Decisions by UK universities to place trigger warnings on Oliver Twist and Harry Potter have drawn the ire of a Conservative MP. The Times ran two stories last week on the use of content warnings for relatively tame tomes, issued by staff at the University of Chester and Royal Holloway, University of London. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said it was “very sad” and claimed universities were undermining students’ resilience by offering “ridiculous trigger warnings” for blockbuster children’s books like Harry Potter – which apparently could lead to “difficult conversations about gender, race, sexuality, class, and identity” – as well as The Hunger Games and Northern Lights. Chester responded by saying its warning was generic. Defending its warning for Oliver Twist, a source of “potentially sensitive topics” such as “child abuse, domestic violence and racial prejudice”, Royal Holloway cited its “responsibility to support the mental health and well-being of our students”.
January was a good month for academics facing employment tribunals. In recent weeks, two scholars won cases for unfair dismissal from their universities. A tribunal sided with University of Exeter physicist Annette Plaut, who was sacked from her post, supposedly for being “female and loud” – a product of her European Jewish background, she told The Guardian. She was awarded just under £101,000. Dr Plaut said: “I have a naturally loud voice. As such I have no ability to sense when I am speaking loudly.” Meanwhile, a tribunal also found in favour of a professor at Northumbria University who had been accused of modern-day slavery, awarding her roughly £15,000. Two students claimed that Shuang Cang made them do her household chores – and that they worried they wouldn’t get their PhDs unless they complied, the BBC reported. But an employment judge ruled that he could not be sure that the allegations – which never went to court – were true, and said there were serious concerns about the students’ evidence.
Freedom-loving Texans can rejoice at the outcome of a recent case involving Collin College, which has been forced to pay $70,000 (£52,000) to a professor who was fired after criticising Donald Trump’s vice-president on Twitter. Lora Burnett tweeted that a moderator in a vice-presidential debate should “talk over Mike Pence until he shuts his little demon mouth up” and was subsequently fired in February 2021. The college agreed to the payout to end a First Amendment lawsuit filed with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Although college leaders have not admitted fault as part of the settlement, Professor Burnett’s lawyer, Greg Greubel, said it was “a real victory for her, both morally and financially”.
For a country that claims to value its international students, Japan has a government that seems to do its utmost to show its utter ambivalence. It’s as though Tokyo is playing from the dating-game rulebook that says you should insult your date to make her fall deeper in love with you, and fresh insults just keep coming to students who have been waiting to get into Japan for nearly two years since the country shut its borders. This month, the country cracks the door open to let in 87 overseas learners – just enough to rub a little more salt in the wound for the other 147,000 of them waiting to get in. But it’s merely a matter of time before some of them give up to pursue studies in another country, one that will love them back. “We will see what happens,” one student said. “Nonetheless, I am preparing for alternative options if in spring nothing has moved.”
While the England’s higher education regulator aims to have the back of students, its human resources department may have inadvertently done a great service to university staff. A freedom of information request has revealed that by guaranteeing the pensions of four members of the Universities Superannuation Scheme when they joined the Office for Students, the Department for Education has hypothetically underwritten the entire scheme. John Ralfe, the pensions consultant who made the request, told The Times that the guarantee was “excellent news” for the USS’ 475,000 members, but “not such good news for taxpayers”. A government spokesperson told the newspaper that this “hypothetical scenario...would require every UK university and other contributing employer in our world-leading universities sector to go bust. This is not something the government expects or intends to let happen.” Ten more days of strike action over proposed cuts to USS pensions are set to get under way on 14 February.