#shameonyouwarwick

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Warwick Police haven't prosecuted anyone for these vile rape threats and Warwick uni are now letting (some of?) the perpetrators back in to study at the same university alongside those they discussed threatening to rape.

Would you be happy sending your child here?

Warwick students suspended over rape threats allowed to return earlyly*_

I'm so sorry, I somehow missed the previous posters' mentions of the Victoria Derbyshire interview. Apologies for the repetition.

Would I be happy to send my child to Warwick? Well, my DD actually applied there with nothing but top grades in every subject and was refused a place. This was at the same time my own pupils at school were being offered places at Warwick with pretty indifferent grades.

My poor girly was not accepted at her other choices either and was plunged into depression, illness and suicidal thoughts. It took her months to recover and affected her final year A level study - though not her eventual top grades.

I subsequently found out that Warwick was operating playing field levelling policies and was taking extra cash to let in students who did not deserve a place on merit.

When Warwick started hitting the news with student unrest, safe spacing, icon threatening, no platforming and other horrors threatening free speech and academic learning I realised that they were being punished for letting malcontents and single issue troublemakers into the student body. The latest problems with letting men who think rape is a joke back into the student body merely compounds my view of the university as a money grabbing, moral free zone.

It is the last place I would want my lovely, clever, hardworking, decent, well brought up children.

What is more, they will not want their children attending these corrupt institutions. You reap what you sow.

Wow. This thread has it all. The snobbery in that post has topped it off.

God forbid that universities give slightly lower entry requirements to intelligent teenagers who happened to go to poorer schools. None of them are decent or hardworking or well brought up. Those malcontents will destroy everything!

People have poor memories and there’s a strong chance that in a year or two employers won’t remember individual names but will remember Warwick and wonder about every male applicant. It discredits the entire undergraduate body and is likely to affect every male graduate for years. I’m astonished that the student body and their parents are tolerating it. If I had a son there I’d be seriously considering transferring to another university.

That statement by Stuart Croft is dreadful. It makes it all about him and the horrible men that he has "a duty of care for," and is weirdly pompous and full of non sequiturs.

I don’t think this will affect Warwick at all unfortunately. They must have far more applicants than places and I can’t imagine applications will drop enough to make any difference. The media will stop reporting on it once there’s nothing new to say and life will go back to normal. Apart from for the poor girls affected by this of course, and their families. Wish I could agree that these men’s lives will be affected, but I honestly think there are people in very powerful positions reading this story and knowing full well they engaged in the same kind of chat in their own university days (albeit in a less easy to find out way before social media took off), and they will be quite happy to shrug this off as hing jinks and employ them with no qualms. I am disgusted with the university for not taking a stronger stance on this.

It will affect Warwick- it’s damaging their reputation every day. Who would want their 18 year old to go there now? Those men will be there another couple of years...

Will academic staff be allowed to refuse to teach the men in question, or will the University management be able to force them to allow them to participate in their classes, does anyone know?

The History department has stated that they are not legally allowed to refuse to teach these individuals.

And what a snobbish post Teacher22. Who are you to say that students are not there on merit because they have been given contextual offers? In my experience of actually teaching such students they are often the ones who come out with the higher degrees classifications. Or that they are troublemakers? As someone who follows issues of no-platforming and academic freedom very closely, I can assure you that the culprits are generally middle class and privileged, and that there are worse institutions than Warwick for this kind of thing, most notably including Oxford. I take it you wouldn't want your DD to go there either?

Who would want their 18 year old to go there now?

But surely every university will have their share of these types of vile men? Thankfully (hopefully anyway) they are in the huge minority. I don’t think Warwick is any less safe than anywhere else, they’ve just had a light shined on their issues, same could happen anyway. The thing I find so depressing is that having had that light shone, they could have chosen to really make an example out of this and show this will not be tolerated, but they haven’t. That’s leaves women all over the country that little bit more vulnerable, not just at Warwick.

No it says to me: your kids are not safe here. We will not protect them from violent sexism AND racism. I would strongly steer my dc away from there. (Im a Warwick grad)

@Fazakerley

" If we learn anything from this it is to tell our children not to talk utter shite on social media."

Really that's all you learned from this? Should they just discuss how they should rape someone in person!? Tell your children not to plan to rape someone I think might be a better lesson! Are you one of the said boy's parents by any chance or have you or your child said similar things and you think this is okay as long as you can't get caught saying it?!

I have emailed them to say that it is no longer a university that we are prepared to consider because it's not a culture that our son is prepared to be in as he respects women and thinks that the universities approach is appalling. My son was horrified when he read about it.

@MerdedeBrexit

Thank you for sharing the link to the petition

Those who watched the Victoria Derbyshire segment, must also have been struck by the intelligence, passion and courage displayed by the students she interviewed.

They made articulate and compelling arguments. This is a true reflection of a Warwick University undergraduate.

It is not fair to tar the entire university and student body with the same brush due to a group of morally bereft men ( and their families it would seem) and an incompetent old duffer of a Vice Chancellor.

I hope someone with an ounce of decency, management skill, legal knowledge and PR experience takes over this shambles at the University and that the young women involved can feel safe and can somehow move forward with their personal lives and university studies.

I also find it a strange phenomenon that some middle class parents like nothing better than to run down a university which their own children don’t attend.

Bristol has the ‘suicide reputation’ etc. I’ve heard horror stories ( of a different nature to Warwick) from practically every highly regarded university. Ironically Warwick has been regarded as a safer campus university compared to Leeds or Manchester,for example.

The administrations of all universities need to take student safety and well being more seriously and update their policies accordingly to reflect the world in 2019 not 1970.

Quite telling that in the VC's Q&As, the most cursory answers were to the questions: Do you care more about the male students than female? How will you keep female students safe and what punishment will these boys be given?

Bristol and UWE have both had spates of student suicides. Sadly, Bristol seems to have had a problem on and off for several years at both universities. Appallingly the U of B cut some student services in halls of residence - I vaguely remember reading that they had some kind of student mentors around in halls for first years where they got free/reduced price accommodation in return for providing some kind of support to struggling students.
Some have said it's because of the U of B attracting students who put pressure on themselves to achieve top grades, who knows.

I wonder if the university could allow these women to retake a year, without extra cost so that they can focus on their studies, not on fighting to be treated with respect. This must have had a huge impact on the focus and energy they give to their actual studies. They deserve the chance to catch their breath and retake if they want, on a campus clear of these men until they have graduated.

At £27K a time Warwick can't afford to let them go.

A good reason why universities should have remained seats of learning, and not become commercial enterprises.

I wish people would stop saying that the university can't afford to lose £27k for three students who are returning. That will not have been a consideration. 3 students out of 25,000 is neither here nor there. However, they will lose millions of pounds as a result of this episode from hundreds if not thousands of applicants withdrawing their offers and younger students not applying. They really should have just sucked up the legal proceedings (the cost of which will still have amounted to substantially less than millions of pounds) and come out of this with some sort of moral credibility.

I've emailed the department head at Warwick explaining why my Dd has rejected their offer, I wonder if he'll reply. I also asked the head of her sixth form if she will be discussing this scandal with the students as they make their firm choices on UCAS. Her school pushes the Russell Group very hard and have a close eye on the 'leavers destinations' so it's very important to me that they give the whole picture.

ut surely every university will have their share of these types of vile men?

Depending on how widely you draw “these types”. But I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s the places which are basically the second-choice for prospective Oxbridge students which appear to be having the biggest problem with rich, entitled, sociopathic men protected by their parents’ money.

That VC's letter is beyond belief. All it does is enact the problem all over again. First para is all about how he felt, oh poor him, and then after that the complainants only get marginally more notice than the perpetrators (like about two words more). At no time does he ever consider how the recipients of that behaviour might feel. Because it's all about the MEN.

I've found this whole series of events really disturbing. I'm an ancient feminist who grew up reading Germaine Greer and really thought that the world was changing in our favour. I've been privileged enough to work in industries where my colleagues are mainly women and the levels of overt sexism are minuscule. And now this giant wheelie bin of worms has been opened.

Right now I am struggling to work out what I want to do, but the only thing I do know is that I don't want to do nothing. My DD is 12, and I don't want her to have to deal with this shit.

I don't think that their VC can win. If he talked about the female victims you'd call him patronising.

Look, he might be a prick, but what else can he do?

He's written that it's horrible. He spells out that he legally cannot expel people based on his personal feelings. That two of the eleven are going back after an independent panel reviewed their circumstances, and judged them as worth bringing back with conditions attached. He's written that he's talking to the SU and the university is listening and trying to work out what to do to stop it happening again.

Can you IMAGINE the fury on Mumsnet if someone's son got expelled because they'd been added to a group chat, that (theoretically) they hadn't taken part in and had been disgusted by? Expelled and their futures ruined after a review that said they should return anyway? People would be horrified.

Not sure i really care about the vc. He is well paid to deal with this kind of stuff. If he cant, he should leave his role.

This isnt an issue restricted to warwick. Its a toxic masculinity issue.

lines in the sand need to be drawn.

This was a good opportunity to do so and its being wasted.