#timesupacademia - anyone been watching this unfold on twitter?

[ReappearingWoman]

Vonny Leclerc has been asking for DMs on 1 academic who has been identified via some vague details & since she started her post, she's uncovered

"So far, serious sexual misconduct at: Oxford, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Swansea, Warwick, Edinburgh, Bangor, Newscastle, Canterbury, Brighton, Herriot Watt, Winchester, Northumbria, Leeds, Liverpool, Reading, York, Exeter, Lancaster. Many multiple offenders"

Looks like a reckoning is about to explode on this.

I'll be watching about Portsmouth with interest. DH was an academic there for 30 years and I worked 31 as support staff.

Just seen this; didnt realise she'd started the collection.

I have been waiting for months for this to happen. I'm glad it's coming out. I'm sorry for every academic who has had their career affected by a man in this way as well as everyone who has experienced the emotional toll this takes.

Vonny is brilliant. Looks like the start of a big expose.

The scale of it is dreadful, but sadly unsurprising

Goodness, just catching up with this. What an explosion it will be.

I’m waiting for them to move onto medical schools. Quite the royal fuck up will be exposed there.

I saw this briefly, but figured I'd missed an earlier post with the details.

So these are powerful male academics sexually harassing women, I assume? Students, or fellow academics?

I take it the universities involved knew and did nothing?

My university is on that list. I will be interested to see what happened there (I wasn't aware of anything, I don't think).

Don't think we'll get the full details until the article she's writing is finished but I get the impression that the scale & breadth of the problem is greater than she anticipated, especially with multiple perpetrators, in multiple locations.

It should be shocking but in light of all that's gone before this, it's not surprising at all.

Students and fellow academics.

One of the issues in academia is the people on precarious contracts and how established academics take advantage, it's hard to speak out because your field can be so specialised, and you can wind up being ostracised because perpetrators can influence whether you get a job or not. Careers depend on publishing papers and colleagues with power can make your life very difficult.

There's too many supposedly consensual relationships too - I get that they can be consensual because everyone involved is an adult, but the power differentials are substantial. Plenty of male academics having relationships with students. I'm always interested if a female academic doing the same would lose respect, I suspect she wouldn't be taken quite so seriously.

Crikey. I want to know who the historian is. Real life The History Man for those old enough to remember.

Yes, though the character in the history man was a sociologist, if I remember correctly. He saw himself as being part of the tide of history, or something like that.

I find this research completely unsurprising. Sexual abuse has been going on at universities for a long time. Everyone knows about it and nobody does anything.

Yes - Howard Kirk in The History Man is a lecturer in sociology. A "theoretician of sociability"!

Yep drives me mad. I've just been part of a push at my place to ban staff-student relationships and I was amazed at the pushback and the amount of people who seemed to think it was fine as the student was over 18. Even if they were being directly taught and dissertations supervised by the offending academic.

Although they haven't been banned completely (which is sort of understandable as I know at least one PhD student who was already married to a member of staff when they applied) we have thankfully managed to get the policy significantly strengthened and a well known offender has left.

I have been watching it unfold. It will be interesting to see how many hasty retirements there are before publication.

I also think staff student relationships should be banned. The power imbalance is huge plus it has a potentially detrimental impact on other students.
Some male academics are disgusting. They will openly hit on female students and see it as their own personal hunting ground. Read about Lee Salter who assaulted his postgraduate student girlfriend, stamping on her head and pouring salt in her eyes. At the trial he was supported by his new girlfriend, an undergraduate. It took the university until he was convicted to actually sack him and stop him interacting with female students. He was a 40 yo man preying on young women in their early 20s. Unsurprisingly he did not take too well to one of them actually standing up for herself. He also subjected her to emotional abuse and told her that she was the reason her father had killed himself.

It was only last year we published a 'relationship policy'. Will have to dig it out but it was basically you should let your faculty know if you're sleeping with someone, staff of student, so they can be aware of any potential conflicts of interest/ power imbalances.

In my dept we are really short staffed. I run several modules single handed. If I was shagging a student, there would be no provision for my conflict of interest- I would continue to teach the module and mark the exams and essays. The students who were concerned that my being in a relationship with one of their fellow students might make me biased would just have to suck it up. I can’t see any HoD agreeing to increase the staff budget to get someone else to teach my module because of my involvement with a student. And nor should they. Staff student relationships within the same department and where the student is taught by the staff member should be a disciplinary offence. I can get in trouble for posting something negative on Facebook but not for sleeping with people I have power and influence over? Doesn’t seem right to me.

Exactly, the policy is "make them aware" - there's no onus on the university to actually do anything. The entire policy is about damage control and doesn't acknowledge that any relationship between a lecturer and a student will have a power imbalance.

I've been watching it unfold with the numbers going up daily.

The identity of the history guy is pretty well-known. He’s not especially famous in his field, I don’t think, but was v active on twitter (and got lots of plaudits for his “bravery” around mental health issues).

At a small-ish conference I attend, there’s an academic who preys every fucking time on female graduate students. Isolates them, emotionally abuses/gaslights them (tells them all their peers hate them/are jealous of them), gets off with them. At the next conference/event, it’s someone else. Quite apart from the emotional/sexual abuse aspect, I really despise that he’s put a wedge in between so many young female academics. A couple of us more established women chatted about it after the last egregious episode, but don’t know what - if anything - we can do about it, short of warning off whoever the unlucky next candidate is.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Have you also seen that Lee Salter, the lecturer who violently assaulted his student girlfriend has now made a film called 'Injustice' which is about the criminal justice system? He is going by a pseudonym- Unsound Robin- and has been touring various universities screening it. If you work in academia, be aware of this and warn organisers if you hear of a potential screening. He has accepted no responsibility for his crime.

I’m so glad I found this though am late to the party. I’m surprised it hasn’t been bigger news and am wondering if it’s down to women being scared to complain. I know I am. We all know powerful people are being protected in our universities and what the consequences can be for complainants. What will it take of this to really take off? Has it slowed down? Looks like it to me.

I'm also watching this with interest. My university (where I'm both staff and student) is going hard on declaring that its got "zero tolerance" for bullying, that people can report accusations of bullying and sexual assault anonymously...which is all bullshit, because no way is the university going to sack professors who bring in millions of pounds in grants. Pretending they care about bullying, sexual harassment while crossing their fingers behind their back they can squash it before they get caught. They deserve whats coming to them.

Yes, it's not just harassment, its bullying and it's all of this in the context of a culture where broader toxicity is normalised and accepted as 'just how it is'.

Yep, my university is on that list too and is a power keg waiting to explode. Fear of exposure, bad publicity and legal action are driving recent platitudes. Not concern for victims.