Academia

A Life Caught in the Crossfire

Dr Scott McLachlan, @lawhealthandtech

This article is reproduced below in full from Scott McLachlan's substack with his permission. Scott is a member of the HARTgroup, with qualifications in Law, Health Science, Informatics and Computing. He has been actively researching and publishing on a number of topics, but as have seen from the GMC and NMC, academia is in the same situation where stepping outside the box leads to anonymous complaints and finally academic destruction.

This account from his career is especially shocking when we are conditioned to believe that universities are the pinnacle of critical blue sky thinking.

Well... it finally happened.

After three years. After meeting and exceeding almost every academic probation requirement and clearing more than a few hurdles that had been placed before me. And even after receiving some of the top student reviews in the school for my course content and teaching; I have been sacked from my academic role in the nursing school at King’s College London.

Did I steal from the stationary cupboard?

Hang on... There’s a stationary cupboard? How was I there for three years, spending hundreds of pounds of my own money to buy printer paper, pens, pencils and highlighters, and I never knew this?

Did I make a pass at a student?

Of course not. Have you seen me? For that matter... Have you seen the students?

Did I call my boss’ boss a complete pr*ck?

While we all think it from time to time, even I am not that stupid.

Did I steal someone else’s research results and publish them as my own?

Given the elitist attitudes in King’s nursing school, their seeming unwillingness to engage with anyone non-clinical, and the fact that nobody wanted to work with some geeky IT AI keyboard fondler. This too never happened.

So, you may be wondering, what actually was my ‘crime’ ?

Well, I’m really glad you asked. I am guilty of being outspoken on particular issues, such as freedom of speech, the unfairness and injustices of many criminal prosecutions but especially that of Lucy Letby, and political corruption and the (ab)use of political power to promulgate policies like those of covid and net zero.

Yet, I never set out to be a crusader. Many years ago in a country far far away I dared to want what most young people want: a chance to study, to contribute, to carve out a meaningful life of knowledge and service, a place to call home, a cool car, and perhaps even the ability to travel and see the world. But over three decades academia has repeatedly turned that aspiration into a gauntlet of discrimination, exploitation, censorship, and political persecution. My academic story, abridged here, is not simply personal—it is a cautionary tale for whistle-blowers. A warning of what happens when universities abandon scholarship for ideology. And an example of what happens to good people when free inquiry is traded for conformity to dogma.

Early Encounters: Expelled for Asking Questions

My first taste of academic injustice came when I was a student for a semester at what was supposed to be a fairly relaxed and progressive theological college in Australia. I was nineteen, bright, eager, and willing to probe. Unlike most of my classmates, I questioned the logic of some contemporary biblical interpretations. I raised legitimate comparisons with older texts and translations. Yet, for my inquisitive nature, I was sternly admonished and told to sit silently at the back of the class.

Soon after, I went to the movies with a female classmate. We talked, enjoyed each other’s company, and shared a kiss at her door. The next morning the Dean called me in, accused me of impropriety, and expelled me from the college. No hearing. No defense. I was given a week to leave.

This was my initiation to the grim truth that questioning authority—whether theological or ideological—was not permitted. Even ordinary human interactions could be weaponized into grounds for expulsion.

Nursing School: Bureaucracy as Punishment

Next, I embarked on nursing. Initially I thrived, but soon I ran afoul of a Year Advisor. The policy allowed students with 200 hours of paid aged-care work to skip a six-week unpaid placement. I had more than 340 hours of paid work—more than several classmates, all female, who were granted exemptions. My application was rejected, again and again, with shifting excuses.

When I persisted with paperwork proving my hours, she simply moved the goalposts: wrong employer, wrong facility, wrong mix of hours. Finally, she whittled my 340 hours down and ruled I had “197 not 200”. She declared I was three short by her count. My assignments and exams—all passed—were marked as failures for “not completing the placement.” I lost thousands of dollars in fees and months of academic progress.

Other male students experienced the same discrimination. By the end of year two, of nine male students only one remained. The rest had left under pressure. Nursing school had purged them.

Harassment and Targeted Failures

A year later at another university, my clinical supervisor during a psychiatric nursing rotation abused his authority. Competencies signed off and exams passed—yet he failed me by fiat. He even phoned me at home, insisting “a nurse has no private life,” telling me he could scrutinise me at any hour. A few years later he was struck off after multiple complaints about his personal intrusions by female students. My legitimate education was derailed in the process.

Disillusioned, I left nursing. I spent my third year studying computer science, left university without a degree, and for nearly two decades I built a career in IT.

A Return to Studies: Exploited for Revenue

Nearly two decades later, I returned, encouraged by colleagues to pursue graduate studies in health informatics. At Massey University, I completed module after module and was awarded a Graduate Diploma in Information Science with top marks. Yet, while I had completed three years of undergraduate study and this Graduate Diploma, but because I didn’t have an undergraduate degree, the enrolments office forced me into unnecessary “extra” courses from the Masters of Information Science program in order, he said, for me to prove my academic ability; extracting more fees and dragging out my progress. At the end I had completed 345 credits—enough for three full graduate degrees—but was only awarded a Graduate Diploma (90 credits) and an MPhil (120 credits); both with top marks and an award of academic distinction. The university had milked thousands in unnecessary coursework towards a taught Masters in Information Science and made me endure an additional full year of study, but while I had the extra 120 credit points necessary for that award, excuses were made and it was never granted.

This was my first direct encounter with higher education as a revenue machine: manipulating students into paying for modules they didn’t need, and keeping oversized tuition pipelines open while delivering often far less than was promised.

Entering Academia: Precarity and Punishment

When I became a researcher and later a lecturer, the exploitation grew worse.

At Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), where I completed my PhD in only two-years and around half the time of most PhD students, I was kept on a series of short-term contracts for over five years by an administration illegally avoiding conversion of long-serving staff to full-time permanent posts. Universities today thrive on this “gig economy” model, keeping junior academics permanently insecure. Precarity is the leash by which dissent is silenced.

But in my case, it didn’t silence me. And it is that which sealed my fate.

Censorship by Complaint

At QMUL, I responded to a tweet by a junior academic who had attacked a senior virologist’s peer-reviewed paper with no evidence. My reply was measured: incredulity at the fact that careful science could be trashed so casually on Twitter. For this I faced a barrage of orchestrated complaints that I was “racist” and “sexist.”

I was hauled before a kangaroo-court investigation run by a professor-activist intent on a guilty verdict. With no evidence other than prejudice, in his ‘court’ of persecution all five DEI-themed charges he had raised against me were “upheld.”

Weeks later and only after the damage to my career, credibility and public opinion had already been done, QMUL’s administration overturn the charges; admitting there was nor had ever been anything racist or sexist in my words. My reputation was poisoned. My career future was compromised. My mental health was certainly scarred. But in the broader sense—the lesson was clear. In my case I was considered to have well crossed over, given my name was on work questioning covid and the covid statistics and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and in spite of the fact that most of it used little more than the government and Office of National Statistics own data to demonstrate what they were telling us was, more often than not, a pack of lies. It’s not about whether you acted wrongly. It’s about whether you crossed that ideological line.

Or, as some academics are just now working out; it’s ideological Lawfare. A soul-crushing ordeal navigating a legal or quasi-legal system with significant time, financial and emotional costs that themselves are used as retribution, regardless of the adjudicated outcome.

To put it more succinctly; the process is the punishment.

Blacklisting and Leaks

During 2020 I was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship with a fixed start date in 2021. When, as a result of the professional and emotional insult I had experienced at QMUL, I sought to move my Royal Academy fellowship from QMUL to Edinburgh University, QMUL staff deliberately sabotaged me: leaking the confidential kangaroo court outcome report (already overturned in-house) to HR at Edinburgh, absent context of the second report that overturned it. This poisoned the well, led to significantly increased scrutiny of me by Edinburgh’s HR and, after several weeks, resulted in my being removed from post.

Almost immediately I was offered a Senior Lecturer post at Liverpool John Moores University. After almost six months there the same leaked kangaroo court outcome report mysteriously surfaced again, waved at me during a disciplinary meeting based solely on accusations that sounded like they had been lifted directly from that report. Despite admitting they were relying on tainted evidence; the university sacked me. Only under threat of employment tribunal action did they compensate me for early and unfair termination, effectively paying out my entire employment contract with a healthy notice period on top.

This practice—weaponizing anonymous complaints and confidential reports that are intended to be taken out of context, and circulating them across institutions—is blacklisting in all but name.

A similar thing was happening with academic journals at the time—lists of names of academics like myself whose research questioned the covid narrative were, we are told, shared among journal editors—with research submitted for peer review by academics on those lists desk-rejected, sometimes within only minutes of submission.

Kings College London: Three More Years of Probation Hell

Finally, at King’s College London in 2022 I was hired to lead digital health teaching and research. On paper, my academic probation required publishing, teaching, securing funding, and student supervision. I excelled: several high-impact publications, a successful new digital health module, top student evaluations, and even a PhD completion.

Yet my funding applications, caught in post-Covid and post-Brexit hyper-competition, were unsuccessful. Despite this being entirely normal (hundreds of rejected applications for each of a handful of grants), I was told my “failure to secure external funding” meant I was unfit for academia.

The school manipulated probation: three years (double or triple some other institutions), repeatedly failing to assign appropriate mentors or reducing mentor’s working hours and telling them to no longer perform this vital function, and making it my problem to find my own mentor such that I had three over the three-year period. They also scheduled and cancelled my final academic probation hearing three times, eventually fixing it for one day after my employment contract expired and ensuring my direct-report professor could not attend to defend or support me.

The outcome was preordained and predictable: immediate termination. My course was popular, my students successful, my publications solid, my teaching reviews excellent—and yet, because I was not pliant, I was cut loose.

The Speech Police

Alongside this institutional sabotage came ideological censorship.

When I robustly analysed the Lucy Letby trial in a series of published articles and interviews, even correcting a minor misstatement by another academic in an online interview, I was reported by KCL to the Nursing and Midwifery Council—despite my not being a registered nurse. KCL faculty themselves filed the “incident report” to distance the institution from me.

When I researched Gillick competence and medical consent in minors, a DEI officer demanded to see my manuscript, merely because it reviewed a small number of court transcripts from transgender cases. “Future work on race, gender, or transgender issues,” I was told, “must be sent to a DEI team member for approval.” This was not peer review—it was political pre-clearance.

Universities are no longer content to gatekeep hiring and promotion. They now claim authority over the research questions you may pursue, the words you may speak, and the conclusions you may draw.

A Pattern

From Australia to New Zealand to Britain; my experiences are consistent:

· Expelled for questions.

· Failed for persistence.

· Harassed for being male.

· Exploited for money.

· Kept precarious to ensure conformity.

· Accused and condemned without evidence.

· Blacklisted across institutions.

· Threatened for research that cuts against fashion.

This is no longer about me as an individual. It is a system-wide problem. Higher education, once the home of open debate and fearless inquiry, has become an ideological machine—financially exploiting our children, policing behavior, stifling dissent, enforcing conformity, and punishing whistleblowers.

Context: The Free Speech Wars

We see the same battles all across society today. Governments push “disinformation units” to police online speech. Corporations censor debate around medicine, gender, climate, and immigration. Universities, far from resisting, have become enforcement arms: hunting “wrong thinkers,” ostracising dissenters, and sacking and deplatforming anyone who challenges orthodoxy.

What better way to silence whistleblowers about misconduct, fraud, or bad science than to tar them with accusations of racism, misogyny, or “disinformation”? What better way to protect entrenched bureaucracies most often staffed by middle-aged white liberals than to purge talented but awkwardly independent-thinking staff?

The new academic value is not truth, but conformity.

Not rigor, but allegiance.

And those of us who resist pay with our livelihoods.

The Call

The point of telling this story is not self-pity. It is alarm. If I can be silenced despite strong research, high evaluations, publications, grants, and public engagement—then so can anyone.

Academic freedom is not a luxury. It is the foundation of universities’ very existence. Without it, we are seeing education decay into indoctrination, research collapse into propaganda, and society has lost one of its last remaining arenas for truth-seeking.

Whistleblowing is not misconduct. Questioning consensus is not hate speech. Pursuing politically inconvenient research is not harm. These are the duties of academics.

The system is broken. It has become a factory of fear and conformity run by HR bureaucrats and ideological enforcers instead of scholars. It must be reformed—fundamentally. Permanent contracts must replace precarity. Anonymous complaints and confidential reports must not be used as portable weapons. DEI departments cannot police research output. And universities must restore freedom of speech as their highest principle.

Until then, more promising academics will be hounded out, more truths will be buried, and more injustice will flourish under the guises of “diversity”, “tolerance”, “inclusion” and “safety.”

The wars over “disinformation” and “free speech” are not abstract. They are being fought right now inside the very heart of our universities. If we do not defend academic freedom today, we will reap only silence tomorrow.

My Situation

I am one of many being hounded out of academia. But I ask you: Please consider my story before you or your child embarks on their academic journey. Do they really need the qualification? Will the debt it creates be commensurate with the future outcome? Do you really want to spend years undertaking a Masters and PhD to join the ranks of an academia that is so fraught and corrupt? Going into academia has meant losing the long-established IT career I had. Going into academia might also now mean losing the house I spent everything to buy in order to be close to London and King’s campuses, and having to distance myself from my young son so there is no potential for financial blowback on him.

That said, the one thing that going into academia has done for me is that it has shown me how and why so many people in our world - in medicine, in pharmaceuticals, in education, in agribusiness, in politics, in social services, in the tech industry, and in the media - have all become corrupted. The corruption of body, mind and spirit now starts in kindergarten (here). It pervades all of education (here, here and here). But it gets reinforced and amplified when our children go to university. Even worse than that, it is the corrupt academics at the universities that complete the link and perpetuate the cycle; they create the corruption and teach it to university students who become the next generation of teachers, those teachers go on to teach ideology as scientific fact and indoctrinate children in schools all around the country, those children grow up repeatedly hearing and absorbing incredible nonsense that gets reinforced and expanded upon when they too go to university. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The eight years of academic probation I have endured, including the last three at King’s College London, has taken a stiff toll. Universities use academic probation to restrict the academic’s access to pay rises and promotion. Made worse in my case because King’s demoted me from Senior Lecturer, which had been my title with commensurate pay grade in my immediately previous role, to Lecturer.

It is really beginning to feel like my race is run. I have been diligently applying for a variety of roles both within and outside academia. IT companies and departments, like those where I worked for almost two decades before coming to academia, have directly or indirectly judged me either too old, overqualified, or too long out of “the game” for consideration in the senior systems engineer, infrastructure architect, IT Manager or Project Manager roles I used to excel at. More than twenty universities have sent me rejection emails seemingly without any consideration of my qualifications, potential or long-established skillsets in computer science, digital health, Bayesian modelling for intelligent decision-support, or health and cyber law. As at 10:00am this morning I have received 43 faceless and curt rejection emails in two weeks.

I have no family or support structure in the UK which further limits some of my options. My son is already afraid that he will be sent overseas to live with family he hardly knows because, absent some luck and without the benefit of a new job, I will be forced to put my house up for sale in less than six weeks.

This is the legacy of contemporary academia.

*******

Academia used to be like the left side of this image: all about facts, figures, and the search for truth. Today academia is more like the right side: an abstract toxic mess linked to rainbows and lunacy and lacking of any scientific rigor.

The first few people who read this post asked me to provide a link so that they could support me as I navigate my new-found unemployment. On their encouragement I have set up a Buy Me A Coffee Page:

Even better: If you are hiring for a role that I might be suitable for so that I can keep my lights on and pay my bills, drop me a private message

Thank you to everyone who reads my Substack. You are a fantastic bunch of people.