The week in higher education – 14 March 2024

Anyone who’s ever had an essay deadline will probably recall the desire to do absolutely anything except writing said essay – and for some University of Surrey students, that appears to include whiling away an hour in the shower. Ian Walker, professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University, recently conducted a study into students’ showering habits in an effort to inform water efficiency practices. Sensors were placed in almost 300 showers around the Surrey campus, covertly tracking the length of more than 86,000 shower sessions across 39 weeks. Sharing the results on social media, Professor Walker said the average shower lasted 6.7 minutes – less than the UK average of 10.8 minutes. But a few outliers threatened to skew the results. “We excluded any showers over one hour, but believe me, they happened,” Professor Walker wrote.

Civil servants and lawyers worked until minutes before midnight to vet a letter from science secretary Michelle Donelan that would ultimately trigger a libel suit and a taxpayer-footed bill of £15,000, The Times reported. In the letter to UK Research and Innovation, which Ms Donelan posted on social media, she accused Heriot-Watt University professor Kate Sang of expressing support for Hamas; last week, she acknowledged that she had misunderstood the posts prompting her accusation and agreed to pay Professor Sang damages and costs. Internal emails indicate that staff at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology spent the evening of 27 October amending Ms Donelan’s letter and seeking legal advice; the letter was ultimately cleared at 11.58pm. “Why was this letter apparently rushed out of the door in what looks like a last-minute scramble? And did any checks that took place identify potential risks posed by Donelan’s letter, before taxpayers were left on the hook for the legal costs?” asked Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper.

A post-hockey tournament drinking session reportedly took a dangerous turn when a student from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, dressed as a traffic cone, launched a chair from a Wetherspoons balcony, striking two students below and hospitalising one. The incident occurred at Oxford’s Four Candles pub after a day of competition between Oxford and University of Cambridge teams, usually known as the “BDoTY” (best day of the year) for the student hockey players. The celebrations went downhill, however, after a group of Oxford students allegedly commented that throwing the chair would make “great chat”. One Oxford player needed stitches after the incident, while a Cambridge athlete “suffered minor injuries to her face”, Cambridge student newspaper Varsity reported. Oxford University Hockey Club has suspended a player amid an ongoing internal investigation.

A Conservative peer has paid substantial damages after falsely accusing a University of Oxford student of displaying “disgusting antisemitic symbols” while appearing on University Challenge. Baroness Foster of Oxton published a retraction and an apology to Melika Gorgianeh, a PhD candidate in astrophysics at Christ Church, Oxford after accusing her of wearing the colours of the Palestinian flag while displaying the team’s mascot, an octopus, as an antisemitic statement in the wake of Hamas’ 7 October attacks in Israel. In fact, Ms Gorgianeh’s jacket was blue, orange, pink and green, while the episode, which aired in November, was filmed in March. After a libel and harassment claim, Baroness Foster accepted that her allegations were “completely false and unfounded”. “I was a student appearing on my favourite TV quiz show,” Ms Gorgianeh said. “All of a sudden, lies told about me, and only me, led to me receiving death threats and to my mental health deteriorating.”

Liberty University, the evangelical Christian Virginia institution known for its outsized role in conservative politics as well as the sex scandal that ousted former president Jerry Falwell Jr, has been fined a record sum by the US Department of Education for repeatedly failing to inform its community of cases of sexual violence and other safety concerns. The university must pay $14 million (£11 million) for violating the Clery Act, a 1990 law implemented after the rape and murder of a student that requires colleges to disclose campus crime data. The sum is more than triple the previous high of $4.5 million, levied against Michigan State University for failings concerning the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal. Liberty’s Clery violations are “wide-ranging,” said Richard Cordray, chief operating officer at the US Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid – but the university, while acknowledging “numerous deficiencies”, said it has “repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the department”.