Mr Tom Kirk, Counsel For the v Respondent — 2024

Dr Graham, a black priority candidate of Afro-Caribbean heritage, applied for the University of Cambridge post of Assistant Professor in Second Language Education. The tribunal found that the shortlisting criteria used by the four Professors were refined during the recruitment process, but that the refinements arose from collaborative academic discussion and were not devised to exclude him. It accepted that the committee did not know or rely on his race when it scored his application, and that the decision not to shortlist him was based on its assessment of the relevance of his PhD, publications, teaching, supervision experience, and the need for immediate contribution to the Faculty’s RSLE teaching and supervision.

The tribunal accepted that Dr Graham did five protected acts under s.27 EqA 2010, and that the email sent by his solicitor on 7 June 2022 was a protected disclosure within s.43B ERA 1996. It nevertheless dismissed the race discrimination and victimisation claims. On the race claim, it held that the selection committee’s explanations for the scores given to Dr Graham were credible and objective, and that the procedural departures identified in the recruitment process affected all candidates rather than Dr Graham individually. On the victimisation claim, it held that the later refusal to take him to interview, and the review of his complaint by Professor Fisher and Professor Liu, would have been handled in the same way for any comparable priority candidate and were not materially influenced by the protected acts.

The tribunal also dismissed the whistleblowing complaints. It found that Ms Niven’s handling of the complaint, the time taken to progress the grievance, and the response to requests for information were not motivated by the protected disclosure, but were explained by the absence of a clear complaints procedure, her reliance on academic judgement about the recruitment decision, the need to constitute a grievance committee, and the tone and escalation of the correspondence. It criticised aspects of the handling as insufficiently proactive, but concluded that these shortcomings did not amount to detriments because of the disclosure. All live claims were dismissed; the disability discrimination complaints had been withdrawn at the start of the final hearing.