Skorupski's Law

The Principal's silence on the Corner/Esler report

On 17 December 2001 I e-mailed Dr Brian Lang, the Principal of the University of St Andrews, with reference to a number of issues relating to the Corner/Esler report. The e-mail was copied to the Acting Director of Personnel Services. The Principal refused to respond to any of my questions in spite of the fact that some of these raised serious issues which clearly might result in legal proceedings. The part of my e-mail to the Principal detailing the issues of concern reads as follows:

• no individual is held responsible for any particular malpractice

• individuals who have been blameless have been tarred with the same brush as those whose behaviour has been reprehensible

• the impression has been given that standing up to intimidation, lying, defamation, and other malpractice is as objectionable as the original malpractice itself

• people in management positions who have contributed to the problems of the Department of Social Anthropology have escaped any censure

• the report was delivered to the Social Anthropology academic staff at a meeting held with the Secretary and Provost on 28 November — i.e. exactly two months after it was completed with no opportunity to read it before the meeting; this inevitably curtailed any considered response which might have been given at that meeting.

• in the interim three of us (Drs Riches and Dilley, and myself) had a meeting on 2 November with Dr Clark and yourself, also to discuss the Corner/Esler report. One of my colleagues found the conduct of that meeting offensive and he has raised the matter with the AUT. I also found the meeting objectionable for the same reasons: we had not seen the report to which you were referring; your general admonishment made no attempt to distinguish those who normally do their job professionally from those who do not; and you suddenly curtailed all discussion shortly after I had begun speaking in order to prevent me from bringing to your attention the defamatory behaviour of certain people. To prevent a lecturer from speaking in this way, not least when the Chairman of the Department had just called on us to make our views plain to you, strikes me as a denial of one of the most basic rights of an employee. All in all, my colleagues and I concluded that the conduct of this meeting was considerably more intimidating than productive.

• the report refers to 'matters documented and on file in the event that ... further action is taken against a member or members of the unit'. This seems to contradict a reply made by the Secretary to Dr Dilley during the meeting on 28 November to the effect that there was no other record apart from the notes he had jotted down while interviewing different members of staff and that these notes would be indecipherable to others. This should be clarified. Perhaps Personnel could also clarify whether members of staff have a right to see any notes held on file which could be used against them in any future disciplinary action.

• A number of statements in the Corner/Esler report are tendentious, or require expansion in order to be transparent or to be justified... [these were then listed]

By any yardstick, this was quite a catalogue of very serious objections to the Corner/Esler report and the manner of its delivery to Social Anthropology staff. I received a one-line acknowledgement from the Principal which, then, obviously contained no attempt to address any of the issues I had raised. Had he felt it was beneath him to respond to my comments, he ought, under the normal expectations of my contract, to have nominated someone else to do this on his behalf. This did not happen. Failure by the University to reply to such serious objections is, of course, a breach of normal procedure. I argued to the employment tribunal that it was a breach of contract. This was the third time in six weeks or so that the Principal had, in a sense, denied my voice.

Since I could get no answer from the Principal, on 24 January 2002 I e-mailed the Acting Director of Personnel Services directly asking her for clarification about the “persuasive evidence... documented and on file”. She sent back a very surprising reply: the Secretary to the University, Mr David Corner, who had jointly run the investigation and had co-authored the report which was sent to the Principal, had decided that the only document that would be retained from the investigation was the one page report. Put differently, Mr Corner had apparently destroyed all of the allegedly persuasive evidence of pathological behaviour that he had uncovered.

Under cross-examination in the Employment Tribunal Mr Corner stated that he had destroyed this evidence without any consultation with anyone. He stated that he had not conferred with the co-author of the report — Professor Esler — with whom he had jointly run the preceding investigation. Nor, he claimed, had he consulted the Principal and Vice Chancellor (Dr Lang) who had commissioned the report. Given that the report and the evidence supporting it were more the property of Dr Lang (who had commissioned it) or the University, why would Mr Corner destroy all of the evidence without consulting anyone? What would give him reason to believe that he had the authority to do this?

When I was cross-examining Dr Lang in the course of the employment tribunal, I asked him directly what he knew about the destruction of the evidence relating to the Corner/Esler report. Immediately the University’s barrister shouted at Dr Lang not to answer. The Chairman of the tribunal then immediately intervened and prohibited me from asking Dr Lang anything about the destruction of the evidence. The Chairman of the tribunal gave no explanation for this prohibition, but simply instructed me to move on. In my view I was clearly prevented from bringing out material evidence. This, as it turned out, was not the only evidence that the Chairman of the employment tribunal was to prohibit me from bringing out (see The employment tribunal).

The author

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Skorupski's Law: "The more vain one's ambition, the more redundant one's grasp of morality"