Sack him? I’d just smack this ‘sexist’ Prof on the bottom
Mary Beard says Nobel winner should get job back
SEXISM row scientist Sir Tim Hunt found an unlikely new ally yesterday – Cambridge don and feminist Mary Beard.
The TV academic added her voice to growing concerns that the Nobel prizewinner had been wrongly forced out – and said she would simply have smacked his bottom.
Her remarks came as it emerged that some of University College London’s ruling council are ‘cheesed off’ at the way their scientist had been treated.
Sir Tim, 72, sparked a storm of controversy on social media after making ‘jocular’ remarks at a science conference in South Korea about women in the laboratory. He suggested they were a distraction and cried more.
The scientist insisted he ‘did not mean’ the comments, but within hours of flying back to London he offered his resignation as an honorary professor at UCL.
His wife, Professor Mary Collins – who also works at the university – has since claimed he had little choice. She said that while her husband was flying home, a senior figure at UCL phoned her to say ‘Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked’.
Professor Beard – who herself has been the target of vicious online ‘troll’ attacks on her appearance – said: ‘I would like to smack his bottom, give him a piece of my mind and keep a very close watch on him if
‘I wouldn’t drum him out’
he is grading applications. But I wouldn’t drum him out of the academic town. Besides, a quick campaign against an individual can be an easy deflection from the real underlying issues, about women’s chances in science or in the academy more generally.’
Miss Beard’s support for Sir Tim came as a surprise to some. She has been an outspoken critic of sexist attitudes, saying in 2013: ‘I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.’
Space enthusiast Professor Brian Cox also said Sir Tim should not have been treated in the way he was and warned of a wider problem of ‘trial by social media’. He described the action against the father of two as ‘wrong and disproportionate’.
Now, a member of the council which controls and monitors UCL’s affairs, has suggested that senior staff there are unhappy at the way the affair has been handled.
Speaking anonymously, the UCL council member said there was concern among the establishment figures on the council that Sir Tim was effectively forced out unfairly.
‘I think there are members of the council who are cheesed off – and I’m sure we’re going to be talking about it at the next council meeting.
‘I think the provost Prof Michael Arthur – the head of the university – and the chair of the council, Dame DeAnne Julius, are pretty aware of the general feelings, and we’ll have a discussion.’
The source added a press release rushed out by UCL on Monday – which insisted Sir Tim resigned before he had been contacted by the university – had, unusually, been circulated through the coun- cil before being issued. The release said: ‘Media and online commentary played no part in UCL’s decision to accept his resignation. UCL sought on more than one occasion to make contact with Sir Tim to discuss the situation, but his resig- nation was received before direct contact was established.’
Sir Tim had said: ‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry’. He was roundly abused on Twitter and other social media – and the next day, within hours of flying back to London, offered his resignation from his honorary professorship at UCL. After it was accepted, he was similarly asked to resign from the European Research Council. At the weekend, however, Sir Tim and Prof Collins, 56 – who did fall in love after meeting through science – said they had been ‘hung out to dry’.
AS he prepared to take his debut Prime Minister’s Questions as David Cameron’s understudy, George Osborne could hardly have hoped for a more cheering vindication of his economic strategy.
Yet again, official figures showed the numbers in work at a record high and the lowest jobless total for seven years.
But this time, there was icing on the Chancellor’s cake. For with real wages rising by 2.8 per cent in the three months to March – their fastest since before the crash – families are at last feeling some of the benefits of the recovery.
Was it only last month Labour went into the election, insisting Britain was in the grip of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ from which only a change of course could rescue us?
But perhaps most encouraging of all for Mr Osborne is his continuing success in rebalancing the economy between the public and private sectors.
True, there’s still a long way to go. As he points out, it is simply ‘unsustainable’ for Britain, with only 4 per cent of the world’s output, to go on shelling out 7 per cent of global welfare spending.
But the remarkable truth is that as the employment rate climbs ever higher, the numbers on the state payroll have fallen to their lowest since comparable records began 16 years ago.
Not only does this expose the baloney of Labour’s claims that cuts would throw millions out of work. A slimmer state will also leave Britain far better placed to weather future economic storms.
Indeed, with interest rates expected to rise within months and a financial hurricane heading our way from Greece, Mr Osborne can’t wield his axe too soon.