A number of people have asked about how SOAS has treated me as a member of staff who publicly exposed management misdeeds.
The answer is that the university administration has made efforts to try to remove me from SOAS. In November 2016, my application to continue as a Research Associate of SOAS was rejected by senior management with the whistleblowing directly referenced as the reason (see below). I thereby lost my staff position; I am still a student of SOAS, though, having since 2015 been enrolled in Sanskrit language classes. My ongoing presence at SOAS being apparently still irksome to university chiefs, in December 2016, they ordered an assistant to question my teachers about my progress in Sanskrit. It would appear senior administrators hoped that I might be ejectable as a poor or non-genuine student. One can only wish that SOAS administration would devote its efforts to correcting the Alphawood programme’s problems instead of futilely scrounging for ways to smear me, not to mention possibly violating my student rights to data protection.
Research Associate Application Denied
The Research Associate post is a temporary, unsalaried position that carries no specified duties but provides the holder with an institutional affiliation, a library card and a university email address. From January 2013 until my term expired in October 2016, I was a Research Associate of the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology, where I received my PhD in Thai art history in 2012.
In January 2014, I began working as a volunteer helping to develop, organise and run activities of the SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies (CSEAS), assisting Prof. Elizabeth Moore, my former PhD supervisor, who was then the centre’s Chair, and then continuing to volunteer after Prof. Ashley Thompson succeeded as Chair in 2015. In October 2016, Prof. Thompson formally proposed my appointment as a CSEAS Research Associate to Prof. Richard Black, the Pro Director of Research and Enterprise, who oversees the regional centres at SOAS. Prof. Black’s emailed response is as follows:
(Prof. Black has given permission for me to publicly share his email. I have redacted email addresses and the names of two administrators.)
In his message, Prof. Black stated that I have “sought to bring SOAS into disrepute.” But it is not I who have damaged SOAS’s reputation. It is SOAS senior management itself that has done so, by condoning and indeed rewarding the unethical behaviour of certain staff members running the Alphawood programme. Prof. Black further states that I have made accusations “despite a total lack of evidence of financial impropriety on the part of SOAS.” I have never accused SOAS of “financial impropriety.” He also misstates the amount of the Alphawood Foundation’s gift as £22 million instead of £20 million (of which £15 million is for the Southeast Asian art programme.) He does correctly note that I have “publicly questioned the professional integrity of a member of staff.” Actually, I have publicly questioned the integrity of two members of staff, Prof. Anna Contadini and Dr. Peter Sharrock. Questions arise because of the clearly evidenced examples of their unethical conduct. Prof. Black, indeed, does not criticise the accusations for lacking a basis in evidence.
Prof. Black states that I should have followed “our procedures for raising concerns.” This is no ordinary administrative case. The head of SOAS has been closely involved in the management of the Alphawood programme. Also, by the time of Prof. Black’s email, I had sent five letters to SOAS management over the previous nine months. There has never been any invitation to address the concerns through an internal procedure. If there is such a process, I would be happy to be informed about it. However, the opinion of me expressed by Prof. Black, one of SOAS’s most senior administrators, indicates that there is little hope for an objective hearing.
There is another aspect of Prof. Black’s email which is concerning: he copied Prof. Anna Contadini on it. This is unexpected as she is not a member of CSEAS and has no relation to it nor any jurisdiction over it. Perhaps he was just letting her know that one of her critics has been rebuked. But she is the Head of the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology and therefore Prof. Thompson’s line manager – although not in regards to CSEAS, which is a separate entity. By copying Prof. Contadini on his pointed rejection of Prof. Thompson’s request, was Prof. Black signaling to Prof. Contadini that a professor in her department had stepped out of line in allowing herself to be associated with a whistleblower?
It is also interesting that there is a change in font in Prof. Black’s message, from the larger one with which he starts the message to a smaller one when he explains the reasons for the rejection. Did he copy and paste this latter part of the message from another author?
Senior Management Interested in My Progress in Sanskrit?
I have been a student of Sanskrit at the SOAS Language Centre since October 2015. In December 2016, an assistant of one of SOAS’s highest officeholders, the Registrar, asked my teachers about how I am as a student. This was an unexpected request for which the assistant offered no explanation. It can only be assumed that s/he was acting on the order of a very senior administrator of the university. This non-routine request possibly violated my student rights to data protection.
Since February 2016, I have repeatedly presented to SOAS the evidence and my reasoning in written, public form, enabling anyone to question and to scrutinize them. If SOAS management is unable or unwilling to address concerns, it has only itself to blame for any “disrepute.” The punishment of a whistleblower perhaps says more about an institution’s inability to rectify itself than it does about a particular whistleblower. I love SOAS, as my whistleblowing and years of unpaid work for CSEAS show. It is my sincere hope that, with less than two years left in the five-year Southeast Asian art programme, SOAS management may yet make the reforms needed to realise the potential of the Alphawood Foundation’s generous gift.
