IF I had to pick one incident that crystallises the systemic failings of British universities, and much of Western academia, it is the fleeting visit of a lecturer from a Pakistani university that Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) insisted I host in January 2007. I will call him BS (really, no pun intended).
Like many UK universities at the time, QMUL had enthusiastically embraced ‘internationalisation’, a policy pursued supposedly to enhance academic quality, social responsibility and global engagement for the benefit of all members of the university community and society at large (sounds familiar, huh?). The financial benefits were considerable as partnerships with countries such as Pakistan, China, Saudi or Qatar would bring in lucrative overseas students. That was the official line at least.
The reality (as I am documenting in the book I am writing on academic corruption) was that we heavily subsidised the students and the ‘research collaboration’ was invariably confected, one-sided, and a colossal waste of time and money.
Pakistan was a priority target. Senior management leaned hard on academic staff to make extended visits to partner universities there to cultivate new academic collaborations. One such QMUL partnership involved my department with [institute X]. Whilst the implication was an association for mutual benefit, in reality, as per a Memoranda of Understanding (MoU), we were expected to take lecturers from [institute X] as PhD students at greatly reduced fees, disadvantaging British students. No financial incentive was offered to supervisors, the only reward being the presumed privilege of an international student who would soak up your time.
In November 2006, BS, a middle-aged lecturer from [institute X] applied to my research group. His covering email made it painfully clear he had zero background, or even interest, in the PhD topic he had selected from those listed on my website. I made my objections known, repeatedly, in emails and phone calls, between November 14, 2006, and January 16, 2007: BS was unsuitable; persistently ignored every reasonable academic request I made; was evasive; pushy; and manipulative. Yet under institutional pressure and to honour the MoU I went along with accommodating him, giving him chance after chance.
So, BS had proved himself to be an entitled time-waster who had no business being considered for the programme in the first place and who exploited everyone’s goodwill at every step. I knew instinctively this was going to be trouble, but pressure from above was explicit: the partnership must be seen to be working.
He had been due to arrive on January 15, 2007. He didn’t show. Nor on the next day. However in the afternoon of the day after that he finally appeared. After discussing the research programme I gave him a campus tour, showed him his desk, the tea room and told him to return to my office at 4pm. At 3.59 a senior member of staff emailed me thus (redacted as appropriate):
Sent: 17 January 2007 15:59
Subject: Problem: BS arrived today.
There are two problems. First, XXXXX told me that he made inappropriate advances to her in the tea room this afternoon . . . It seems that when she protested he became very apologetic and offered her money not to say anything. Oddly, when asked to repeat what he’d said to XXXXX to [admin staff] he did and started crying. So possibly he’s unstable rather than malicious.
Second, it emerged that he is not (he says) connected with [institute X] any more. He is paying his own fees, he says . . .
Doesn’t look good.
Further investigation revealed what had happened: within minutes of entering the tea room, BS had walked up to XXXXX and fondled her breasts. When she recoiled, he offered cash for her silence. Later, he barged into the departmental office, threw himself on the floor in front of two shocked female administrative staff, and began kissing their shoes while begging for forgiveness.
When he came to my office, his explanation was unforgettable:
‘When I saw her in the tea room I thought, from the way she was dressed, that she wanted me to touch her breasts.’
I told him that is not how we behave in Britain. He responded saying: ‘But I could not resist her, since she reminded me so much of my eight-year-old daughter.’
I told him his PhD offer was withdrawn with immediate effect and that he should leave the building. He wept, pleaded then, astonishingly, asked me to write him a reference for another UK university. I refused. The next day we discovered he had already been accepted on to a PhD programme at another Russell Group university. I asked if a formal complaint had been made by XXXXX to the police, it was after all a sexual assault and other institutions should be aware of such behaviour. As far as I am aware, no such report was ever filed. I’ll leave you to decide why that may be.
The experience with BS did not deter QMUL. Indeed, days later another semi-literate application from a different lecturer at [institute X] landed in my inbox. My response to reject it instantly did not go down well with faculty management. Moreover, the campaign to send Western academics to Pakistan, a country with a severe and escalating terrorism problem, continued unabated. A few weeks after the incident, all academic staff in our department received the usual cajoling memo about the need to schedule a trip to Pakistan. I had previously made clear that I was not going and my colleague Martin Neil was the only member of staff prepared to call out the dangers publicly. He wrote:
Subject: Pakistan trip
I’ve had a quick look at the Foreign Office travel advice . . .
· There is currently believed to be a heightened threat to Westerners in major cities.
· More vulnerable targets such as clubs, restaurants . . . places of worship and schools are at risk . . . Previous bomb attacks have sometimes involved consecutive explosions.
I assume that when they say ‘schools’ this might include universities? The US State Department continues to warn US citizens against non-essential travel to Pakistan . . .
Has the college taken this into account?
I recount this experience because it exposes, in microcosm, how far British universities had already fallen by 2007. How they were already subordinating scholarship, safety and simple decency to managerial box-ticking and revenue-chasing. An already cowardly, hypocritical and fully operational system, a precursor to the tyranny of diversity, equality and inclusion, which should have served as a warning, has today succeeded in denigrating and corrupting academia and campuses everywhere. As we now know, such a system, that is capable of such venal and craven behaviour, that suffers no consequences, is capable of anything.
This article appeared in the Where are the Numbers? substack on December 1, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
