I don’t think Manchester came out of that looking at all good. There were some extremely damning comments from the MPs on that committee.
I do also think the university were dissembling a lot in relation to the questions of whether Manchester had anything to do with funding this research. It was published in February. He’d been a school funded PhD student at Manchester since the previous September. Almost certainly, they were paying him for the time he spent on some aspects of preparing the initial submission, responding to any reviewer comments and making changes. He will have been using their resources to access academic literature etc. He most certainly was using his Manchester email account for his correspondence relating to it.
I do think they’d have been better just admitting that, while the research activities described in the paper were not in any way associated with Manchester and the funding he received from Manchester was for a slightly different research project, he clearly was working on publishing the paper during the period in which he was being funded by Manchester. For that reason they just can’t unequivocally say that they had nothing at all to do with funding it.
It does also seem highly unlikely that the student never mentioned this - directly relevant to how he understands and approaches his doctoral research - previous research and the paper he’s written about it to his supervisor. It would be really weird not to. If you’ve got a student starting a PhD that is pretty much a direct continuation of their masters research (and this clearly is in obvious ways), you would have discussed the research he’s already done at some point. How could you possibly have avoided doing so? Even if the research had been terrible, you’d want to get them to reflect on their experiences of researching the topic already so that they can design a good PhD project.
i totally understand why the university is as keen to find as much distance from the wanking autoethnography as they can. But it doesn’t help if they are a bit cagey about quite the extent to which it will have been part of the bit they paid for.