What Do We Know about the Research Ecosystem?

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Athene Donald

While funders make decisions about where their money goes, and PhD students decide what to study, with whom and where before they go on to wander along the career maze; while publishers decide who to publish and universities around the world make decisions based, at least in part, on these same editorial decisions, who looks at the Big Picture? There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study. Meta-research (scraping – of data – was a word frequently used) is facilitated by new tools, but there are many other tedious longitudinal studies of people, places and impact that will probably need a rather more old-fashioned approach to gathering data too.

RoRIlaunch2

Topics for the day included Priorities, Careers (in which I had the unenviable task of summing up and being ‘provocative’ about the other contributions, the panel is shown in the photograph), Culture (featuring fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry), Decisions and Partnerships. Each, as you can tell, a massive topic with many strands to delve into. Of course the next challenge is to work out just which parts of this vast array of possibilities for study RoRI will concentrate on. Something I think the partners are currently thrashing out.

In the Careers session, we heard James Evans (University of Chicago) consider connectivity of researchers and the impact on research outputs. He described the research system as ‘deeply complex’ with ‘emergent phenomena’. One of the results of his study of the networks formed and the groups that acted as nodes in the networks was that as fields grow new work is exponentially less likely to impact that field radically. In other words, just having more people working in any given area is more likely to lead to incremental research than breakthroughs. As he put it ‘social connection leads to cultural collapse’ and he felt that ‘aliens’ from other disciplines were crucial for new insights. Funders should definitely take note.

Sally Hancock from the University of York talked about data on career pathways following the PhD. (Her co-authored working paper can be found on the RoRI website.) She particularly highlighted how different disciplines have different patterns, and how there are quite distinct differences between the genders. But the data is incomplete. It is hard to find out what happens to those who leave research completely or to analyse more nuanced issues that may impact on individuals. This could of course range from having a disastrous relationship with a supervisor to an equally disastrous relationship with a piece of equipment. Continuing on the theme of PhD students Megan MacGarvie (Boston University) and Kolja Briedis (DZHW, Germany) gave international perspectives on the careers question, also with an emphasis in the former case of international students who travel to the US for study and then may – or may not – return to their home countries thereafter.

My task was, in six short minutes, to bring together these different threads and join them into a coherent whole. But, this session coming immediately after one on Priorities, I pointed out how funders, policy makers and indeed the tax payer to some extent, have big decisions to make about choosing what student(ship)s to fund. I have written before about the danger of the ‘lumpiness’ of the UK’s research council (and specifically EPSRC’s) programme for doctoral training. Bearing in mind the comments of James Evans regarding radical new ideas tending not to come in large fields (he referred to people sometimes as living in a bubble chamber), I think it is worth considering whether such lumpiness is even good for getting the science we need done. We should ask what are we training students for and who are we training. I certainly strongly believe that those who leave research completely (be it academic or industrial) should not be regarded, as they so often are, as failures. We need people educated to think critically, to solve problems and to be aware of context to enter many different professions. These people are not failures.

Perhaps inevitably I picked up on the gender disparities Sally Hancock identified. If the THE is to be believed, I said female students are ‘forced out’ by a hostile environment. I don’t remember saying that but, since my comments had to be produced on the hoof, it is quite possible that I did. I certainly said I thought it would be useful to carry out exit interviews for students as they complete their PhDs, to find out what went right and what went wrong. Such qualitative data would be invaluable to help interpretations of the quantitative data that is so much easier to collect.

Later in the day, we heard from Molly King  (Santa Clara University) on data extracted from JSTOR articles which showed an appalling mismatch between women as last (and so presumed senior) authors and their expected benchmark figure. Building on an article Melinda Duer and I wrote earlier this year I questioned the role journals play in this, by virtue of bias (no doubt predominantly unconscious) in their editorial processes and decisions. I am delighted to say this was picked up by some of the Nature team present and I hope to follow this up with them in due course. Our concerns, as expressed in that earlier article, are that there is insufficient scrutiny given to factors such as relative time in review for men and women, or whether referees’ reports ever contain clear evidence of bias. There are many places where the editorial process collectively shows bias, as has been shown for economics but not, as far as I can tell for other disciplines.

I can only give you a sample of the fascinating talks we heard covering this broad and burgeoning topic. If I’ve whetted your appetite here are some further links to fill you in further with the intentions of this institute (I may not have a complete set here).

Overview by James Wilsdon, Director of RoRI, in WonkHE.

Commentary in the THE.

Blogpost by Richard Jones,  Associate Director, on his own talk at the launch.

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Talking Leadership in Toronto

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently been in North America meeting up with Churchill College alumni, flying into New York City and out from Toronto, with a delightful flight with gorgeous views over New England in between. It was rather exhausting but was also something of a trip down memory lane, initially triggered by a nasty incident. A few days before travelling I had had my wallet stolen in Cambridge, pickpocketed, and although this became clear very quickly so all my cards could be stopped, it meant significant worry and inconvenience. In fact the replacement cards came fast enough that I was able to travel abroad with them (taking piles of cash feels so old-fashioned, although I got myself prepared courtesy of my husband’s visits to holes-in-walls), but it reminded me of what happened when I went to the USA for the first time.

Immediately after the end of my PhD and accompanying viva, in early October 1977, I was due to travel to Cornell (in Ithaca, NY) to take up a post-doc position, my husband already having travelled earlier to start his course. It was the time of ‘standby’ flights across the Atlantic, the idea being that if you turned up early enough in the day you could purchase any empty seats on major transatlantic airlines. I dutifully turned up at crack of dawn and got a seat at my first attempt (I think I even managed to buy a ticket for a connecting flight on to Ithaca). Having a lot of time to kill before the flight I set off to buy a cup of coffee, managing to leave my purse behind in the café. My final phone call to my mother for many months was therefore ‘please tell the police’, so I could claim on my insurance. My finances, my state of mind not to mention my ‘status’ as it were, were very different upon arrival this time at JFK compared with that previous trip! The timid and impoverished postdoc who turned up that first time could never have imagined that 40+ years on I would return, essentially also wallet-less but otherwise a totally different person.

One of the events I did for Cambridge University alumni was with Churchill alumnus Bruce Simpson, a Senior Partner at McKinsey, in Toronto. Together we talked about leadership. Bruce discussed leadership in the present day, while I could steal lots of appropriate quotes from papers held in the Churchill Archives when talking about the very different styles of leadership of Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher, including their attitudes towards science. In this vein it has always struck me, however bad Churchill may have been at maths at school and lacking any formal science training, through his friendship with HG Wells he developed far more interest and curiosity in science than really comes across in Thatcher’s actions, despite her degree in chemistry.

Churchill had a child-like curiosity towards inventions, whereas Thatcher’s attitude seems to have been far more utilitarian. Jon Agar’s recent book Science Policy under Thatcher spells this out in depressing detail. In Thatcher’s view scientists needed constant scrutiny, a view which in turn led to the introduction in 1986 of the (much lighter touch) predecessor of the Research Excellence Framework. Churchill, on the other hand, was prepared to commit huge sums of money to the uncertain end of nuclear weapons through the so-called Tube Alloys project, work that later crucially underpinned the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb. Whereas Thatcher expected to be fully engaged in decisions about scientific policy, dispensing with or ignoring the chief scientific advisor for much of her premiership, Churchill just wanted to be kept informed and involved by his close friend Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), despite the latter being such a contrasting personality in his approach to food and drink.

Nevertheless Thatcher’s scientific background stood her in good stead when it came to some of the big scientific issues of her day: the first signs of climate change and AIDS/HIV. On the former she spoke passionately at the UN in 1989.

“It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself.

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”

Ronald Reagan at the time would not have uttered those words, and it is perhaps even harder to imagine the current President echoing them, even over Twitter.

Both Bruce and I referred to the gender angle in leadership. He referred to a recent Harvard Business Review article discussing the skills women possess when it comes to leadership, an article I had read when it first appeared this summer. Surveys of corporate America using so-called 360o techniques have showed that women most certainly are viewed as possessing the necessary attributes to succeed. Indeed on many fronts they out-perform their male colleagues, according to the evidence. But there are still only a tiny number of senior female leaders in Corporate America. As the article says

“Leaders need to take a hard look at what gets in the way of promoting women in their organizations. Clearly, the unconscious bias that women don’t belong in senior level positions plays a big role.”

It isn’t that women aren’t competent; it is that too often they aren’t believed to be competent.

I faced this myself years back when told kindly to my face by an older male faculty member that ‘it would be my turn next’ to be head of department, despite the fact that I was older both in years and seniority (if you call possessing an FRS as I did at the time ‘seniority’) than the other – needless to say male – contender. He got the job. He was, I hasten to say, a very good head of department, but that completely biased statement based on very little (it was not a faculty member I’d ever worked with or knew more than distantly) rankled then and rankles now. It is anecdote not data but I internalised it as how, in the absence of other evidence, gender trumps facts.

Yet, the evidence is constantly building up that diversity in an organisation’s senior leadership really matters in achieving successful outcomes. A study from 2018 showed this clearly when considering profits (not, of course, the only important outcome), but to be effective it does require diversity to be broadly defined not just in terms of gender, but also including ethnicity, education and socioeconomic background. If we are to get the best leaders we must not just look for clones of past CEOs. Interestingly, the colleges in Cambridge are now essentially equally split between male and female heads for the first time this coming October, with several powerful new (external) heads joining colleges old and new.

Leadership is a tricky beast. Many of us (certainly when it comes to heads of colleges) learn on the job rather than through the formal training of an MBA or equivalent. Our present-day politicians likewise seem to be making it up as they go along. Watching them is not edifying. Whatever one may feel about Churchill and Thatcher and their policies it is hard not to think they made a better fist of leadership than the current bunch.

 

 

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Red Lines Don’t Need to be Political

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Athene Donald

Despite the introductory couple of paragraphs, this is not meant as a political diatribe….it’s just hard to avoid parliamentary affairs currently. I did foreswear following Brexit news for several months after the last deadline in the spring for the sake of my well-being, but somehow I’ve got sucked in again….

We’ve heard a lot about red lines from UK politicians over the past many months. It turns out they didn’t do much to help Theresa May in her negotiating stance with the EU, although we seem to have a different type of rigidity being played out right now (‘die in a ditch’ hardly seems like a pragmatic or flexible approach). The PMs current position looks set to leda to potentially even more disastrous outcomes, hard though it would have been to imagine that a few months back. It is often informative to read the foreign press to see how others view our current political antics. I’m off to Canada soon for a brief visit for the College and was particularly struck by an editorial in their Globe and Mail which was full of pithy, if derogatory comments about the current parliamentary mess and its arch purveyor the country’s prime minister (his Special Advisor didn’t get a look-in in this article, although many see Dominic Cummings as the puppet-master behind the scenes). The article says:

Megashambles? Summa cum laude shambles? Tyrannosaurus shambles? The-Chernobyl-reactor-just-exploded-and-the-dosimeter-reads-15,000-roentgen shambles?

Mr. Johnson is the author of 11 books, some admittedly banged out in the careless haste that is his style. But this week, without breaking a sweat, the PM penned the Odyssey and the Iliad of shambles. He faced his first votes in Parliament and lost them; lost his minority government’s governing majority; sacked 21 of his own MPs, including his party’s longest-serving member and Winston Churchill’s grandson; provoked his own brother into resigning from cabinet, citing a conflict between “family loyalty and the national interest”; and lost control of the House of Commons while remaining so offside the chamber’s confidence that it will not yet allow him to resolve the matter by calling an election. Mr. Johnson did all that, and more, in the space of two days.

(One of those eleven books I actually possess: the one about Winston Churchill based extensively on his papers in Churchill College’s Archives and substantially compiled for Boris Johnson by his research assistant Warren Dockter. I’ve even read it but did not fall for the line that Johnson is a latter-day Churchill, despite it being implied throughout the book by Johnson. Somehow, I now seem to have mislaid that book….)

Nevertheless, whatever you may think about those particular red lines of May’s, let alone dying in ditches, there is no doubt that personally I have sometimes approached difficult meetings with mental red lines in place. I was reminded of this when talking to a younger colleague recently who could see such a meeting speeding towards them (nothing to do with Brexit I should add). Being not that much younger than me, with plenty of managerial/leadership experience, I was surprised that they did not seem to think in these terms. I know when I worked out the importance of creating clear no-go lines before a meeting started rather than on the hoof I felt much more in control.

Even so, I was myself late to the realisation that planning in advance for challenging situations can only be helpful. It is too easy, in my experience, just to think ‘this is going to be dreadful’ allowing panic to filter in rather than organised thought. And panic does tend to bring on absolutely everything you fear because it drives out clear thinking. ‘This is going to be dreadful’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if you would like to think you are merely preparing for the worst. So, the day I went into a tricky meeting about resources around the turn of the century, armed with a bottle of water (to prevent my lips sticking together and my mouth feeling like sand) and some red lines, I felt I came out in better shape and with a better outcome than my experience up till that point might have led me to expect given the other protagonists involved. I emerged with my dignity intact and without being made to concede ground (in this case literal ground, i.e. space – isn’t space always one of the inevitable battle grounds in university life?) beyond what I had known from the outset I would have to give up. I had laid down some conditions of my own which had, apparently, been accepted and I felt I had more confidence in my negotiating abilities than at any point previously in my life.

Unfortunately, although I won that battle ultimately I suspect I lost the war, not least because the convenor of that meeting decided to send an email around widely shortly afterwards which did not entirely reflect what had been agreed. A second lesson to learn there; make sure notes are taken and agreed at the time. In many situations that is a strategy to bear in mind, so that there can be no ambiguity about what decisions have and have not been made. For younger readers note I may be, now, the Master of a Cambridge College but I doubt many of my colleagues would have given good odds on me achieving that accolade at the time of that meeting 15 or more years ago.

I guess, political diatribe apart, my aim in writing this down is twofold. First to pass on the tip – that no one had ever thought to mention to me, however obvious it may be to those born with (too much?) confidence or schooled earlier in tactics rather than pure science – know what you are willing to concede and what is too important to give up without at least some extremely firm resistance and counter-offers. Secondly, not just to those of mature years but those setting out, remember that experience counts for a lot. Many of those at the top of their game are not – unlike former Bullingdon Club members – born with a sense of privilege or an expectation that everything and everyone will bow down in front of them. Remember that senior leaders are not necessarily born with Leader engraved on their foreheads, but have had to learn the hard way what works and what does not, given their own personalities, strengths and quirks. We are all different and our strategies for survival and achieving positive outcomes will also differ. Learning on the job is crucial, reflecting on failed strategies is at least as much, if not more important, than simply thinking about success stories.

So, next time you can see a tricky meeting looming – be it with your supervisor, your head of department or even a grant-funding agency – consider what your red lines are. What is so fundamentally important to you that you would walk away from any agreement in preference to conceding this one issue? What could be a sacrificial pawn? And what are you willing to do to meet in the middle of some disagreement? Don’t be too rigid, but do be prepared.

 

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Trying Not to Discourage Others

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Athene Donald

What should one say to school children about to make university choices regarding life after school? Of course there are lots of positive things – clichés abound to supply them – but there are also the darker elements of the conveyor belt they are on. Talking to a group of around 50 teenage girls considering applying to Cambridge for maths or natural sciences last week, I found myself wondering whether honesty is always the best policy.

As the local student newspaper Varsity described earlier this summer, Cambridge maths remains overwhelmingly male. This isn’t because the faculty want this to be the case (I know, because I’ve talked to some of them and they feel very strongly how disappointing this is), but they do expect, and probably require although there may be slight college variations, students to do well in STEP (Sixth Term Entry paper) exams as well as Maths and Further Maths A level. It is clear that this is less attractive to girls who, the evidence suggests, disproportionately don’t want that additional uncertainty and stress. In 2018 Varsity quotes a mere 35 female students were admitted to study maths at Cambridge, out of a grand total of 234 accepted students, the lowest proportion for many years.

To stress the low numbers being admitted, might just make potential applicants feel put off or presume that it’s all just too difficult for them, particularly if they in any way already lack self-confidence. Not to be open that the numbers are low seems misleading at the best. I was struck some years ago by an article from the USA stating that at high school the only successful intervention keeping female students in physical sciences (so not maths explicitly) was pointing out that women were typically under-represented. Not, as one might have thought, having female teachers, or single sex classes, or talking about female scientists or having female scientists come into the classroom. In this one study only talking about under-representation mattered.

It isn’t clear to me how much follow up work there has been by other groups, but a later paper from the same team indicated that talking about under-representation ‘explicitly creates an opportunity for students’ figured worlds of professional and school science to change, and facilitates challenging their own implicit assumptions about how the world functions.’ Which, in layperson speak I think means that children can re-evaluate some of the stereotypes they have internalised without necessarily noticing, but only if the low numbers are discussed in a supportive environment. So, from those studies, perhaps pointing out low numbers is not a bad thing to do, although after my talk there wasn’t really much indication of the students wanting to discuss this. It was the end of an intensive three days, there really wasn’t much sign of them wanting to do anything other than go home.

So moving on from these specific challenges, in my talk I discussed my career path, trying to point out – as I so often do – that life doesn’t necessarily go in straight lines and that things can go wrong without it meaning you personally are a failure. Perhaps to that audience that too was a mistake. Those girls presumably all have stellar track records at school; the hiccoughs that most lives throw up may not yet have assaulted them. Do they want to be told that my first post-doc was an unmitigated disaster and that luck enabled me to overcome those two years of nothingness? Different members of the audience may react with anything from ‘whatever’ to, if it’s all down to luck what’s the point of trying. It is so easy to tie myself up in knots (never mind those listening) with worrying about what the ‘right’ message is.

I have learned that talking about my CV as a ‘standard’ CV is probably the wrong thing to do. I remember using that phrase once to an audience of ECRs and being pulled up. I meant this was what my CV looked like in the way it might appear on a job application (really as opposed to one in which life-events such as marriage or children might feature, versions of my CV I also typically share). The challenger in this previous case obviously felt the word ‘standard’ came across as if everyone’s should end up with a big shiny FRS or professor’s title attached. Not my intention, but it just shows how careful one has to be.

However, whoever the audience and at whatever career stage, I do believe the mantra ‘seize opportunities’ applies; that it is hugely important not to be passive and wait for others to tell you what you should be doing but make your own deliberate life choices (even if they turn out not so well, they are at least your choices and you can usually change your mind or direction); that seeing confidence in others should not convince you that their confidence is warranted, so it should not undermine your own faith in your abilities; and, yes, luck plays a part in everyone’s life. I hope that by finishing off with those messages, leaving that slide up while answering the few questions that came my way, meant one or two useful take home (literally) messages may have resonated and may stay with some of the listeners. And I hope we will be seeing some of those students return to Cambridge in due course.

 

 

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How Groupthink Contributes to Harassment

Posted on August 7, 2019 by Athene Donald

I was recently challenged by a colleague after a meeting as to whether we had all been guilty more of ‘groupthink’ than was apparent at the time or that any of us would have wished. I’m not sure that I think he was right in his conclusion, but he was certainly right to ask the question. The trouble is, it is such an insidious way to behave. We have all been in situations where you arrive at a meeting convinced the answer to the problem under discussion is scenario A, but by the time the first couple of speakers have gone for scenario X you are left wondering if you want to be the only nay-sayer. Sometimes it feels easier to go along with the majority than appear awkward and out of line. This is a phenomenon psychologists are well familiar with.

Having recently read Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s eloquent book about the teenage brain Inventing Ourselves, I am (even more) aware how adolescents in particular are susceptible to wanting to ‘fit in’ and not go against the consensus of their friends. But we all are guilty of this, to a greater or lesser extent and it can be disastrous. My current evening reading is Margaret Heffernan’s book, published some years ago but since updated, Wilful Blindness, which takes a much broader look at the wide range of situations in which an unwillingness to face up to facts hiding ‘in plain sight’ has lead to devastating consequences. One familiar example would be Harvey Weinstein; another the recent report about abuse of up and coming young footballers at Chelsea and Crewe. People knew but didn’t know.

If the majority of the people are ostriches, why are some people prepared to be whistleblowers? Heffernan gives the example of Steve Bolsin the anaesthetist from Bristol who spoke up regarding the high mortality rate of babies and children undergoing heart surgery. Bolsin had tried more conventional routes to raise the problems he identified, but was brushed off by the hospital leadership and his peers; no investigation was conducted until he went public with the media, at which point it became a ‘national scandal’. Others could have backed Bolsin up much earlier in the process, but hierarchies (and hospitals are full of these) meant that others in the hospital preferred to look the other way rather than risk confronting senior surgeons.

Of course, isn’t this just what happens too often in our universities when it comes to bullying and harassment? I fear that only too often managers, loosely defined, want not to investigate a complaint against a so-called brilliant researcher with multimillion pound grants. Even when investigations are carried out, I have heard one senior university leader bemoan the fact that – despite all the evidence to the contrary – the person chosen to lead the investigation found in favour of the alleged perpetrator rather than the victim. In that situation it wasn’t clear what he, the leader, could do, despite what he thought was a pretty clear case against the senior colleague.

Both Heffernan and Blakemore cite studies utilising the early video game of Cyberball which was manipulated by psychologists to make the volunteers participating appear to be excluded by other players (who were in fact pre-programmed non-humans). After a session of such exclusion their moods were markedly lowered. We like being part of the in-crowd. Apparently we want to conform if the alternative is to be excluded. Conformists are less likely to step out of line and blow a whistle, or support Scenario A in opposition to Scenario X when that is what everyone else appears to be recommending. It is telling that Bolsin had to emigrate to Australia because, having spoken up, he could not find a further position as an anaesthetist in the UK, despite his actions highlighting poor practice having saved many children’s lives at Bristol and elsewhere. Despite this being a landmark action within the NHS. Indeed, one might fear it is precisely because it had been such a landmark case that he had to leave the country.  There is at least one other case (following a whistleblowing story regarding Alder Hey Hospital) where again the whistleblower has ended up leaving the country.

Although I haven’t reached the end of Heffernan’s book to see if this is the denouement (I fear it is not), I would like to think that diversity is one answer to the challenge of groupthink; that in a diverse group there is more likely to be someone who is willing to speak up against actions that other people appear to find no fault with. Furthermore, maybe if you are a minority, you are more likely to feel excluded from the in-group already so there may be less to lose by not being conformist. It would be interesting to know if there is any evidence to suggest ‘misfits’ (minorities in particular, but anyone who for whatever reason is outside the mainstream) are more likely to be outspoken!

Certainly it seems to me that much Heffernan writes about is redolent of what I have written regarding the importance of bystanders, but she is referring more to them in a negative sense: bystanders who stand around and do nothing when they see things go awry, relying on someone else to act. She alludes to research that suggests this behaviour starts at school when children see, for instance, bullying behaviour. As in any organisation this often goes on in plain sight. Teachers do nothing – perhaps thinking children just have to learn to deal with this (we all know how well this can work out in practice) – and other children learn from that observation that doing nothing is OK. Teaching children instead to relate with the victim, to talk to them and check they are OK actually removes some of the power of the bully. The bully, not the victim, becomes the one who is isolated. Lessons for us all there, as we watch bullying occur. Bystanders can, indeed should, help victims even if they are not prepared to intervene directly with the perpetrator.

I have written previously in the Guardian about my own attempts to bring some sort of retrospective justice with regard to the inappropriate behaviour of a senior colleague. I was prepared to speak up publicly. Others, other women, were not. One (more senior than me) told me afterwards she had always just slapped the guy down but had not thought to tell anyone else. Another (slightly more junior) woman assured me the guy was very supportive of women in general and so had equally ignored his inappropriate advances. I don’t think either of these is a sufficient response. I think they should have called him out (both had far more to do with the person concerned than I did, moving more in his circles). His behaviour was well-known but, as Heffernan spells out, the more people know of an issue the less any individual is willing to act.

As I have said, to me this amounts to complicity. We need to find allies and act. We need not to assume that just because no one else is prepared to act, it means that is the best way to behave. We need to be willing not to bury our heads but to challenge decisions. If they are all for the best, the decisions will stand up to such challenges. But otherwise we will, as Heffernan spells out, end up with yet more Enron’s, Harvey Weinstein’s or deaths of Bristol children. Equally, in our universities, we will facilitate bullying, forcing out the less confident rather than the less smart. Collectively we need to do better.

 

 

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