he started giving me failing grades…”.

Not a very supportive statement! The Report went on to list other fears

“perceived threats to tenure prospects; ability to freely pursue research and scientific stature opportunities; and threats to physical, emotional and mental health were significant factors for women who have been sexually harassed in weighing whether or how to disclose the incident.”

One of the women who spoke up against Berkeley’s (former) star performer Geoffrey Marcy – who was ultimately sacked – told how, in every faculty interview, she was asked about what happened. In her case, it did not stop her getting job offers – although not from Berkeley – but she was, as she put it, afraid.

Anyone who is in a senior position – such as a head of department – who does follow up on an allegation, may also find themselves harassed.  After I wrote an article for the Guardian about bullying and harassment in academia, I received emails, not just from those who had suffered at the hands of senior staff, but also from heads of departments who had not received support from their institutions when investigating such allegations. These people, who are doing what is manifestly the right thing, may also be labelled ‘troublemakers’, and themselves hounded out or forced to step down, as my correspondence proved. (At least when I spoke up publicly about one individual, I merely was made to feel as if it was me that was the guilty party, but I don’t think it hampered my career or standing, as I’ve written about at length previously.)

The most recent case I read about from the academic world – concerning the Provost at the University of Michigan –  is perhaps not atypical. When, ultimately, a university acts – in this case the professor was fired as Provost and, some months later, stepped down from all his roles – what comes out is a litany of historical complaints. Complainants discouraged from taking things further, or complaints that were either not handled correctly at the time, or got somehow mislaid en route to the appropriate authorities. Maybe there was no active silencing, but there will undoubtedly have been people who wanted to look the other way or sweep things under the carpet. Until, finally as in this case, everything comes tumbling out and a formal investigation details the catalogue of missed opportunities to put a stop to things earlier and – very often – the failure of the authorities to act appropriately.

The ultimate form of silencing is of course the NDA – the Non-Disclosure Agreement. These permit a pay-off in return for silence, and they have featured significantly in the Weinstein and, in the UK, the Philip Green cases. Academia is no different. One victim, Emma Chapman, has initiated a high profile campaign to stop the use of NDAs in the case of sexual harassment. In part this is to prevent the cover ups but, importantly, also to stop a perpetrator being allowed to leave quietly and move on to some other institution without a blemish on their formal record, when the harassment may start all over again. Furthermore, as Chapman has written

“Retaliation and reputation damage are also commonplace, with the enforced silence leaving you defenceless as close colleagues wrongly assume your complaint was malicious, minor or not upheld, or the perpetrator spreads false rumours about you or their false innocence. The career of the complainant, not the perpetrator, is too often forfeit.”

Silencing by NDAs in these cases harms the whole system. The only person who wins is the perpetrator. To quote Chapman again

“When you have university processes that result in women and minority groups being pushed out of academia for complaining, then this is not just unfair, it is a violation of the Equality Act 2010. Breaking the silence not only empowers victims and prevents perpetrators from falsely claiming innocence, but it also brings the spotlight back on the institution’s role by allowing whistleblowing. Universities should not be free to ignore warning signs, to settle complaints informally and, without victims’ involvement, to avoid paperwork and confrontation.”

We need to find ways in which victims feel safe to speak up and in which universities – and every other organisation too – know that investigation and action are the only way to go. Silencing is not an adequate response to complaint, formal or otherwise.

 

 

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Remembering Rosalind Franklin

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Athene Donald

ROSALIND FRANKLIN 1920-1958 Pioneer of the study of molecular structures including DNA lived here 1951-1958.jpg
By Spudgun67 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Everyone knows a little something about Rosalind Franklin, whose hundredth birthday it would be today. Some may have little sense of her beyond the belief that she was cheated out of a Nobel Prize by the dastardly actions of Maurice Wilkins at Kings London and, even more, by the cavalier attitude of Jim Watson aided and abetted by Francis Crick. But her life is much more interesting than that mythological potted history would imply. It also has strong resonances today, with women in science still in a minority and many – both men and women – feeling that there is a hard-core establishment, predominantly pale, male and stale which controls funding and hence researchers’ lives.

Also hidden in the story of how her own X-ray photograph was shown to others, enabling them to solve the double helical structure of DNA before she herself could, is any insight into how the science progressed to enable such a stunningly improved photograph to be taken. The way of science in the research lab is not at all the same as the kind of science school children encounter. It can therefore seem mysterious and too often told as the ‘heroic’ story in which one person’s efforts suddenly and miraculously lead to a Eureka breakthrough. Think of the ‘myth’ around Isaac Newton watching an apple fall and immediately coming up with the idea of gravity. Thinking of science in this way does the practice of science a disservice and is unlikely to encourage children to think more seriously about what needs to be done, why they might want to do science themselves, or to reassure the public about the validity of scientists’ claims. Unfortunately, too often, this is how the history of science is presented and, by extrapolation, the idea that that still applies, despite the importance of collaborative team science and interdisciplinarity. In the 21st century we are more than ever dependent on science, as recent months have proved, and the trust and confidence of the public in the scientific endeavour is crucial.

Too often science is seen as an arid landscape, where people, emotion and creativity have no real place. This is so wrong, so wide of the mark of what a life in science is actually like. The concept of the lone scientist, typically in a white lab coat and quite likely holding test-tubes containing some noxious smoking liquid, does not equate to reality. We are part of a flourishing network of committed, cooperative individuals, interspersed with a few real jerks.  (Many people would throw Jim Watson into that last category.) We have our highs and lows during the course of our daily life just like any other kind of worker. We are as interesting or as boring as those in any other profession. There are many challenges to be addressed on the way to being entitled to call yourself a professor, many places where the aspirant may fall by the wayside or lose motivation. However, the bottom line is that working in science is just like the rest of life, the tensions and pleasures of working with others in a scientific laboratory are not really that different from working in an office.

Rosalind Franklin never got to be a professor – in fact far fewer scientists rose to those dizzy heights back in the 1950s than now – and her life was cut miserably short by cancer. During her relatively brief flowering she encountered many obstacles: she was a woman, she was a Jew, and for a number of years she was surrounded by people with whom she felt she had little in common to name three factors that had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of her science. During her life she did have time to demonstrate the versatility of scientists, moving between fields – from the structure of coal to DNA, albeit using X-ray diffraction in both cases – another feature that is often overlooked in the public’s view of experts who are imagined as dedicating their entire life to a single topic, as they beaver away in their alleged ivory tower.

One can tell Rosalind Franklin’s life story in many ways. To Jim Watson she

“was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning if she had taken even a mild interest in clothes”,

to quote from The Double Helix. He appears to have been as just misogynistic then as in more recent utterances. However, others also found Franklin difficult, just as she also found many of her colleagues. A schoolfriend of hers was quoted as saying

“She was straightforward, even forthright, and not inclined to be diplomatic.”

In adult life, in different labs, her behaviour which, in a man might have been hailed as confident and assertive, in her was seen as aggressive and unattractive. That parsing of assertive compared with aggressive is one that women still face today.

What I find most interesting, when reading some of the key books about this seminal period when Franklin, Wilkins, Crick and Watson were all interacting, is the comparison not of personalities, but of approaches to resolving the structure of DNA. To Franklin, the model building of Watson and Crick seemed child-like, playing with toys. For her it was the detailed, thorough analysis of Paterson functions that was required to interpret her beautiful X-ray diffraction patterns. Crick described her in his own memoir, That Mad Pursuit, as lacking panache. He explained this by “she felt that a woman must show herself to be fully professional.” Or, as Brenda Maddox expressed it in her biography The Dark Lady of Science

“Rosalind had been trained, as a child, as a Paulina [a student at St Paul’s School for Girls], as an undergraduate, as a scientist, never to overstate the case, never to go beyond hard evidence. An outrageous leap of the imagination would have been as out of character as running up an overdraft or wearing a red strapless dress.”

Watson had none of these inhibitions, nor did Crick. The first chapter in Watson’s book The Double Helix starts with the sentence “I have never seen Francis in a modest mood”. They may have been briefly embarrassed – and apparently were – when Franklin pointed out the fundamental mistake regarding the level of hydration of DNA they had made in their penultimate model, but it did not stop their model building and imagination. You might call it panache, or confidence to blag their way through. Still, that gender differential between the stereotypical solid 2.1 sort of woman who writes essays with reams of evidence but allegedly no originality, and the ‘brilliant’ man who writes a wonderful, unsubstantiated account and gets a 1st, persists. There are many contributing factors to the well-documented gender attainment gap at university, particularly in essay-writing subjects. As a Cambridge University Student Union report put it

“When it came to producing work within the arts and humanities, many women respondents talked about a style of essay writing – fast-paced, aggressive, and argumentative for argument’s sake – that they felt was valorised over more considered and expansive pieces, and that women in general found more difficult, or were less inclined, to write.”

As we celebrate the centenary of Rosalind Franklin’s birth, we may reflect that our education system still facilitates a gendered assessment of what is valued; this is supported by the difference in success rates for UKRI grants (and their size). We cannot tell if different educational practices would have enabled the needed leap of imagination for Franklin to construct the double helical structure without deriving it through detailed analysis, or if her character and upbringing would inevitably have held her back from model-building. She knew what she could do well, and worked flat out with those tools. She was someone who undoubtedly faced multiple hurdles by virtue of being a determined woman surrounded by men who thought of her as ‘Rosy’ (Watson), ‘a fool’ (according to Peter Pauling), ‘incompetent in interpreting Xray pictures’ (Watson),and that she ‘looked beautiful when she was angry’. Unfortunately, for many women in science today, those or similar epithets may still be tossed in their direction as they are judged unfavourably, unreasonably and unfairly.

 

 

 

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