My resignation letter

(with names redacted)

2 December 2021

Dear Prof Blackman (cc’ed xxxxxxxxx)

Resignation

I am writing to inform you that I am resigning with immediate effect on the basis that I have been constructively dismissed by the OU.

It is hard to express how sad I am that it has come to this. As you know, I took a pay cut to come to work at the OU, a career move that many in our profession viewed as a backwards step given my previous roles, which included Dean at Durham University. But for me this post at the OU was my dream job. I am on public record as saying this – indeed this was the theme to the introduction that XXXX gave to my professorial inaugural lecture in July 2019. I had told XXXX that I refused to give an inaugural lecture at both the Universities of Durham and Leicester because I knew they were not my ‘love match’. In that introduction, XXXX described me as “the living embodiment of the OU”. I have been connected with the OU for nearly 25 years. When my post was advertised in the spring of 2016, all I thought was that being a Chair of Criminology at the OU would be the crowning glory of my career. I so wanted to see out my career here, to end my professional life at the university that taught me my teaching craft and where I helped transform the lives of 100s of students when I was tutoring on D310 and later D315 in the 1990s and early 2000s. This was why I agreed to the huge pay cut – so I could work for and retire from The Open University. What was money when I had a chance to live out my dream?

However, my treatment over the past few years and in the last 6 months or so in particular has made my position untenable. I cannot remain here for the sake of my mental health. I am not exaggerating to say that this treatment has broken my heart. It has given me PTSD, caused me more sleeplessness, anxiety, and sadness than I have ever known, left me bereft of an institutional disciplinary academic community and torn apart my dreams. I cannot recall a departmental meeting I have attended in the last several years where I have not left in tears or in a rage or so utterly lonely that I have had to shut my laptop down and find a peaceful place in order to settle my mind. Indeed, the last departmental face to face meeting I attended in December 2019, I recall that I cried the entire XXXX hour drive home from Milton Keynes to XXXX. But that is nothing compared to the mental anguish I now feel almost exactly two years later.

Too much has happened over those years for me to detail it all in this letter, and I have already set it out in my grievance and employment tribunal claim. In this letter I want to focus on the treatment that has most distressed me, and also on some very recent events which have made my life at the OU unbearable.

On 12^th November 2021, I was informed that it would not be possible to provide a specific date for the outcome of my grievance (submitted on 24^th June 2021) and informed that it *might* be before or after xmas 2021. In that same email, I was informed that The Open University takes its responsibilities towards my protected belief as seriously as its responsibilities towards other protected beliefs and that the horrendous delays to my grievance are because of its ‘complexity’.

When asking, and then practically pleading, with the OU to speed up the grievance process, I stressed over and over again the grave impact that the harassment is having on my mental health, my professional reputation and my career, in particular the public statements by my colleagues. As I said above, I have been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of this treatment which left me too unwell to work for a long time, and now leaves me unable to participate in any departmental work. I have explained to the OU that I need an outcome to this grievance process and a resolution if I am to have any chance of being able to fully carry out my role again. That an academic of my seniority and international standing has been reduced to this remains wholly inconceivable to me.

Time and time again, the OU has refused to expedite the grievance process. I have tried time and again to come up with reasonable suggestions to help. HR rebuffed the idea of expediting the parts of my grievance which dealt with the public statements, simply asserting all aspects of the grievance would be dealt with at the same time. My suggestion of an interim finding on the public statements was also rejected, again without good reason. The OU also refused to take down those statements pending an outcome to my grievance, which as I explained to HR was not a neutral act. We all know the context: accusations of transphobia in higher education can be enough to end careers, let alone the smears and false accusations contained in my colleagues’ denunciations of me and other members of the GCRN. I have spent many sleepless nights and anguished days since the grievance started wondering why no one at the OU was listening to the fact that these public statements mean that – quite plausibly - *every* employee of the University now associates my name and the GCRN with transphobia and contributing to transphobic violence. After all, that is what the WELS statement accuses me and us of. In this context how on earth am I to, for instance, submit a research proposal on trans prison placement policy to the ethics committee and badge that proposal GCRN and have my name on it given that it is perfectly possible that all members of that committee have read the letters and statement, witnessed the inaction of the university and concluded that GCRN and me are transphobic? The well has been truly poisoned by these statements. Indeed, I heard on 1^st Dec that a senior member of WELS said ‘oh thank goodness!’ upon being told that the GCRN would likely not be in WELS once the Health and Wellbeing Strategic Research Area ceases to exist in summer 2022. This senior member’s view point was, apparently, informed by the WELS statement as well as what is now just seen as ‘the hassle’ caused by GCRN. And with each inaction, my heartbreak and stress is compounded.

To be told that I am not even guaranteed to receive a decision before Christmas, some 6 months after I submitted the grievance, to me demonstrates a complete disregard for my welfare.  I just do not believe that this investigation required at least 6 months to complete. If the OU had wanted to speed it up, it would have done.  

The OU have suggested that I am frustrated and asked me to be patient because the process is so complex. Let me put the OU’s request to me into other words. The OU is asking me to just put up with the ongoing effects of the harassment campaign on me, my mental health, my professional career, and my wellbeing for in excess of 6 months. It is asking me to put up with all that whilst at the same time as providing me with no protection and to do that for however long it takes. I am not frustrated. I have PTSD as a result of what has happened and PTSD does not just go away. The failure to provide me with a final date is multiplying that trauma daily. There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel the effects of the delays. Not a single day. And, I wait and watch my email inbox - yet nothing appears. The only unprompted communications I have recently had was to be asked to think about changing the wording of the crowdjustice fund appeal because some of my colleagues are upset. The inequity of treatment is shocking.

I also do not believe that if comparable public smears about a different protected belief had been published online, including on the OU’s website, and signed by hundreds of OU staff, that the OU would have taken at least 6 months to investigate and would have allowed the statements to remain online in the meantime. For example,  if one of my colleagues had written a statement that contained pejorative inaccurate stereotypes about Muslim scholars seeking only to destroy democracy and working hand and glove with terrorists, the OU would have taken it down immediately. In my 5 years at the OU, I have seen even the merest suggestion of anti-islamic sentiments being removed by forum moderators within minutes. I have sat in meetings where we have discussed whether to shred an entire print run of a book and change the VLE image associated with DD212 because it contained an image that *1* person thought *might* be possibly racist.

It is important for me to stress that this did not start in June. My grievance outlines that for two years, I have been made to feel like a pariah in my own department. Even now, I find it upsetting in the extreme that a department that prides itself on research and activism in support of people who are victimised by powerful institutions made it clear to me I was not to talk about my unlawful treatment by Essex University and offered no support to me through a professional ordeal, irrespective of any differences we might have regarding our academic work. Of course, I now know that that treatment was a result of the way that several members (including XXXX and XXXX) view and treat people with gender critical philosophical beliefs. I know this because it was several of my close departmental working colleagues who took part in the public campaign of harassment targeted at me and the other members of the OU GCRN.

The loneliness, isolation and anxiety caused to me by being treated as ‘the problem’ in the department meant that I have had to look to other parts of the University to find the collegial environment denied me in my own department and yet that as an employee I have a right to expect. I found that with XXX and the REF work.  I am very proud of the work that XXXX Sarah and I did pulling together the C20 submission to the REF. The University executive knows well (because it is on record) that it was heading for a disastrous Sociology REF2021 before XXXX and I started working together.

Yet, the Open University has repaid that strategically important work by failing in its duty to protect me from departmental harassers and a public harassment campaign. This too breaks my heart.

I also need to mention the VC’s recent statement of 10^th November 2021.  This statement was published on the news section of the OU’s website and is therefore publicly available. The statement was not shared with the GCRN in advance and so the first I came to hear of it was when I turned my laptop on and saw it as news (I note here that the VC’s previous statement was shared in advance with the OU’s LGBT Network, and yet this statement which directly concerned the GCRN and those with protected GC beliefs was not shared with us in advance). When I read it, it triggered off a severe episode of PTSD – I could not think straight. I was so deep in panic and anxiety. For two days, I was in a state of extreme fear. All I could think was that that statement would finish off what the department started and the public campaign pushed for. We all know what happened to Kathleen Stock. As far as I am concerned, the VC statement’s on the public news page is an open invitation to any and all to denounce, harass and call for discrimination. 

The VC’s statement says nothing about the hostile public campaign that gender critical staff face, nor does it condemn it. That is quite an omission when the VC chose to expressly say that some staff found the GCRN’s work “challenging or concerning”. Why are some people’s “concerns” about lawful academic speech deserving of an express mention and a sympathetic email from the VC, but not the distress caused to me and other employees by a hostile public campaign against those who hold gender critical beliefs, open calls to discriminate against us and false allegations?  The disparity of treatment is clear for all to see.

The only official statement made about the network I set up along with others is that it is consistent with academic freedom we exist.  This is hardly anything other than a begrudging statement. Other research networks might have been congratulated for the achievements that we have had. XXXX’s work has been used to formulate national level policy (as you will also know from the fact that XXXXXXXX impact case study!). My circumstances regarding Essex has led to me giving evidence at the end of November 2021 to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Speech. I have given evidence in a recent judicial review on the failure to apply single sex exemptions to the female prison estate – evidence that was accepted by the judges and formed a significant part of their judgment. Yet, I am treated by the OU as ‘a cause of distress’. The only official statements the university has made is that it is ‘consistent with academic freedom’ that we exist, that some people are concerned by our existence and that there is support available for those who are distressed.

The message says loud and clear to ALL concerned (including my external research partners as the November statement is placed on the open accessibly OU News) that the OU simply has no legal footing on which to shut us down and it is clear what that means – you would rather not have us. The OU has done absolutely nothing to give any other impression. Every opportunity to demonstrate otherwise has been rebuffed and squandered. No end date to the grievance process. No recognition of the trashing of my public reputation (both inside the university and outside). No protection at all. Just a grudging statement that is presented as a news item. Not a public statement. A news item.

At the risk of repetition and for the avoidance of doubt: there is absolutely nothing in that November statement that will discourage further harassment against gender critical staff at the university, and in fact by not expressly condemning it, it is clear to anyone who reads that statement that the OU’s VC is sympathetic to those who have harassed me and that my distress is not considered to be worth even an express mention.

As far as I am concerned, the VC’s own words and the promotion of them as news puts an even larger target on my back and has given the green light to further harassment. Saying that it is consistent with law that we exist is not the same as saying that it is UNLAWFUL to harass us. Such a statement could be made – and indeed has been made by other VCs. It is perfectly possible for the VC at the OU to have issued a news item stating that it is unlawful to harass people on the basis of their gender critical beliefs without even mentioning my grievance. But no. The choice the University made was to state nothing other than that the University cannot legally stop the GCRN.

I want to come back to the fact that the university chose to place that statement ON THE OU NEWS. This is a public OUTWARDS facing part of the OU. OU News is designed to be seen by people OUTSIDE the university. I work with several organisations who themselves work with some of the most vulnerable female victims and offenders in our society. One of them has already declined to work with me in public because of the public harassment campaign *I face* XXXXX.

I find it incredulous that my own employer is failing me to such an extent that the most senior leader of the university has placed a public news items on a corporate webpage that jeopardises my ability to do the very research work it pays me to do. So not only have I been harassed and bullied for several years,  not only am I unable to be involved in departmental and other work because of the unconscionable delays to the grievance, not only have I been left hanging for 6 months with no end in sight to the grievance process and not only has the OU failed to protect me from ongoing distress and harm and damage to my reputation both within the university and outside of it, it is now actively doing things to damage my reputation, ability to do my job and further damaging my mental health.

Earlier I stated that when I saw the news item, I couldn’t think straight for two days. Now that the immediate trauma response has subsided, I know why I couldn’t think straight. I felt the gut punch and on some deep instinctive level I knew that all my hopes and dreams for my future at the OU were over. All the trust I placed in my departmental colleagues and the trust and faith I placed in the grievance process and the institution to do the right thing have been misplaced. 

For all the above reasons, I have no trust in The Open University as an employer. I resign my post of Chair of Criminology in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology with immediate effect.

Yours sincerely

Jo Phoenix

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