Office for Students: Academic Misconduct Allegations
Baroness Gohir Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, one area of academic misconduct that does not get addressed is the exploitation of junior academics, particularly women and minority-ethnic academics, by older academics who sometimes force their names on to papers to which they have not contributed, use the work of junior academics to secure millions of pounds of research funding and then discard them from projects. Sometimes there are tribunals, settlements and NDAs, but there is no accountability and the cycle continues. What are the Government doing, and what can the Office for Students do, to address this?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
That would clearly be an unsatisfactory position for any junior academic involved in that situation. It is slightly less a job for government and slightly more for the leadership of universities, which, as I have said, are autonomous institutions that are rightly responsible for maintaining their academic standards. I am sure that they and others will have heard the concerns that the noble Baroness has expressed today.