So, let's go through this one more time, shall we! (Updated)

It is now four years to the date that I first blogged about the totally disgraceful way my BA dissertation title and research area submission was completely unprofessionally handled. So I had assumed that there was no longer any confusion as to how this administrative disaster occurred and unfairly impacted on my education and undergraduate research. A student is not meant to be forced to suffer discrimination, bullying, disempowerment and being deprived of viable educational opportunities, while simply submitting their own dissertation title and research area of interest on time. No matter how you look at it, there are no excuses. It breeches just about everything you could attempt to breech during the supervisor allocation process. 

However, it has come to my attention that philosophers are still unable to grasp the basics of exactly just how out of line, rule breaking and frankly abusive the rejection of my chosen dissertation and supervisor misallocation was. 'What the devil' did Miranda Fricker think she was up to, not only as an academic with responsibilities as Head of Department, but also as a supposedly feminist philosopher? How could she commit the very epistemic injustices that she seems to argue against academically? Such as: attempting to disseminate distortions and misrepresentations that skew a person's experience; have misplaced distrust and suspicion of others whilst spreading toxic misinformation themselves; undervaluing others; being discriminatory; the disempowering and silencing of women; using toxic power to disadvantage others; exclusionary actions and bias; being authoritarian. 

The handling of my dissertation research and supervisor allocation was so toxic and unacceptable that, not only is it in the public interest for prospective and current students to know, it also educates the general public about the extravagant abuses of power that occur within universities in the 21st century, through real life examples and evidence. There is still far too much focus in the media and within university policies on spiced up narratives about sex and relationships being the chosen tool for lecturers to wield power over students. Yet, once again, in my experience, it is in fact a non-sexual abuse of power that impacted most on my educational opportunities and undergraduate degree. 

So, especially for all of those philosophers who struggled to keep up the first few times, four years ago, let's go through it all again shall we? This time, step by step, with the evidence before us. 

The topic of how to submit your dissertation title and research area began as soon as we all put our pens down at the end of the exam period, with an instructive email from the BA Tutor, whose job it is to oversee the BA degree course and allocate BA dissertation supervisors:

So I followed the instructions above and sent the following email with all essential details 

and before the deadline:

And received the following confirmation from admin:

Only to suddenly receive this rude, toxic, unprofessional email from Miranda Fricker, as late as the 25th June 2012, shortly before the end of term 👇

This field of research interest for my dissertation should not come as a suprise to Miranda Fricker, given that I had already informed her about my dissertation intentions a year earlier (see the ✴️ at the end of this post for more details). 

I note that:

1) Nobody officially tasked Miranda Fricker with the side job of interfering in my studies where she wasn't wanted, disempowering me as a student, restricting my academic freedom and closing down my study options, not even the wider college, whose correspondence with me and whose policies she is contracting and breaking in this email. 

2) She had no right to send me this email at all, and worse still, on the quiet, without copying in the BA Tutor, whose job it actually is to handle the dissertation submissions. She has randomly and rudely appropriated the BA Tutor's allocation job, then thinks she can shunt the BA Tutor down to doing the dissertation advisory work that is actually designated for the Personal Tutor, who, in turn, falls off the end and whose potential role is ignored in her email. Being power hungry and excessively controlling does not suddenly make a Head of Department eligible to rearrange the lives of a student and a professor at will. If anyone was meant to raise any possible issues with the allocation process, it should have come directly and transparently from the BA Tutor, not her. 

3) Blaming her actions on some anonymous person she refuses to name is simply not good enough. That's unacceptable in itself. It could either be a total lie, since it remains unverifiable. Or she is protecting the perpetrator from any repercussions and making it impossible for me to know who is the original culprit behind the victimisation. 

4) I have no idea what she is referring to by "history". This is the only actual reason she gives yet it is a completely vague and meaningless thing to say. She doesn't specify anything and she would not be able to substantiate any such "history", no matter what this wild claim amounts to in reality. 

Professor Susan James had no conflict of interest to declare, be it personal or work related (for instance, we have never collaborated together; she has never 'helped' me academically; we have never discussed anything relevant to my Cavendish (or Hume) dissertation prior to my dissertation title / topic submission. 

In addition, nobody can ever simply act on their perceived notion of a conflict of interest between two people, and worse still, without ever consulting the two people about it, hearing both their accounts and obtaining their agreement and consent to any possible differences in arrangements. 

There was nothing that prevented Professor Susan James from being eligible to undertake my BA dissertation supervision. 

Frankly, Miranda Fricker's email was simply a way of harassing, bullying and discriminating against me as a student, depriving me of educational opportunities, and depriving Professor Susan James of work. 

5) Her tone is completely disrespectful towards Professor Susan James. This is a work email yet she is not addressing her properly with her title written out in full, and she completely omits her first name Susan/Sue. Instead she shortens her to merely "Prof James". Although she manages to give the male lecturer his full name, so she knows how to refer to her colleagues respectfully when she wants to, well, her male colleagues anyway, which is also surprising for a supposed feminist. And not just any feminist either. 

Miranda Fricker is a privileged member of SWIP who:

 

- was taught by a founding member of SWIP, Anne Seller, on her Women's Studies MA (1991); 

- she oversaw the merger between NYSWIP and SWIP-Analytic to form SWIP-NYC in 2020;

- and furthermore, Miranda Fricker has gone on to be an advisor to SWIP. 

And if we take a closer look at her professional details she provides after her name, we see that she's pointing out that she's not only the Head of Department (which means she's also automatically an Assistant Dean too, since the roles were paired together in those days), she is also the Director of Mind Association, but more importantly:

She's the Chair of the Research Postgraduate Committee. And this is how she uses and abuses her power to dictate what research ideas and theses are allowed to be undertaken?! Why is anybody surprised afterwards that I've never wished to go on to do Postgraduate at Birkbeck College, with people like Miranda Fricker being selected and employed to be on the Committee and as Chair for postgraduate research?! She should know better than to behave badly like this towards my research, given she's concurrently making various decisions about student research, so knows perfectly well what is professionally acceptable behaviour towards student research. If such obnoxious behaviour is what she thinks is acceptable, I dread to think how Postgraduate research is handled and processed! 

She's also overstepping her position by passing comment on my undergraduate research when the remit of her job is only restricted to postgraduate research. 

I decided that, since she insisted on receiving an acknowledgement of her email, the only answer her disgustingly toxic email warranted, was the following dismissive reply from me:

At no point have I ever accepted the suspicious rejection of my original dissertation, nor have I ever accepted the refusal to allow Professor Susan James to supervise me. But I had very little time now before the end of term to ensure I had a dissertation and a supervisor secured for the following academic year. Hence, I submitted a second dissertation title / topic before the department had any excuses to fail to provide me with the dissertation arrangements I was entitled to receive. 

Nevertheless, I also simultaneously swiftly logged my written objection with the Master (David Latchman) and with Student Experience (T King), stating that it had happened for an invalid reason and made it clear that I was only submitting a second dissertation title / topic because I was being forced to do so by Miranda Fricker's email, even though the deadline had passed ages ago. Neither the Master, nor Student Experience ever replied to me, they just ignored me as a student, which is also how I was institutionally forced out of doing the dissertation of my choice. So, as far as I'm concerned, the dissertation matter became the fault of the entire university, not just Miranda Fricker or the department. The Master and Student Experience had an opportunity to correct the issue Miranda Fricker had caused, and resolve it to my student satisfaction and they both failed to do so. 

Moreover, one expects far more from a Master (a sexist name for the job role that has now been renamed Vice-Chancellor) who had recently received a CBE for services to education (Birthday Honours 2010). He is no longer the Vice Chancellor of Birkbeck College since January 2024, but he has been allowed to become a Deputy Vice-Chancellor for the whole of the University of London. So his career progress and ability to hold positions of power and influence continues, despite allegations of research fraud in 14 papers from a lab he ran; and investigations concluding he had run his lab and co-authored research in a reckless manner; and an allegation of research misconduct was upheld against him. By 2020, he had two papers corrected and six papers retracted. He has since stopped running labs and supervising research. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, which doesn't even begin to discuss the issues raised about fake, manipulated scientific images making their way into research from his lab. 

So he's in no position to take a moral high ground on  research, supervision or anything else. 

For newspaper articles on Latchman see here , here and here . For a very detailed account of what exactly is seriously wrong with Latchman's research integrity, and a guide as to how to spot the fakes, see this blog post here .

 

A woman lecturer merely talking to a female student a few times in a four year course to ask her about how college was going and encouraging her to keep studying for the degree and not give up, despite all the difficulties she has to deal with which are not of her doing (such as stalking, mismarked essays, missing essays, a 'nutty' male lecturer and more) pales into total insignificance compared to the Master of the College and what he's been up to! It's just an ethics of care. It doesn't constitute confiding in someone. If it did, then I confided in four male members of staff (Simon Hewitt; the problematic Dr Keith Hossack; Prof Ken Gemes; Prof AC Grayling) as well. I don't think they would think there was a romantic thing going on between the five of us! 😳

Furthermore, it goes to show that a university's statistics and stories about student experience of their university are meaningless. It's merely all good advertising, albeit misleading, but it cannot reflect reality if you simply fail to acknowledge anything that shows there's a serious institutional problem with student experience at the university. 

Here's the title and beginning of that email in which I state my second dissertation title / topic and provide my written objection, continue to the following screenshot for the full email content: 

Here's the full content of this same email: 

As we can see from admin's response (Kerry), it was Michael Garnett's job as BA Tutor, not Miranda Fricker's job, or place, to interfere with supervisor allocation. She simply risked severely overstepping the line and used and abused her power and control as a Head of Department against me. 

And so Garnett did finally allocate a supervisor for my dissertation, albeit for the wrong dissertation topic and the wrong supervisor: Professor Susan James' academic expertise and specialisations makes her the only suitable and relevant supervisor for both my first dissertation on Cavendish and for my second dissertation on Hume and empathy. 

Do we have here a similar case to my Groningen MRes application, whereby I also receive a rude, domineering, harassing email to bully me out of an academic opportunity? Both wish to force me to withdraw something I have submitted. Indeed, I later found out by accident that Miranda Fricker was listed as a Researcher at Groningen university, so perhaps these parallel cases are not such a coincidence. If I'd known Fricker was there, I wouldn't have dreamt of applying to Groningen university. 

✴️

And here's what I wrote to Miranda Fricker when she was a temporary substitute Personal Tutor, in which I informed her of: 

my research interests in the Jewish philosopher, Spinoza;

and my research interest in, and intention to write my dissertation on "a 17th/18th century female philosopher, who wrote a political text". I also informed her that this was based on my educational interests prior to my degree, so it is especially odd that she treats my dissertation research area with such unfounded suspicion a year later and attempts to change it for me eg narrowing me down to just a "topic in Political Philosophy", while by implication, suggesting I remove the history of philosophy and women philosophers from it. Not to mention also leaving out the feminist philosophy aspect of my original dissertation on Cavendish, a concerning action for a supposed feminist philosopher to take. 

And here is Miranda Fricker's response. Nowhere does she raise that my research interest in, and next year's dissertation area in, Early Modern women philosophers could result in a problem allocating me a supervisor for it. Nor does she mention anything about Professor Susan James. Indeed, she only seems to be happy with my decisions about what I opt to do.