Post-Election Christmas Reading List

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Athene Donald

The general election is now done and dusted. The UK’s future is determined, for good or ill. Scientists (along with everyone else) now must work out how to interact with the new policies, new ideas and – if some of the Tories statements are to be taken at face value – substantial new money going into fresh initiatives. One of those touted in the run-up to the election, courtesy of Dominic Cummings, is the idea of a (D)ARPA like funding entity, sitting – as far as current rumours go – outside UKRI. I am sure I won’t be the only scientist up and down the country reading up about (D)ARPA over Christmas; my copy of Sharon Weinberger’s book Imagineers of War is on order (as referenced in David Willetts’ The Road to 2.4%), ready as a distraction from family and turkey.

That possible initiative is not the only thing the community may need to get to grips with. Time to think more concretely about what life post EU-funding means and the loss of both the ERC and structural funds. Reading the Smith/Reid report leaves many questions unanswered. Will yet another extra-UKRI agency be set up to oversee any new replacement funding? How efficient would having three, distinct public funders be (to be clear, I mean UKRI, ARPA-UK and replacement-EU), if that really is the plan. Would the same senior scientists be involved in oversight of three such bodies; would their back-offices reinvent wheels, even if the conditions of funding were not identical?

Post access to EU funds, the possibility of new structures to serve a fully global world, no longer with a special emphasis on collaborations with our nearest neighbours, opens up. How would that work in practice? Would an international strategy be more focussed on facilitating capacity-building in sub-Saharan Africa or ensuring we have good links with the Chinese economy, as it itself invests so much in its own science? Whatever direction and shape these new structures might take, it is absolutely clear that resolving issues around immigration and access to visas has to remain a central plank in our collaborative efforts.

But what about all these newly blue constituencies in the Midlands and North of England, what will ensure they stop being ‘left behind’? On this front, to echo Tony Blair’s past mantra, I would say education, education, education. But it has to be education for a purpose. As Richard Jones has pointed out in his essay Resurgence of the Regions: rebuilding innovation capacity across the whole UK, low skills in such areas result in part from the absence of local jobs at which to aim. Why bother to upskill or study hard at school if there are no jobs waiting for you? Regeneration of these areas in tandem with thinking much harder (and investing more) in education and skills is needed. So, to add to the Christmas reading list we should probably be dusting off our copies of the Augar Review, remembering that university isn’t going to be the goal of every 16-year-old in the country. Further Education colleges rightly need to be reconsidered. Ensuring that this part of the educational ecosystem is fit for purpose, including being properly funded, is going to be a vital part of turning around those parts of the country not currently well-served by innovative local companies and jobs a-plenty.

In this context, I would add to my Christmas reading list the US report from the Brookings Institution The Case for Growth Centres: How to spread innovation across the US to join my (re) reading of Richard’s essay discussing related issues. Getting a grip on the ‘place’ agenda is going to be critical in reducing inequality across the UK. Unsurprisingly, the distribution of cities with thriving economies is comparably uneven in the US. Left behind towns and cities, in the Rust Belt for instance, old manufacturing towns whose livelihoods have faltered as the production of steel or cars has faded and moved elsewhere, are just as significant a social issue in the US (and equally contributing to the rise of populism) as over here. The Brookings Institution solution is to propose that huge sums of money should be invested into a few of these centres, carefully done so that the benefits diffuse widely away from the actual centre. This need for diffusion – in tandem with a workforce sufficiently skilled to provide the necessary absorptive capacity of money and innovation – is crucial if invested money is to impact on all those who need it. One of the challenges for the somewhat overheated city of Cambridge, is that its impact does not reach to Wisbech or Newmarket, let alone to Cromer and Lowestoft. The Combined Authority of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is seriously impeded in its ability to transform the region by the huge discrepancies between the utterly different nature and economies of the cities of Cambridge and Peterborough and their surrounding fenland. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach and therefore a lot of stasis, despite all the good intentions.

I come back to the importance of skills. The move to improve coding and IT skills in our schools, starting at a young age, is to be welcomed. It is vital that it isn’t simply middle-class kids who get given tablets at a young age and who thereby gain confidence in these areas. The robots may or may not be coming to take away all the lesser-skilled roles (actually not at all likely in areas like social care), but it is hard to imagine the workforce of the future being successful without computer-literacy of some sort, as well as literal literacy. Regrettably I don’t expect the new government to reinvent Sure Start, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots in education starts incredibly young.

If parents don’t have confidence in their own numeracy, literacy and IT skills, how can they facilitate their toddlers and young children not to be fearful of education. David Willetts, in his 2017 book A University Education, implied that pouring money into higher education was much better than, for instance, into the early years centres of Sure Start. I don’t buy his arguments (nor was I convinced by the evidence he adduced). I feel it begs the question of how an 18-year-old who has been consistently failed by the education system (possibly even permanently excluded) is going to want to be turned around and packed off to university, particularly if they are struggling with absolutely basic skills. And, if their whole family has been unemployed for years because of the local economy, what optimism can they have that it would be an investment of their time and money that will provide returns?

So, over Christmas, I will have plenty of reading to dig into. I need to improve my knowledge of the evidence base and comprehension of the political and economic landscape the general election has brought us and where we might be heading. I strongly believe it is not sufficient, as a well-heeled, middle class Oxbridge don, to bury my head in the sand and think ‘I’m all right Jack (or Boris)’.  There will be many in those newly blue constituencies who may briefly be feeling optimistic. We, collectively across the sector, need to do our bit to ensure their optimism is justified.

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Travelling Hopefully to 2.4% GDP

Posted on December 6, 2019 by Athene Donald

David Willetts, for a number of years the Minister of State for Universities and Science, now an FRS, President of the Advisory Board for a think-tank (Resolution Foundation) and writer (most recently, A University Education), has just published a pamphlet about The Road to 2.4%.  All the three main parties (in England) are supportive of an uplift, a substantial uplift, in the amount of funding for science and innovation in the UK. The figure of 2.4% – as a percentage of GDP – is not simply plucked from thin air but is the OECD average and hence the number homed in on by the Conservatives. The Labour party has even greater ambitions. But, and this is a big but, this isn’t simply Government money. It requires a huge increase in financial input from the private sector too, roughly in a proportion of 2:1 from industry to government. Hence talking in terms of a ‘road’ seems appropriate, since we may be more likely to travel hopefully than to arrive. Pessimists in the room have been heard to say that it will be easy because post-Brexit GDP will plummet, and so the figure could be achieved simply with flat cash, but I will put their negativity aside. Willetts makes no mention of Brexit, or its impact, apart from a couple of fleeting quotes from the Tory manifesto referring to ‘getting Brexit done’. This omission of potentially the largest change to the UK landscape on the horizon seems too blaringly obvious to be accidental in Willetts’ writing.

I recently wrote a blogpost about a report on science within government departments and their interactions with the wider community, in which the culling of research establishments during the Thatcher era was implicitly mourned. Willetts makes similar points about the damage to the UK R+D ecosystem in his pamphlet.  He is absolutely clear that when it comes to getting to 2.4% – which will need all that industrial input and plenty of innovation to kickstart increases in productivity and hence economic growth – it is not appropriate to look to universities alone. To quote at some length a part of his analysis

The Heath Government took money from the Research Councils to go to departments to purchase applied research. But over the subsequent decades departments proved to be very poor protectors of their own R&D budgets. They behaved like short-sighted British businesses cutting their R&D budget whenever they were under financial pressure. As the customer who is supposed to be purchasing R&D regularly cuts their budget, that leaves behind only the science budget which is allocated under a different model and protected behind the Haldane principle. It means the science budget is under pressure to fill the gap in applied research left by departments. ….

There is one more twist to this. The minister who received Rothschild’s report was none other than Margaret Thatcher who was then Secretary of State for Education and Science. Some time after she arrived in Number 10, in the mid-1980s, the Rothschild doctrine that applied research requires a customer, was taken to its next stage. Business not Whitehall was to be the customer…..

This doctrine creates the funding gap called the “Valley of Death”. It means public spending stops long before applied research is commercially viable.

Yet universities have been fingered as the key player in growth by innovation by many. Why don’t they have more spin-outs? Why don’t enough of these spin-outs turn into the next Google or, more locally, ARM? Questions like these get bandied around all the time, with the added rider that ‘of course’ the UK has always been bad at capitalising on its inventions. Sentiments neatly illustrated by the headline The Brits: great at inventing, not so good at monetising are common. Furthermore, the various instruments of university accountability – most noticeably REF and KEF (the latter as yet fully to materialise) – put explicit value on ‘impact’ so often (but not invariably) translated within an economic framework leading to, I believe, unrealistic expectations.

As the ‘scientist of the moment’ (to quote from this article) my friend and physicist colleague Richard Jones has said

I think British universities are really good at interacting with industry. That’s not to say that they couldn’t be better, but we’re not starting from a bad place at all….People expect too much of universities…the British system has become very unbalanced because it’s over reliant on them to deliver all the R&D.

Richard’s view is in line with Willetts on this point.

And since Richard is the scientist of the moment precisely because his extended views have, apparently, been endorsed (not necessarily to his unalloyed joy) by arch-Tory-policy-driver Dominic Cummings, perhaps his thinking on how to move forward will get some traction. His analysis of how to get the economy moving, particularly in those left-behind regions that are impacting so significantly on polls, has suddenly penetrated beyond simply the readers of his own blog, although the article itself has been there for months.

What David Willetts, the review on Science Capability within Government and Richard Jones all home in on is the lack of those research establishments that once provided the mechanism to take a neat academic idea through the next phase of development that must occur before a company is likely to wish to invest substantially or be able to scale-up to large scale production. An extremely detailed and comprehensive analysis of all the things that can go wrong in this intermediate stage has been provided by Uday Phadke and Shailendra Vyakarnam’s book Camels, Tigers and Unicorns: Rethinking Science and Technology-enabled Innovation. In Germany, the existence of the network of Fraunhofer Institutes provides the structures whereby this intermediate work can be done. There is no expectation there that universities will do the necessary leg-work. Yet in the UK, in the absence of such organisations (the nearest equivalent would be the Catapults, of which there are few and not all have been notable successes) is ever more clearly becoming a factor in the lack of disruptive and innovative ideas turning into disruptive but successful and pervasive technologies with consequent positive benefits for the UK economy.

Universities have many issues on their hands ranging from widening participation to Brexit, from Prevent to the giant issue of financial sustainability and survival. And of course the burden that REF (and KEF-to-be) place on their people and structures. It would be helpful if future ministers for science and education would do battle with the Treasury to propagate the understanding that universities cannot act alone to be the solution to this aspect of the economy. The road to 2.4% needs strong financial support (such as, to quote Willetts again, full economic costing of research grants meaning full and not the 80% it has been for so long) but also investment in other parts of the innovation chain so that our bright minds’ best ideas actually turn into solid returns for the UK and don’t get lost in translation. To conclude with more words culled from Willetts pamphlet

Exceptionally but above all we need to promote more applied R&D outside the university. It would be wrong to do this by cutting research funding for universities who face their own funding pressures.

 

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Working Together for Equity

Posted on December 1, 2019 by Athene Donald

This week I was honoured by the THE as the winner of their ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award during their annual awards’ ceremony, for my work around gender equality issues.

THE Lifetime Achievement Award

Photo courtesy of THE. With me are John Gill (L), their Editor and Atul Chauhan, President and Chancellor of Amity Education Group who sponsored the Prize.

I am obviously delighted to receive this award and not only at a personal level: it is a platform demonstrating the commitment of the THE to the importance of this work and a testament of recognition also to all the others around the world who have stepped up to try to improve the working environment for everyone. It is important to remember that well-known trope, what helps improve the situation for women will help everyone. Of course intersectionality issues make the challenges even harder, but if we could level the playing field for women it would be a step in the right direction, however many steps are still left to be taken.

It is perhaps not irrelevant that just a few days before, the THE ran an opinion piece by Irina Dumitrescu (a Junior Professor at the University of Bonn) about how being toxic can enable you to be ‘upwardly mobile’. It was ironic parody I hope, but like all the best parody it included far too many grains of truth for comfort.  Many women – and quite a few men – would say how a toxic atmosphere at work has driven them out of HE. Toxicity is central to what needs to be eradicated if everyone is to be able to progress in line with their talents, and not merely according to skin colour, chromosomes, accent, country of birth, academic genealogy, sporting prowess, societal background…..you can probably extend that list based on your own observations and experiences. Bias of many sorts, not to mention outright bullying and harassment, are all contributory factors in maintaining an unhealthy atmosphere in many dark corners of the educational landscape. Good policies are themselves insufficient to remove every dubious action. We need to move on from having a few champions – a word used to describe me in my citation – to an embedded culture in which everyone is prepared to challenge toxic behaviour whenever and wherever they spot it. I was pleased to use my ‘acceptance’ speech as a vehicle to remind the 1200 people in the room at the award ceremony, held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, of their own responsibilities in this space. What I said was roughly along the following lines:

I am deeply honoured by this award, although slightly shaken to be offered a Lifetime Award before I’ve even retired. I am sure I will continue to champion diversity issues, whether they are part of my job description or not. Although they are much talked about there is still such a very long way to go. In everything from harassment issues to bias, conscious or otherwise, in appointments, promotion and the handing out of awards or tasks, there is work to be done. This applies across the spectrum of minorities, although my focus has always been on gender.

One of the undoubted advantages of growing older is the feeling that speaking out is a less dangerous thing to do. I have very much enjoyed using my voice – through my blog, twitter (however evil you think that is) and elsewhere – to speak for those who can’t, and to push for change on many fronts. It is always encouraging to meet early career researchers who tell me how much they love my blog. I feel it gives it purpose. If it encourages others, then it’s brilliant. Let me remind those of you in the room who have voices – speak up.

Being a champion is all very well but it’s totally insufficient to overcome the systemic problems in our society and our institutions. I call on every one of you to join me in the fight against inequality and against assuming the status quo represents the best workplace for everyone. When it comes to bias and harassment each and every one of us can call out bad behaviour – if we don’t we are complicit. Think about that next time you observe something that makes you uncomfortable and act. Join me in championing a better workplace.

There were those who subsequently ‘called me out’ over Twitter for not being on strike. I am not a UCU member (and the local UCU branch have made it clear the dispute is not with Cambridge colleges). I would not consider a dinner such as this a part of my daily job, even if I were. There were no picket lines to cross.  Nevertheless, I appreciate that many of those who do stand on the picket lines in the cold and wet are motivated by the same desire to see equity, along with the removal of precarity and unfair treatment – not to mention the core concerns over pay and pensions, which as constituted may also perpetuate gender disadvantage. In that spirit I recognize that they are ‘doing their bit’ in this space. However, it saddens me that they felt a need to attack me because I choose to champion gender equality in ways different from their methods. (Readers with longer memories may even recall during the last UCU strike I took a very public stance as Master of Churchill College, publishing an open letter to UUK’s Alastair Jarvis.)

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, their own attitude to what they best can do personally to improve our universities and different opportunities to act. We should not be pitching one form of ‘virtue’ against another, implying that one’s own approach is the only valuable or viable one, the only one that counts. If diversity and inclusion mean anything, it should be a recognition that there is strength in difference. So, whatever is open to you, in whatever sphere you move, I can only urge you to take that particular action to ensure that we don’t see cohort after cohort continue to be disadvantaged, let alone generation after generation.

It is good that the THE recognize and themselves champion the need to improve our universities to achieve genuine diversity. I hope their global readership takes heed.

 

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How Silly Are You (or Pompous or Forthright)?

Posted on November 27, 2019 by Athene Donald

What’s wrong with being called gutsy? The new book by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton use it as a term of approbation, but it didn’t find favour with Emma Brockes in the Guardian. Why?

‘It’s partly that descriptors like “gutsy” seem to protest too much, partly that they feel slightly infantilising, and mainly, I think, that they have become disembodied marketing terms used to launder self-promotion as somehow socially useful.’

It’s true that gutsy is probably a word that I associate with that child who sticks with something – the egg and spoon race perhaps – that others can see they’re struggling with. (Or, for those of a certain age, think Eddie the Eagle, the ‘gutsy’ ski-jumper from the UK who came last in the 1988 Olympics in both the events he entered.) In that sense it is infantilising I suppose, but at least it isn’t a word I’d necessarily see as gendered. Unlike feisty.  Or sweet. If you look at this analysis of student evaluations across the gamut of subjects on RateMyProfessor, it is fascinating to see which words come across as strongly gendered, and which (not always obviously to my mind) do not. It is also curious how different subjects vary so greatly in the extent to which adjectives are both used at all and used differently for men and women. Feisty does not turn up particularly often in evaluations in this study, but whereas it doesn’t seem to be used at all about women in physics (phew!) it is most common in the Fine Arts. Funny is a word that is used far more often, more about males than females, and apparently particularly in psychology and Criminal Justice courses. I did not have the latter down as a laugh a minute, but apparently I’d be wrong about the subject. As for ‘sweet’, inevitably far more women are labelled this way than men, particularly in Languages. Again, perhaps reassuringly to me, female physicists don’t get called sweet very often.

I find it intriguing that pompous and arrogant are associated with men, pompous particularly for those in Fine Arts (which repeatedly comes at the top or bottom of the lists for frequency of use of a given word) and in political science and engineering for the latter. But, whereas engineers (male) are seen as arrogant, male – and female – physicists and mathematicians are rarely viewed that way, sitting right at the bottom of the list for that word. Across the board women are slightly more likely to be called tedious than men, but men are more likely to be called boring. Why? Women are more likely to be deemed nasty, men as charismatic. One can spend a long time following these charts, watching which words are gendered, which are used frequently and in which subjects. Not necessarily a very fruitful way of spending a wet November evening, except in so far as it shows how gendered our language is, even when we don’t mean it to be.

All this is relevant to the shorthand way we use to try to describe people when we first meet them. I was amused to hear the head of an Oxbridge College recently described as forthright, and it struck me that that was a word that I don’t think is obviously gendered – a view corroborated by RateMyProfessor, although it clearly isn’t often used at all in student evaluations. Nevertheless, heads of colleges describing their fellows heads probably do pick their words often in the same unthinking way as a student describing their lecturer. I get on really well with one head of house – so they strike me as charismatic – but I have nothing in common with another, so I might deem them boring. I wouldn’t necessarily only use those words about men, despite the data from RateMyProfessor, but I am not sure I have met a female head I’d call pompous.

It is all very well being acutely conscious of how one writes letters of reference, but in casual speech – or rapidly-scrawled student evaluations – we are probably much less conscious or careful.  Yet, as with all the concerns expressed about the use of student evaluations in the TEF – or indeed their use in promotion processes – we probably should be worrying. If I am making small talk over the dinner table I might slyly insert that I think someone is terrible (more negatively associated with women apparently in evaluations) when it comes to completing committee work, but that someone else is too sarcastic for my tastes (more commonly applied to men). Yet the idea of censoring all my language so that I can only use words that the public at large would not recognize as gendered would certainly restrict my conversation.

This of course is the trouble with bias, particularly in this unconscious form. We are brought up to associate certain words with certain characteristics and culturally those characteristics may more often sit with one gender than the other. Or at least, they may have done in the past. We are still stuck with a certain set of norms that have almost invariably passed their sell by date without anyone removing them from the shelves of discourse.  Hence, our shorthand lazy brain makes easy connections which may no longer have any validity, even if they ever did. Think Daniel Kahneman and his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, who explained how our System I brain jumps to conclusions our System 2 brain would reject if it ever bothered to kick in. Ironically, in this context Virginia Valian certainly came to the same conclusion earlier in her 1999 book Why So Slow?.  I have heard it said of this observation that, typically, an idea only catches on when what the woman said is picked up by a man…..

We can only do the best we can. Choosing words like ‘forthright’ to describe someone may be pleasantly free from gendered associations. But if someone strikes me as silly or pompous, be they student or professor, I’m likely to go on saying so regardless of gender. I just think much harder when it comes to putting an adjective down on paper for more formal consideration.

 

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Doing Your Bit

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Athene Donald

When you have vulnerable people being harassed, what can you do? And I mean you. I have written a lot recently on my blog about the importance of bystanders. To learn more, I attended a recent training session regarding Bystander Interventions run under the auspices of the University of Cambridge’s Breaking the Silence Campaign. The University launched this in 2017. Amongst other things it allows for anonymous reporting so that the university can monitor the scale of the problem. There are some telling statistics, one of the most startling of the ones we were told about was, that of 276 students reporting sexual harassment, only 6 did not know the perpetrator. Stranger-rape is not the common feature of life on campus that people may imagine; damage is most likely to be done by someone in your friendship or academic group, or a staff member with whom you are interacting. Those are not comfortable facts. Nor is the fact that stalking – in person or online – is most likely to be carried out by an ex-partner. Strangers are not the evil we should be worrying about. Friends, colleagues and even teachers are, at least within a university setting.

The training covered not only legal and practical aspects (including links to resources), but also took us through some plausible scenarios using various video clips. One of these was particularly dramatic, showing all the opportunities for interventions by onlookers which were missed, followed by the script ‘rewritten’ to show how a ‘happier’ outcome for the young female victim might have been facilitated. Many of the attendees at this session will go on to role play around scenarios. However, an old fogey such as myself might be seen as a dampener on openness or disclosure to students 40 years my junior, and so I will not participate myself in these subsequent sessions. Nevertheless Churchill’s Senior Tutor, who was also present,  and myself will be bigging up the importance of this programme within the College and beyond.

There is absolutely no doubt role-plays are a crucial part of gaining confidence for how to deal with what may be tricky and distressing situations. For feeling ‘empowered’, as was stated during the training. Although the only role-play I have done in any formal training in the university was too brief and superficial to be helpful, many years ago when in the States I trained as a suicide counsellor. During that training we were given various opportunities to role play, both as ‘victim’ and as ‘helper’. All this time later I can still remember the power of these activities. When asked to imagine myself as contemplating suicide and identifying how I might carry it out, I was deeply disturbed immediately to imagine myself jumping off a (specific) bridge in Cambridge into the Cam. In actual fact I suspect, unless the toxic waters of the river killed me, the jump was from such a low height that it would have been unlikely to be a very successful attempt, but the solidity of that vision, at a time when I had already been away from Cambridge for two years and had never had suicidal thoughts as a student anyhow, was fairly terrifying.

Less immediately specifically memorable were the role plays to work out how to assist others in their own troubles; how not to ask closed or leading questions (though this turned out to be a useful skill for later life when interviewing students, postdocs or other staff), nor to attempt to solve their problems as a psychotherapist would, but simply to empathise, validate feelings, get the individual to a safe place with appropriate support and identify what resources might be available and useful to them. However, when putting myself into a victim’s place again I was horrified to find when describing a troubling situation to a fellow trainee, that I was rocking backwards and forwards, a common tendency in the distressed. Again I recall this with disturbing clarity.

The power of role-playing is real, the confidence conferred by practicing different ways of tackling challenging situations when in a safe place, be it around suicide or harassment, is crucial to enable one to be a good supporter. Like media training in its very different place, being made to articulate possibly less-than-articulate thoughts on the spur of the moment is a valuable skill; having the confidence to get involved in fraught situations reasonably sure that you can improve or defuse them is indeed empowering. Practicing strategies before one needs to put them into action is extremely helpful.

In my own case the training still didn’t give me sufficient strength to deal with the role of suicide counsellor. Back in the US 40 years ago I was put in a situation where I had to handle phone calls alone, with no colleague to download to at once. The Samaritans, at the same time in the UK, had already moved on to ensuring there was always a second person with whom one could share stressful experiences immediately. I found the burden of the one call I took from a genuine suicide risk too overwhelming to continue, despite knowing that for that night at least I had succeeded in providing adequate support: the person rang back later the same night after my shift had ended to say they would not go through with it. Policies were changed in that particular organisation thereafter to ensure that support for the counsellors themselves was immediately available.

For bystanders the situation may be different. In a university setting all that may be required is for bar staff to monitor situations and be alert to remarks such as the ‘ask for Angela’ campaign suggests (my college bar is signed up to this); for a friend to check that their pal really is happy to get into a taxi with someone they don’t know well when they are so drunk as to be barely conscious; even for a stranger to be aware when a girl in the corner is being pinned to the wall in an uncomfortable way so that intervention is likely to be kind (a situation that is all too real for me and more recently than I would like); for people in groups not to laugh at sexist/racist jokes so as not to perpetuate bad cultures….the list of relatively small actions that could change the climate for all of us is long, the consequences of carrying them out substantial.

It is worth remarking that at this week’s Bystander Intervention training there were (I’d guess) approximately equal numbers of males and females present, somewhere between 100 and 150 in total of committed people determined to eradicate some part of the toxicity and dangers life in our university environment can create. The University and its colleges cannot and must not tolerate harassment. I am sure all fellow Heads of House understand this and will be supporting their own students in providing support for those who need it on this front.

 

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