Metrics critic’s marching orders


A lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London who has criticized the institution’s performance-based redundancy program has had his contract terminated, the Times of Higher Education reports.

Simon Gaskell, Queen Mary’s principal, last week confirmed that Fanis Missirlis, a lecturer in the university’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, would be made redundant.

As previously reported in Times Higher Education, Missirlis was among 11 of the school’s roughly 70-strong staff deemed to be “at risk” after failing to meet its metrics-based performance criteria, such as the number of papers published.

He has also faced four disciplinary investigations since he joined Queen Mary in 2007. One concerned a letter he wrote to students last November claiming that tuition fees of more than £6,000 could not be justified on the basis of teaching cost. Another related to a letter he co-wrote to medical journal The Lancet earlier this year criticizing Queen Mary’s redundancy program, which also affects its School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The college claimed the letter brought two senior figures overseeing the program “into disrepute.”

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