We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram

I am a long term member of Birkbeck College (BBK) - since 1987 no less. I hold two degrees of the College a BA in History and a Masters in Law (remember that “Law” for it’s importance will soon become apparent).

I am a member of Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four Inns of Court for Barristers) and a Certified Paralegal. You might form the opinion that I know some smirch of knowledge about the Law and likewise a fair bit of knowledge about BBK itself.

Last year I was approached by a fellow PhD student in BBK who asked for my assistance with a complaint she had against the College.

I won’t go into the details of her case in order to maintain her confidentiality. However she was so aggrieved that she had launched a formal complaint and had engaged a firm of solicitors.

Acting on her legal team’s advice she had made a subject act under the Data Protection Act 1998(http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/ukpga_19980029_en_1).

Now that Act requires the Data Controller to acknowledge receipt of the request and to inform the Subject if they have to pay the £10.00 fee. BBK dithered and dallied. They exceeded the 40 days laid down by the Act. They pretended that they had not received the request.

Finally the solicitors complained to the Office of the Information Commissioner. Following this BBK had a hasty back down. They then decided that lawyers are baaad medicine and attempted to freeze them out leaving the student without advice or representation. The documents they released showed all of their shenanigans including a senior academic stating that the lawyers were silly to send it by fax as you couldn’t prove sending or receipt. The next document was the said fax with a nice received date stamp and his initials on it indicating he had seen it before he claimed he had not. A clear case of “liar, liar pants on fire”

And that’s where I came in. As a member of College I have the right to represent another student and of course as a lawyer I have the knowledge and ability to do so. I should add that I am doing so on a pro bono (or as a friend put it pro bonobo) basis.

We agree a hearing date for the Appeal. Imagine our surprise when BBK appointed a senior academic from a department merging with the student’s home department (and which would have been fully merged by the hearing) as the Chair of the Panel. BBK’s Regulations for Panels states that

“Members of a College Complaints Panel shall be independent of the complaint and independent of any School, programme or Service that may be directly concerned with the complaint. Birkbeck Student Complaints Procedure section 6.1.1 (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/qev/reg/regs/complaints_pdf).

We complained about this but the College administrator (the same sweetheart who had ballsed up the Data Protection application) charged with putting the panel together initially refused to budge. This meant that we had to approach the putative Chair of the Panel directly and warn her of the legal consequences of going ahead.

She withdrew!

We than offered mediation as a means of settling the dispute. Now there are standards for mediation and one of the basic ones is that both parties have to be able to accept the mediator and that to permit this the mediator has to be totally impartial. We suggested a number of well respected mediators and were prepared to consider proposals from BBK. Then our old friend the Great Administrator (who in emails we obtained was discussing gamesmanship with the defendant department) indicated that he and only he would make the choice and he was going to appoint a BBK employee. Again we screamed “foul”. We offered them one last chance to come up with an independent mediator or the blame for the failure of mediation would lie on them.

They chose to re-start the Appeal process.

Then the Great Administrator pulled his sweetest stunt yet. He influenced the new Chair of the new Panel to ask the defendant for a better defence. He did this one week before the hearing was due.
He told us 48 hours before the hearing was due and provided us with the new defence less than 24 hours before the hearing. We asked for 2 things.

1. An adjournment so we could study the new defence. This was refused. The Great Procrastinator chose to argue that the Appeal had to be held to save time!

2. We asked if we in turn could submit a new ground of complaint (based on the procedural irregularity) and also lead new medical evidence. This was refused. The Great Procrastinator citing a College Regulation that prevented new grounds or evidence within 4 days of a hearing.

Again we cried foul and were prepared to seek an injunction against BBK to prevent an obvious miscarriage of Justice.

One outcome of this was that the Great Administrator & Procrastinator declared that I was off the case. He seemed to believe that he could decide who my client could have to represent her. How very Stasi!

These antics had caused my client to become very sick at this point.
We then made one last offer to BBK to enter into negotiations with us. They allowed our time limit to pass without answering.

We also asked for a Letter of Completion on the basis that given that they had twice failed to set up a fair and independent panel and had refused both mediation and negotiations there was no way we could get a fair hearing.

This time we got a response - from the Great Procrastinator’s boss (the Lord High Procrastinator?) re-iterated that as far as BBK were concerned I was off the case.

He then went on to say that the Great Procrastinator (shy and retiring bully that he is) had also been withdrawn from the case “in order to protect his wellbeing.” Ah bless!

He added that BBK was considering bringing disciplinary charges against me.

Now I am a lawyer. I am doing my job defending the interests of my client against gross administrative abuses and practices which to quote Lord Atkins in Liversidge v Anderson [1942] AC 206

“In this case I have listened to arguments which might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of Kings Bench in the time of Charles I.
I protest, even if I do it alone”
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1941/1.html

There is a word for governance systems which seek to punish lawyers for “defending the children of the poor” and that is tyranny.

This attempt to silence me is cack-handed, but serious for all that. The entire weight of a College administrative structure with all of its powers and back doors communications has been brought to bear on one individual student. They have attempted to strip away every support she might have.

And when they have been caught out they have behaved like bullies everywhere and blamed everyone but themselves – indeed they go so far as to paint themselves as the poor wee victims.

I suspect that they are too mean to take legal advice and too stupid to realize that this cannot be hushed up internally by a kangaroo court.

I suspect that my client’s case will be featuring in the Courts soon enough and if they are foolish enough to attack me then as sure as light follows day they will be back in court.

More pertinently I would invite them to consider tha answer given to the Plaintiff in the famous case of Arkell v. Pressdram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkell_v._Pressdram#Litigation