Academia: They’re Doubling Down on their Disrespect

I wanted to update you on what has happened in the ten working days since I was dismissed from King’s.

They want what I can do for them, they just don’t want me

Since receiving my marching orders from King’s several things have happened in rapid succession.

First:

I had two different higher-ranked academics in the nursing school request the complete course materials for the popular digital health module I developed and taught. While they already had access to the complete 12-week set of lecture slides, the assignment prescription and the supplemental readings in their online learning environment, what they appeared to be demanding was the actual narrative, the talk I give, when presenting each lecture. In much the same way actors put their own custom and indelible take onto a character in a tv series that a substitute actor can never quite match, the art of delivering the lecture is, or should be considered, a copyrighted performance. Two lecturers delivering the same material verbatim will never quite put the same inflections on the same key points, and will never have had the same extant experiences that are captured in the experiential anecdotes they might use to support those points. The module I developed was built in no small part on my own experiences over almost two-decades in IT, and more specifically with the systems, software and users of a broad range of health information systems (HIS). Neither of the people who wanted my lecture notes had any experience at all in HIS beyond briefly being a clinical user entering patient data into a specific HIS, and while they could easily facilitate the more basic student-led portions of my curriculum they would have been entirely unable to support the technical or experiential discourse necessary for getting to those student-led discussions. It wasn’t the material alone that made the course so popular. It was the combination of my material, my knowledge and experience in both the IT systems and user domains and the particular way I led the class that made it popular and resulted in extremely positive student evaluations in the top quartile.

My Digital Health and Technology Solutions module had eight confirmed enrolments for Semester 1 of the new academic year (September-December 2025) as at the start of last week, and over the last ten days has had another five clinical users select it as an optional elective and three further enrolment enquiries by email. This means it could have had thirteen confirmed enrolments and potentially sixteen total students. For a small elective module where the university charge £3,400 per student, that represents between £44,200-£54,400 of lost revenue. Beyond that, the module was a required course in Semester 2 through the Nursing School’s Chinese partner – Hong Kong University Space – as part of their Clinical Nursing MSc (see image). I had already been told that the likely enrolment for Semester 2 (January-April 2026) from HKUSpace was twelve – representing a further £40,800 in lost revenue for King’s, a total of almost £95,000 for the year and around double what King’s had been paying me.

Conclusion: They want my module and the potential income it can bring. They just don’t want me.

Second:

While my maternal outcomes model research was initially rejected for publication 4 times by academic journals that included AI in Medicine (AIM) and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), it was eventually peer reviewed and published first at the prestigious IEEE International Conference on Health Informatics (here), and later with more expansive detail and validation in the highly regarded journal Computers in Biology and Medicine (here). In total now three different researchers within the King’s Nursing school, including two in midwifery who I had previously invited to collaborate with me on my maternal outcomes Bayesian AI clinical decision-support model but who had rejected that invitation, have come forward seeking whether there is any remaining open research or data from the project that I might simply give to them because they asked nicely.

Conclusion: They didn’t want to collaborate with me on my research, but since some of it got published they are happy to take any data and open research questions or unpublished findings I might have as I am being escorted abruptly to the door.

Third:

In the engineering and computer sciences school at QMUL it had been common for the school to offer to support the research grant application by providing one or more PhD students fees and stipends when academics such as myself were applying to UKRI funders for a significant research grant (for example, my PhD fees had been covered by the school as part of the package the school put forward to demonstrate support for Professor Norman Fenton’s PamBayesian funding application to the EPSRC). In contrast, professors in King’s nursing school emphatically told me I would not receive such support. A school offering to use part of their almost 50% portion of the grant to support at least one PhD student is often seen as a necessary element that, when absent, can almost entirely reduce the likelihood that your project will be funded. True to their denial, not one of the six primary funding applications I made includes anything more than a letter saying that I worked there and they would continue to support my post for the duration of the project, if funded – and at least one didn’t even include that. When other funding applications included far more expansive support from the host school and mine did not, is it any wonder mine were rejected without even being sent out for peer review?

This also meant that in order to build my academic profile and ensure I had the necessary minimum two PhD supervisions on my record for my academic probation, I had to find self- or employer-funded PhD candidates. Demonstrating that I am never one to shy away from a seemingly impossible challenge in today’s financially restrictive and almost-recessional financial environment, by the end of the second year of my academic probation I had secured two – the first is a nurse educator whose PhD was funded by her academic employer in Indonesia, and the other is a British-Zimbabwean workplace health and safety nurse who was initially self-funded but we have since been able to secure full funding from her mining industry employer.

Within only about twelve weeks of the first PhD student starting her project at King’s, she had been approached not once, but three times by the Senior Lecturer they had employed and given the digital health hub seat and funding I had originally been told I would receive as part of my post. That senior lecturer without establishing a reason for her own inclusion, first asked the PhD student to ask me to include her as a third supervisor on the PhD project and, when I declined, impressed upon the student that she could demand that I allow it. After I demonstrated that I had actually read the doctoral regulations at King’s, and that those regulations only allowed for inclusion of a third supervisor where there was a significant need to justify inclusion, the matter appeared to be dropped. Except that it wasn’t. When my PhD student presented the results of her initial scoping review at an internal postgraduate students research seminar, the same senior lecturer again approached her and sought for the student to work with and publish her results with her, rather than with her PhD supervisors as is normal. Among other issues I have with the way this senior lecturer comports to self-promote both herself and her research, I find it equal parts unethical and despicable that she would attempt to poach another academic’s successful PhD student.

Incredibly, three hours hadn’t passed from my receiving the academic probation decision that I was immediately fired before I received the first of multiple emails asking me whether I had told my PhD students and who, as first supervisor, I would be giving them to. The eventual consensus between several of the academics emailing on this issue was that they were going to give them both to that same senior lecturer. So not only had the senior academics in the school not once admonished her for her unethical and despicable behaviour, they were going to be complicit in it by rewarding her for it!

Conclusion: Ultimately they want the almost £30,000 per year my two PhD students bring in. However, they again just don’t want me.

Fourth:

While I had been promised by two senior academics, both professors, that I would be given the opportunity to meet with and advise both PhD students of my departure before anyone in the faculty stepped in, one of those same two professors, the one who unashamedly supports giving both to the senior lecturer, called up the second of my PhD students at home and told her. Even after that PhD student told her she had not had a formal meeting with me yet as one had been scheduled for the following week, the professor proceeded in telling her anyway. That student formally, in writing, advised that not only was her funding and ethics approval was secured with my assistance, but that I was named on both and continued funding at least might be contingent on my ongoing supervision of the research. She concluded by stating that she expected King’s nursing school to ensure and maintain my ongoing supervision of her PhD – after all, she had come to King’s seeking to work with me, not someone else.

The professor who made the phone call to the student proceeded by email to tell me I should agree to be a silent third supervisor on the student’s project – as my inclusion would meet the test for approving a third supervisor. However, I would be required to provide that support in my own time and, more importantly, for free. King’s are happy to take around £10,000 in fees per year from that second student but they were demonstrating sheer academic greed in their unwillingness to spend any of that money to provide the support or resources the student was requesting.

Conclusion: They not only wanted to retain the income and any potential research publications from my PhD students, they wanted me to continue to provide my three decades of health information systems knowledge, extensive qualifications and technical abilities to those students as a silent, unnamed, third supervisor for free and, I suppose you could say, out of the goodness of my heart.

Thank You

In the week since I came out publicly and shared with you all how King’s had sacked me and the unfortunate position this placed me in, the outpouring of support has been overwhelming. Not only have some of you used your own platforms to share my story both here on substack and through other online media (including the amazing Professors Fenton and Neil at Where are the Numbers, the inimitable Clare Craig at Hart, and even the awesome folks at The Conservative Woman).

But further, three of you asked me to set up a Buy Me A Coffee page and around fifty of you absolutely wonderful people have made donations there. I have been moved by your generosity. Your £1,200 will keep the mortgage paid and the lights on for an extra couple of weeks while I navigate the frighteningly dark space that is trying to find a new job (more on that minefield of demons and vampires in my next article). I also extend my thanks to another of my readers who surprised my son and I with a gift that appeared unannounced this morning – I will email you separately after this post goes ‘live’.

To all of you I say an emotional and truly heartfelt Thank You.