Prof Jo Phoenix vs The OU - Employment Tribunal Thread 5

[ickky]

Started on 2nd October at Watford Employment Tribunal (Radius House, 51 Clarendon Rd, Watford WD17 1HP 01923 281750)

You may attend in person or remote viewing has been quite limited but you can request log in details from

Email [email protected]

Header should read

URGENT CURRENT CASE - Public Access Request - J Phoenix - The Open University - 3322700/2021

Ask for access link and pin and please give your name and address in the email as they check when you connect to the tribunal.

The clerk will ask you (in a private remote room) to put your camera on to verify, this involves looking at you, but no ID is needed. You may turn off your camera after this pointless and unnecessary process.

Abbreviations

JP - Jo Phoenix, Claimant (C)
OU - The Open University, Respondent (R)
J - Regional Employment Judge Young
P - Panel or panel member
BC - Ben Cooper KC, Counsel for C
JM - Jane Mulcahy KC, Counsel for R

OU Departments & Networks:

HWSRA - Health & Wellbeing Strategic Research Area
FASS - Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
SPC - Dept of Social Policy & Criminology
KMi - Knowledge Media Institute
GCRN - Gender Critical Research Network

OU witnesses

PB - Dr Paraskevi Boukli, Former Senior Lecturer Criminology, Deputy Head SPC 2021-22
IF - Prof Ian Fribbance Dean of FASS
MW - Prof Marcia Wilson, Dean EDI, 2020-23
CM - Caragh Molloy, Group People Director 2019-23
LD - Dr Leigh Downes, Senior Lecturer in Criminology (in SPC), Academic Lead for EDI FASS 2019-21
PK - Peter Keogh, Professor Health & Society, Member RSSH
DD - Dr Deborah Drake, Senior Lecturer Criminology, Head of SPC 2018-21
CT - Catherine Tomlinson, Senior Student Advisor
LW - Louise Westmarland, Prof of Criminology, Co-Deputy Head SPC, 2018-21, Current Head SPC
JD - John Domingue, Prof of Computing Science, Director KMi, 2015-22
CW - Dr Christopher Williams, Senior Lecturer History
SD - Shaun Daley, Head OU’s Resourcing Hub. Head Strategic Resources, Co-Chair OU’s LGBT+ Staff Network
HBC - Helen Bowes-Catton, Lecturer Social Research Methods
NS - Nicola Snarey, Assoc Lecturer Eng Language
NatS - Natalie Starkey, Outreach & Public Engagement Officer Sch Physical Sciences, 2019-22
CT - Cath Tomlinson, Senior Student Advisor
SJ - Samantha Jacobson, Employee Relations Case Manager
RH - Richard Holliman, Prof Engaged Research, Head School Environment, Earth & Ecosystem Sciences, 2019-22. Member of Investigation Panel investigating the C’s grievance

Witness for JP:

SE - Sarah Earle, Professor Modern History Uni of Oxford, Founding member GCRN

Tribunal Tweets - https://twitter.com/tribunaltweets

TT coverage so far - tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/professor-jo-phoenix-v-the-open-university

Prof Jo Phoenix Witness Statement (scroll to bottom of page and download)

https://jophoenix.substack.com/p/phoenix-v-open-university?sd=pf

Thread 1 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4905118-jo-phoenix-vs-the-ou-employment-tribunal-2nd-october-whispers-ben-cooper?page=1

Thread 2 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4913946-prof-jo-phoenix-vs-the-ou-employment-tribunal-thread-2?page=1

Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4917480-prof-jo-phoenix-vs-the-ou-employment-tribunal-thread-3

Thread 4 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4918479-prof-jo-phoenix-vs-the-ou-employment-tribunal-thread-4

Ive been busy today so need to catch up fully, but my goodness what a gift of guano the trio of witnesses for today have been. No wonder Ben has argued for his two lost days back. I can’t wait for next week’s nutcases.

@LarkLane let Jo know we all will be raising a glass of something suitably strong in her honour tonight and she should join us.

As a general point - do the OU witnesses understand they’re the ones on trial, not Jo? They seem…confused.

Did Jo mention in her testimony the massive lack of concern about GC students and staff? I missed most of it. Sounded harrowing from TT.

i sometimes wish i were still an OU student. Maybe I'll do that masters after all...

Do we think the extra 5k is purely women (and some men) around the country thinking 'bloody hell, BC and JP REALLY need a drink or 10'......

I hope BC gets some rest over the weekend.

To be fair I work at a university and it is great! Though we are very small, and there is probably less of this nonsense than you get in some places.

I am personally in awe of Jo's resilience - even more so after listening to the word salad totalitarians today (and others previously).

And I do feel a bit bad about judging IK harshly. On the one hand yes, he enabled these overgrown toddlers to be horrible academic bullies and to try and exclude research on reality from a University, but at the same time the Orwellian levels of doublethink must be so exhausting to deal with on a daily basis. I can imagine the urge to do literally anything to make it stop.

Thank you all for commentary and links.
I am gobsmacked.

Is it like this from students and staff in Further/Higher Education Colleges or other Adult Education provision?

Or is there a difference in how you view the world when maybe you didn't get a good education first time around and you were on your arse as a kid and teenager? Or you are teaching there to help ordinary working people learn?

Genuinely interested to hear views.

Thank you Mmmnotsure for your full notes, and your brilliant asides which have made me laugh. My typing is glacial compared to yours!

Goodness, anyone who's ever read a picture book aloud to a child knows that.

It's about as obvious as a man's a man.

Well I just followed a bit of it and honestly find the anti-women sentiment from the OU genuinely shocking. It's really hard to come face-to-face with such narrow minded and single view stances, especially when I naively thought that universities would be places where rounded thought was encouraged. It's also been hard to come face-to-face with the unreflective way those in positions of power in these institutions use their power. I think I had thought that women's rights had, in the whole, moved forward in the past 30 years but I am feeling a little rocked to my core right now. Ben, Jo, I can't think you both enough for what you're doing here. Jo, I really am holding you in my thoughts. You have been treated terribly and you are an incredibly brave woman.

@pronounsbundlebundle I reckon the Judge has put a fiver in after today's hearing.

And again thank you for the new thread, this week in Tribunal has been ermmm instructive, hasn't it!

I've only read today's threads and what a roller coaster ride. Thank you for all the witticisms and funny comments that have had me laughing out loud, which I feel a bit mean about because it's Jo P's life and everything .... but some of it! My God, those people. I bet ordinary people like bin men and shop workers are so much better on the witness stand than this self-regarding, puffed up lot.

I was put in mind of an episode during Allison Bailiey's tribunal when the barrister (I'm almost sure it was Ben Cooper) had to say to a fellow barrister who was the witness 'you know how this works: I ask the questions and you answer them' when the pompous oaf was trying to ask questions himself. They just can't help themselves, can they?

I've also donated at a few multiples of the cinema ticket I paid for yesterday. I fell asleep during the film and there's no chance at all I'd have fallen asleep during this afternoon's performance from Watford.

Thank you all.

Hi I'm not in touch with Jo directly, we've never met! I got a wee nod from her unexpectedly, none more shocked than I! She'll see your good wishes herself.

I just know that she is looking in, and thanks you all here.🙂

TT last commentary today. I bet their poor fingers are blistered after PK.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1712843585773588529.html

It's about as obvious as a man's a man.

Do we need to start a countdown on how much longer Burns will remain on the Reading List of What's Acceptable?

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mans-man-0/

Is there an annual prize for when academics state the bleeding obvious? I think we might have a contender.

Not so glacial. We often appeared at the same time!

Better lots of repeats than missing stuff though.

This is an interesting question. I'm not sure about adult education specifically, I would have thought that people who had a bit of life experience outside of academia would be better insulated to this stuff, but who knows.
Before this and other tribunals, I would have said it was mostly the students pushing this - and excused their ignorance because of their immaturity and social contagion. But it seems there are too many professors who should really know better enmeshed in this stuff.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a book about how and why this type of thinking is a hotbed in college campuses generally in the US over the last 10 years or so in 'The Coddling of the American Mind', but they focused more on the students, and how the staff were basically scared to push back because they are treated more as customers than anything else.

Here's a blurb about the book - I think there is some relevance, but obviously it doesn't explain everything.

The book argues that parents and schools, in an overabundance of caution, have taught children to fear and reject ideas that upset them. As a result, this learned fear explains the recent spate of college students protesting against professors and speakers whose ideas students consider offensive.

Haidt, a social psychologist, and Lukianoff, a free-speech campaigner, believe that modern children have been inoculated with three Great Untruths: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “Always trust your feelings,” and “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

These three ideas are based on cognitive distortions—overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, black-and-white thinking, and others—that are common among people who suffer from depression and anxiety. This may explain why today’s students display historically high levels of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide.

Surely the OU lawyers must have called so many batshit academics as witnesses to build sympathy for management? Ie present management as trying to find their way through a difficult climate of all these extreme people kicking off and making demands etc. The legal strategy will be to protect the institution, not these individual academics who are quite happy to come into court and talk in detail about the reasons they want to discriminate against GC researchers while thinking they are on the side of the angels.

Quite how that witness believes it's possible to separate GC from 'trans exclusion' baffles me. By 'trans exclusion' she means lesbians not wanting to do male people. Women being entitled to single sex prisons and rape services.

The whole point is that women need to be able to state and group themselves on sex, separately from male people regardless of the male person's identity choices. And say so, clearly, because otherwise women's needs and inclusion yada yada are destroyed. And this is wrong.

But her only perception is 'you said no to a man'. I really struggle that an academic can be this limited .

How are we to ever row back from this insanity?

The whole thing has to go, doesn't it?

Once people just stop going to university because they don't want to pay to be indoctrinated, then it might have a hope of recovery. But it is so ingrained, and they just cannot see that other people are entitled to the view that humans have two sexes, and that's how we all got here.

And everyone wants a degree because it gets them a job...supposedly.

Another thing I was thinking recently in relation to all this was the idea that a stupid idea in the hands of a stupid person is not necessarily going to do much harm, but a stupid idea in the hands of a smart person could do a lot more damage.

Not that any of these professors have shown themselves to be very smart people in this instance, but they likely see themselves as part of the intelligentsia and therefore any idea that they support must be the right one.

It seems they've all gone along with a stupid idea and taken it to it's limits. But of course they are the intelligent ones, so they will not admit they were mistaken. Plus they are buoyed by the narrative that they are the good people protecting a vulnerable minority. Reality be damned.

Still catching up on last jaw-dropping thread.
to all!