Scale of sexual abuse in UK universities likened to Savile and Catholic scandals
|
|
|
| | |
|
|
|
| |
Scale of sexual abuse in UK universities likened to Savile and Catholic sca...
By Sally Weale Stories of more than 100 women shared with Guardian expose
pattern of harassment which remains largely hidden | |
|
|
Without suggesting anyone on this list would be culpable for such abuse, some
may have a better idea of its likely scale and what is in place to hold those
culpable to account.
It is anecdotage but when I was editor of the college student magazine (mostly
scurrilous and humorous in intent), only one of the many 'jokes' was blanked
out by the persons who had final approval before it was published - a quip
about frequency probability and the number of times a certain academic would
appear in sexual harassment questionnaires. Can anything be read into this? Not
perhaps straightforwardly, especially as the joke was censorable in terms of
poor taste.
My own view is that it is hard to get the balance exactly right: but in
academic and legal institutions the balance of power and lack of proper
accountability can be 'shocking' (except no one with a grip is really 'shocked'
are they?).
In my time, in terms of academic courses themselves, there was a massive
imbalance of power and lack of accountability - and this perhaps sets the
institutional background within which sexual abuse occurs more often than it
would otherwise.
Since 'frequency probability' has been mentioned, consider this: my college
usually did well, even very well, in the 'Norrington table' - yet in my time it
had been something 10 to 15 years since anyone got a First in philosophy/PPE.
St. John's often got mostly 'Firsts' in this, year after year. (I read
'Jurisprudence', btw, a different 'School'.) These kinds of discrepancy were
not, I think, because no one of comparable intellectual ability and application
passed through my college in that time compared to those at St. John's - it was
down to the quality of the tutors vis-a-vis what Final Exams rewarded. It you
had a tutor with oddball views - see my posts on Pilcher v Rawlins - you were
at their mercy; whereas if you had tutors whose views dovetailed with what
Faculty respected as 'First Class', you had a winning ticket to a First.
JLS once relayed the story of how Strawson did not get a First, but JLS did not
afair delve into this aspect of it - the fact must surely be that, compared to
the average First given, Strawson clearly merited a First given his ability and
if he was viva'd the viva should have tipped it his way. More incredible (to
me) than Strawson's Missing First is the view taken by someone consulted on
Popper's 'The Open Society' that it was not fit for publication - arguably the
single most important work of political philosophy in the twentieth century
'not fit for publication' (because disrepectful of Plato)? Truly academia
contains more than its fair share of unbalanced, weirdos. Now we are hearing it
contains perhaps more than its fair share of sexual predators - and the
question, for everyone but particularly for those within those institutions, is
how far these predators are going unchecked by the very institutions that
provide the opportunities for their abuse.
DL
[A small indicative example to illustrate the lack of accountability of tutors
in regards to their students, most of whom have no sufficient experience of the
'world of work' etc. by which to see that their tutors would be retrained and
then sacked 'in the real world' if they couldn't raise their game. One of our
tutors mentioned, almost en passant, at the end of a course, that a vast amount
of complex and detailed material, set out at the beginning of the standard
text-book, was of historical interest only - well, thanks for that now, given
I'd spent days trying to grapple with this very difficult but, it turns out,
utterly irrelevant material. Would it not be much more intelligent to have
mentioned this at the beginning of the course? No one would have thought to
'call him out' on this. In any well-run organization, this kind of colossal
wasting of other's peoples time would be stamped on - but in Oxford (currently
the world's number ranked university) it was something you put up with, along
with dons who even feel asleep during their own tutorial. A sneery sense of
their own intellectual superiority - way out of keeping with the reality of
their mostly modest intellectual gifts - went hand in hand with this systemic
lack of competence in actually educating others.]