In November 2016 I made a complaint to the NSW Ombudsman about UOW’s policies and procedures. This complaint asked the ombudsman to investigate the misuse of the University’s procedures by lobby group activists:
1) Why did the University of Wollongong allow a member of the public to make an anonymous fabricated complaint of ‘allegations of academic misconduct’ about student research that was completed 8 years prior to the complaint? This was a complaint by a member of the public who was known to the UOW executive for previous inappropriate behaviour in debating my research.
2) How was it possible for the UOW to implement an investigation into my research when the complainant did not provide any evidence to support his allegations? And when UOW Emeritus Professor Brian Martin stated that the allegations did not qualify as “academic misconduct allegations”. And
3) Why has the UOW allowed lobby group activists to use it’s procedures to harass and humiliate a UOW student? And to harm the credibity of the student’s PhD research in the media with false and misleading information about the assessment and content of my PhD?
4) UOW has also permitted academics who are not experts in social medicine (public health) to promote the government’s claims about vaccines on the UOW website. These academics have never researched in-depth the science and politics underpinning government vaccination policies. This is a specialised area of public health and humanities involving the science, politics, ethics and economic decisions in designing public health policy to protect community health. This was the specific topic of my in-depth PhD research.
Yet UOW academics have been permitted to promote the government’s claims about vaccine safety and efficacy without ever having researched this topic for themselves in-depth. In my opinion this is a breach of academic integrity by the University of Wollongong and it undermines the value of university degrees.
Instead of being required to debate the information I have provided in my PhD (or even to read my thesis) these UOW academics are permitted to mislead the public by promoting government policies that they have never researched. This contravenes the charter of universities.
The NSW Ombudsman replied on the 12 December 2017 without addressing these issues and stating that the review is closed and no further correspondence will be acknowledged or provided with a response unless it raises substantive new issues that warrant an action. Here is the response I provided to the NSW Ombudsman on 14 December 2017. To date I have not had a response to these concerns from the NSW Ombudsman.
