Professor John Robertson OBA, former Faculty Research Ethics Chair UWS

Recent headlines casting doubt on the competence and probity of senior staff across Scotland’s universities, and notably the current UWS principal reminds me sadly of my own attempt, nearly ten years ago, to publicly expose malpractice there, which no public body, no local MP, no government minister and no media oultet would touch.

Here it is. Read and weep:

Public Interest Disclosure Policy & Procedure (Whistleblowing)

To: Chair of Court

Discloser: Professor John Robertson, School of Media, Culture and Society

Date: 18^th November 2015

Key aspects of complaint:

Academic or professional malpractice

Improper conduct or unethical behaviour 

Important: I request a written response to this complaint. I will not take phone calls or face-to-face approaches. Any attempt at the latter, I will record as attempts to bully.

Introduction:

Though I am concerned with the overall direction of UWS and HE in Scotland, generally with regard to the adoption of already outdated, expansionist, neo-liberal economic strategy in the context of a registered charity (and in a country completely dominated by social democratic politics), madcap internationalisation, rushed restructuring and the impoverishment of support staff, this disclosure concerns only UWS’s internationalisation strategy. I may return to the others separately in the future.

I am currently absent on medical grounds with full retirement from 31^st January 2016. I have, in 2014 and in early 2015, attempted to criticise the UWS internationalisation strategy via evidence relating to the School of Media and Culture and Society’s involvement. My experience at that time was quite negative and disappointing. My initial protest, as Chair of the MCS Ethics Committee, regarding our proposed association with the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in Berlin was intended entirely to help prevent damage to the University’s reputation and budget. None of the international developments listed below went through the University Ethics Committee but were dealt with otherwise. I understand the Berlin project is live. If media get wind of it, expect ‘pythonesque’ ridicule. My anxiety and reluctance to write for the planned project with ICD soon led to my peer, Professor McPherson (on the ICD Faculty), attempting to apply pressure invoking the power of Court and Senate. This was a form of bullying and inappropriate behaviour. The correct line for a peer wishing your involvement is to approach your line manager. When I asked my line manager, Professor Pyper, to act on my behalf, he immediately sided with Professor McPherson, despite having seen the 4 pages of evidence I had quickly gathered to explain my anxiety about ICD (more of this later). When I rashly accused him of ‘pandering to vanity projects’, he consulted my then Dean, deeply offended by ‘pandering’ I think, about formally reprimanding me for this language. Professor McPherson, ‘hurt’, and their reputation apparently damaged, was apparently made ill by my actions. My Current Dean, Carson, does not agree with my views and the Berlin Campus developments go ahead. I think my treatment, resulting from a well-intentioned attempt to ‘whistle-blow’ has been a form of bullying.  A long-term enthusiast for the work of UWS in Scotland, this along with health deterioration has led me to retire earlier than intended. Though UWS appears in its rhetoric to invite ‘whistle-blowing’, you can be sure I would not be making this complaint were I not retiring imminently. Many colleagues, I know, shares my concerns but are frankly afraid to voice them. I don’t blame them. Colleagues have been warned not to think of asking me back to teach a few specialist classes for them or to supervise current PhD students. I am in line, though, for the new Scottish ‘Naemeritus Professorship’.

The University of the West of Scotland has a strategy for Internationalisation designed to significantly increase fee-income from overseas/non EU students. In attempting to implement this strategy, senior UWS staff may have misused public funds derived almost entirely from Scottish undergraduate fee income, in under-researched and badly-planned projects requiring significant transfer of resources from core activities in teaching which are currently subject to very damning and published evaluative critique from students.

UWS has, since summer 2014, had a VP, 5 Associate Deans and numerous support staff for internationalisation at an annual cost of at least £1 million not counting travel in groups to all parts globally. We have a tiny population of non-EU foreign students. In 2013/2014, UWS had 180 non-EU students (hesa, 2014, table 3) while the University of Glasgow had 6965 (hesa, 2014, table F). I don’t know what our figures are for 2015/2016 but they’d have to be good to meet the cost of investment or even a fraction of it. However, the clear signals in internal emails including those reducing spending suggests we have not been remotely successful. Staff morale, already low from botched restructuring, is now at rock bottom as they are punished for the failure to recruit both non-EU international students and in some cases, home students despite responsibility for these failures lying with International Strategy leaders and managers and with senior staff responsible for the rushed restructuring in 2015 which impeded the recruitment process with a flurry of ill-informed hasty decision-making and reversals about course continuity.

This complaint is structured around three issues:

1. Lack of adequate historical and background research or the neglect of such in making high-cost decisions
2. Inappropriate use of public funds, in under-scrutinised travel by staff, sometimes in too-large groups, without real evidence of likely income, in particular locations.
3. Inappropriate partnerships, for a Scottish HEI, ancient or modern.

Lack of adequate historical and background research or the neglect of such in making high-cost decisions

The benefits of internationalisation, especially for newer entrant to the scene like UWS, are mostly mythical. Knight (2011: 14) writes that these myths are:

• Foreign students as internationalization agents: “more foreign students on campus will produce more internationalized institutional culture and curriculum”.

• International reputation as a proxy for quality: “the more international a university is (…) the better its reputation”.

• International institutional agreements: “the greater number of international agreements or network memberships a university has the more prestigious and attractive it is”.

• International accreditation: “the more international accreditation stars an institution has, the more internationalized it is and ergo the better it is”.

• Global branding: “an international marketing scheme is the equivalent of an internationalization plan”.

Rather more prosaic than the above warnings is the clear evidence that overseas demand for Higher Education courses in the UK is in year-on-year decline (hesa, 2014, UniversitiesUK, 2014; hefce, 2015). This follows on from periods of growth for all the English-language education systems. Many universities especially in Australasia, North America and Southern England, did make substantial amounts in the ‘bull’ phase of this market. There is now a glut of providers fighting over a reducing supply. The recently exposed failures of Glasgow Caledonian University in New York and the University of South Wales in London are typical of this. The established, older, high-status universities will survive, the later entrants will not. There is little point in UWS arriving as the market turns to ‘bear’, with a fine little bullock under its arms. When markets shrink or become over-competitive, late entrants should get out quick and go back to doing as well as they can in core reliable business. Get a good reputation back home and you might be ready to expand overseas when real opportunities arrive.

UWS along with other new universities struggles to recruit overseas students. The reason is our low status in league tables. In the 2016 Guardian University League Table (all course average), UWS came 115^th out of 119. Abertay University was 93^rd and GCU was 91^st. In the Complete University Guide League-tables, on student satisfaction, UWS was 118^th out of 126 with Abertay at 95^th, Napier at 92^nd and GCU at 83^rd. We do not appear at all in the Times Higher table of 800 world universities (THE, 2016).

There is no published evidence that international activity or profile plays any part in home student satisfaction. Here are the most important and well-known causes of low student satisfaction:

• Quality of teaching – e.g. concepts not explained
• Poor preparation of teaching, poor commitment.
• Slow, or no feedback
• Lack of communication/connection between lecturer and student              (Race,  2010: 1)

It’s simple:

• Increase quantity, quality and of course expenditure on staff. UWS staffs courses at around a minimum 25:1 while Secondary state schools for 12-18 year-olds operate nearer to an average of 10:1.These high SSRs allow the creation of parasitic layers of managers to sit on the backs of teaching and support staff.
• Use the above investment to reduce class sizes and bring back small follow-up seminars/tutorials.
• Meet the above costs, legitimated anyway by the funding mechanism, by reducing senior salaries, reducing the number of senior staff especially managers and reducing waste of resources on vanity projects such as overseas campuses.

Get UWS up the league tables and it then might be worth investing some resource in trying to attract more overseas students.

Inappropriate use of public funds, in under-scrutinised travel by staff, sometimes in too-large groups, without real evidence of likely income, in particular locations. Inappropriate partnerships,  for a Scottish HEA,  ancient or modern.

These two accusations are overlapping. I suggest UWS invites an independent agency to investigate inappropriate expenditure on undue travel by senior and other staff to potential partners of a clear unsuitability, easily exposed without travel and, quickly puts a stop to the further waste of public funds. I am not party to all such activity. I draw attention to those I am familiar with. I doubt, UWS is unique. See Glasgow Caledonian’s ‘White Elephant Campus’ in New York.

The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Berlin

UWS has approved a joint-Masters degree with ICD, either ignorant of or, worse, in full knowledge of the ICD’s dubious nature. For some time, UWS VP Kaye and Professor McPherson featured on the banner for the ICD website. McPherson remains on the ‘faculty and the website. The ICD in Berlin has good accommodation on a fine strasse in Berlin. There ends the appeal. The ICD:

1. is not a higher education institution of any stature or credibility;
2. is almost certainly a shell organisation funded anonymously;
3. is denied a Wikipedia presence due to 1 and 2 above;
4. is likely part of the NATO/US anti-Russia propaganda drive in Eastern Europe;
5. has no other high-status university connections;
6. threatens critics in a manner reminiscent of the Church of Scientology;
7. is an extremely bad intern-employer.

Evidence of the above is easily found.

1. Stature or Credibility:  ICD, headed by father and son biblical scholars from the US ‘Midwest’ has a ‘shell-like’ structure with virtually all links to seemingly external partners simply returning to ICD urls. The membership overview lists no actual members and student numbers taking programmes are not published. Searching for partners finds only a list of ICD-hosted events. Critically, the ICD has no partnerships with universities in Berlin or anywhere in Germany. The ICD has partnerships after 16 years with only two Romanian universities desperate for affiliation , one Italian and a German hochschule (FE college). A search for research and publications finds no sign of the former. There is no evidence of any credible research activity in either these institutions. Search in Google for ‘Institute for Cultural Diplomacy’ and find only:
   1. Google:  First 30 all by ICD itself or Wiki critics
   1. Daily Telegraph: 0
   1. Herald: 0
   1. Guardian: only 1 –
      Tessa Jowell MP: Electoral history and profile | Politics | The Guardian

May 2014, received from Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Ku’damm Karree, Kurfürstendamm 207-208, Berlin D-10719, payment of £1,214, plus flights, ..

The ICD uses its volunteer interns, mostly young women from religious colleges, as clerical workers attempting to make contact with academics throughout the world with a view to enhancing ICD’s reputation through association with universities. Despites thousands of contact attempts, ICD has next to no credible partners. I have spoken to colleagues in other universities who have been approached by ICD and who have binned the contacts as you would any other spam. They don’t approach critical old sociologists like me. If someone takes the bait, they are invited across to Berlin and pampered. The interns cheer their arrival and the charismatic, pony-tailed ‘leader’ seduces them with praise. Few are taken in by them but some inevitably are. Unfortunately for UWS, more than one member of our staff clearly has fallen for this.

THE ICD is a largely hollow self-referential entity not appropriate for partnership by UWS or any credible university.

• Funding: The ICD is apparently very well-funded yet has no obvious income-generation.
• Conflict with Wikipedia over actual notability of the ICD. ICD staff attempt to turn Wiki entry into advertising. Wikipedia delete ICD in 2013. Still deleted in 2015. Extracts:
  • The result was delete. Most of the editors commenting below indicated that the sourcing was not sufficient to establish notability, and even after trying to fix the problems with the article, didn’t feel they had succeeded.
  • Past claims to links with high level groups such as US Department of State, the British Council and the European Union have all proved invalid
  • There has been and remains an excessive level of self-referencing upon claims which come from the organisation. The most recent edits with additions add to the promotional nature. There has also been a habit of presenting supposed upcoming events on the page – and then the events have no source as ever having occurred, leaving the page in a most misleading form.
  • I do not agree that there are PLENTY of sources: I couldn’t find a single entry on Google Books that does more than mention the ICD once, in passing. At least 80 per cent of news references read like press releases; then there are a few short interviews. I haven’t found any in-depth articles from serious political media. What is demonstrated by these references is that they exist and organize talks and receptions.
  • Something feels weird about all this to me. How is it possible that they’ve been involved with all these high profile people without attaining some degree of notability? Why do we have to work so hard to find even a passing reference to it? It makes me wonder if there isn’t some elaborate con going on here that I just haven’t caught on to. (For example, Perhaps ICD is managing to attach its name to conferences it’s not really responsible for?) In any case, I guess it doesn’t matter why there are no third party sources that establish notability, just that there aren’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Institute_for_Cultural_Diplomacy

The full text at the above url link is well-worth reading. I cannot believe UWS would consider links with this patently dodgy outfit. To be denied a Wikipedia presence is massively damning for any organisation and raises real concerns about their nature. See below.

• NATO/US propaganda: The dark side of cultural diplomacy is its widely known value as a form of soft power. Berlin has, for decades, been at the centre of such activity aimed at the former Soviet Union and now Russia. This will explain the ownership of. good accommodation.
• University Connections: Critically, the ICD has no partnerships with universities in Berlin or anywhere in Germany. The ICD has partnerships after 16 years with only two Romanian universities desperate for affiliation , one Italian and a German hochschule (FE college). We’re not on the website yet though Professor McPherson is apparently on Faculty.
• ICD threatens critics: When criticised in any way , ICD threatens legal action as with Wikipedia in: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=institute+for+cultural+diplomacy

UWS plans an online Masters programme with ICD. A similar venture in in Italy had a comment website on the programme but it was threatened with legal action by ICD’s CE and taken down. Here is one review: ‘RUN AWAY!’ 

• Feedback from interns (7):
  • Terrible experience as far as the work goes.
  • The former politicians and academics who support their conferences and the organisation itself need to be made aware of what really happens in the ICD offices
  • I no longer put the ICD on my CV since it raises eyebrows among those who work in the NGO sector. 6 Months wasted! Not a penny earned.
  • Interns spend 80% of their time collecting email addresses and spamming speakers or using fake LinkedIn profiles to spam groups.
  • This organisation defines the word “dodgy”. It presents itself as a high level academic-non profit organisation. The sad truth is this is a very cunning legal front for something much darker.
  • This organisation and the people behind it are nothing less then evil.
  • We were inviting guests to phoney conferences that were not really happening. 
  • I am sure that the ICD is not legal or legitimate. 
  • The founder MD is a fast talking American who really only talks about himself and has no credibility. He seems to have got together a disparate (desperate?) bunch of third rate speakers who are re-cycling old papers that have precious little to do with cultural diplomacy.
  • Most of the other delegates were pretty angry and feel that they have been had by this curious organisation. We want to know who funds them and how they have achieved NGO status.

Away We Go

and

• I’m just about to graduate from a London university and have been offered an internship in Berlin for the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. This is for 3 months and there is no money, not even expenses covered. 
  • Do not go and work at the ICD! I spent a horrific week there in 2009

http://internsanonymous.co.uk/claim/

and

m   There seems to be almost nothing about them on the web. The main hits are about complaints on their spam. They appear to organize conferences and then randomly invite speakers who may or may not have a relation to the subject at hand.  More to the point, they don’t seem to be accredited by any degree sanctioning agency. So you will rely on the affiliate institute for that.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1602834-icd.html

Several senior staff have visited the ‘Berlin Campus’.  Surely alarm bells rang. This is potentially a major embarrassment as well as a gross waste of limited public funds.

UWS London Campus

From the Independent Newspaper on the 28^th July 2015:

‘A university in London has been forced to close its doors after just one year – because no students signed up to study for courses. The University of South Wales (USW) opened-up its London centre in the heart of the city’s Docklands last year at a cost of £300,000, promising to deliver a range of undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional courses in the fields of law and financial services, and information security. Now, though, having recruited four staff members, the institution has had to close after failing to spark any interest, shipping its resources back to South Wales.’

UWS unlike USW still has plans for London. The Herald Newspaper on 30^th September 2015 reported:

Scottish university’s London campus is “vanity project”

A SCOTTISH university has been accused of embarking on “vanity projects” just weeks before it opens a new campus in London. The attack by lecturers’ leaders follows moves by the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) to open a centre in the London Borough of Southwark, to the south of the Thames. The university is also considering a campus in the United Arab Emirates. The new London campus has been planned to capitalise on the lucrative market in international students, who pay thousands of pounds for courses in the UK. The first courses available will be in business and nursing. The move has provoked particular anger because it comes just weeks after it emerged the university has drawn up proposals to relocate its campus in Hamilton to a motorway business park 12 miles east of Glasgow. Mary Senior, UCU Scotland official, said: “It is absurd that the university is opening a new campus in London at the same time as they are considering moving out of Hamilton. London is well served with its own institutions that offer first class opportunities to students studying there. “The university should be concentrating on fulfilling its responsibilities to the population of the west of Scotland, including the people of Hamilton, rather than embarking on the building of vanity projects hundreds of miles away.”

Note here, as with USW, the suggestion of neglect of home students to invest in non-Scottish projects of uncertain provenance.

That a UWS did not pick up the obvious advice from a USW regarding operating in London, a city with a few universities of its own, is stunning. I did send the full USW article around my School in July only to be advised by my Dean that it was ‘unhelpful’. It may turn out to have been regrettably very helpful in things go pear-shaped for UWS London.

The Harris Institute, Canada

The Harris Institute is a privately owned, one-man business which teaches, very well it seems, practical music-related skills. It has no real academic profile, no partners in Canadian Higher Education but one international partner: UWS. On the website, they proudly announce:

We began by compressing the content of a typical 3-year college program into the first 12-month diploma programs. There are now 62 leaders teaching 60 courses in each of our one-year programs and, due to a first-of-its-kind partnership with the University of the West of Scotland, students have the option of earning an accelerated diploma, degree and Master’s Degree in 32 months with scholarships.

Leaving aside the alarm bells ringing in the ears of any Scottish higher education practitioner reading the above, there is little sign of students or of income from this venture now running back 10 years or so despite annual trips to Toronto by groups of staff, including  senior staff members and administrators. On  a recent trip at least six members of staff made the mistake of tweeting their pleasure at the high life UWS (the Scottish taxpayer) was paying for.

Conclusion: This is an extremely serious problem, wasting public funds wilfully and in a time of imposed austerity for everyone else. I can only write with some confidence of the Berlin, London and Toronto sites but I know from speaking to colleagues in other schools the waste does not end there. I trust University Court will move quickly to mend the damage before any of this is exposed as happened recently with Glasgow Caledonian’s New York campus.

Yours for UWS,

John Robertson

Professor John Robertson

University of the West of Scotland is a Registered Scottish Charity. Charity number SC002520

References:

Knight, Jane (2008). Higher Education in Turmoil. The Changing World of Internationalization. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

Race, P, (2010) INCREASING STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION, Leeds MU, at: https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/AcademicStudentAffairs/CentreforEducationalDevelopment/FilestoreDONOTDELETE/Filetoupload,218674,en.pdf

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2015/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25

http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/highereducation/Documents/2014/InternationalStudentsInHigherEducation.pdf

https://www.hesa.ac.uk/sfr210