An economics professor who was pursued unfairly for misconduct over a study of racism in Brisbane bus drivers has said his case highlighted the unchecked power of university hierarchies to punish academics “for research they don’t like”.
Paul Frijters, whose research was suppressed in a disciplinary process ruled invalid by the Fair Work Commission, has called for legal changes to give academics greater workplace protection.
The 2012 study, titled “Still Not Allowed on the Bus: It Matters if you’re Black or White!”, found bus drivers were half as likely to waive fares for black commuters who lacked transport card credit than for white commuters.
A complaint about “fare evasion” upon its publication in 2013 prompted the university to disown the research and forbid further discussion in the media.
In 2014 acting pro-vice-chancellor Alistair McEwan had written to the Brisbane council bus company apologising for an “unacceptable” ethics breach around lack of “voluntary informed consent” from drivers and “gatekeeper approval” by the council.
McEwan said the study had not been submitted for approval to the university’s ethics committee, which would have rejected it.
The university’s vice-chancellor, Peter Høj later wrote to the company to “clarify that no allegation is maintained against Professor Frijters to the effect that he wrongly failed to obtain voluntary informed consent from each participant or ‘gatekeeper’ approval from the Brisbane city council”.
“The university notes that the issue of what consents or approvals should have been gained would have been a matter for the university’s ethics committee to determine,” Høj said.
On Wednesday the Fair Work commissioner Michelle Bissett found the university’s investigation of Frijters “infected by error from so early on that the fairest thing” would be for it to start again.
She found “substantial flaws and a lack of procedural fairness” in its treatment of Frijters, whose case has rallied the support of dozens of prominent academics.
Frijters’s supporters include the shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, who cited his research on wealth creation in announcing Labor’s competition policy last month on the federal election campaign trail.
Gigi Foster, Frijters’s co-author on that research, said his case was “unique” in western universities. It was “the only example I know of where a university vice-chancellor knowingly and repeatedly broke university procedures for more than three years to try to cover up evidence of racial prejudices, even after being informed about this directly in April 2014”, she said.
“The unproven excuse was that the original research did not have appropriate ethical clearance despite the fact that it was funded by the university itself and signed off by it.”
The university continued to pursue Frijters despite the findings of Andrew Crowden, an external ethics consultant it asked to look at the case and who found its actions “overly harsh and inappropriately punitive”.
Crowden said the study should have gone to the ethics committee for approval but that the university should share the mistake because its own procedures had failed.
Bissett found it was not for the tribunal “to indicate the fairness or otherwise of Professor Frijters being put through the process again” but this was “always a likely outcome”.
He suggested political intervention was the only remedy to the unchecked power of university hierarchies to punish researchers through endless misconduct investigations, even on trivial grounds.
Frijters said his case showed “university hierarchies can pretty much punish academics afterwards for any research they didn’t like and there seems to be no court in which they themselves can be held accountable”.
“Effectively they are a law unto themselves and, in principle, they can find you seriously guilty of misconduct for mislabelling your teabag,” he said.
“That may be struck down as unfair later on but it’ll put you through huge expense and stress and they can just keep going. It brings to the fore that university governance regulation has to be looked at and that is a job for the politicians.”
Frijters said he had tired of battling the university hierarchy – which had indicated in the trial it planned to renew misconduct proceedings – and planned to move on, holding talks already with “several possible future employers in three different continents”.
“There is no mechanism to stop them investigating you forever, no double jeopardy law, or in this case a triple jeopardy law as I was investigated twice.
“I see no way to hold the university hierarchy – which now has been found to have broken its own procedures systematically over three years … to account. There’s no police commissioner you can inform about this, so they get away with it, which is a sad state of affairs.”
A university spokeswoman said: “All research, no matter how meretorious, must be carried out in accordance with applicable ethical standards and approvals. The university followed its disciplinary procedures in good faith based on information that this may not have occurred in this instance. The decision does not suggest there was not a proper basis for the university to do so. The decision deals only with the procedural issues in that process.”
• Editor’s note: This story was amended on 20 June to correct earlier assertions that Frijters had been demoted by the University of Queensland, and that the vice chancellor Peter Høj “drove” the disciplinary process against Frijters.
