Can you post a few links?
Sure. I got a bit distracted by the riot thread, lol.
Sadly I've lost the puff piece that started my descent into the rabbit hole, but Alan North was in the alumni mag in a nice fluffy article in which it mentioned that he was married to Annemarie Suprenant and had a son called Adrian (lol, no relation).
I don't know when they met, but Suprenant's less-than-stellar honesty started back in the 90s:
Here's Suprenant's rap sheet for faking credentials in 1994: "
Annmarie Surprenant, Ph.D., Glaxo Institute for Molecular Biology. An
inquiry and investigation conducted by the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) found that Annmarie Surprenant, Ph.D., had
misrepresented her academic credentials in a grant application for Public Health Service (PHS) research funds."
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North got her a job at Manchester (see below) but in 2009 she was forced to resign after an "exam marking scandal" (for which understand, gave everyone As without bothering to read them) that made the local news:
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And then the national news:
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It made it all the way to the Times Higher Ed supplement, which sadly I cannot access because it is paywalled, but basically meant academia in the whole country was aware of it, especially by 2010 when some other academics decided to stick up for her.
As usual, the real fun comes in the commentary. Here is a blog of a fellow academic that does some nice editorializing about what happened:
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Now for the absolute best source of anything: completely unsubstantiated scurrilous gossip. Comments on one of the blog pieces:
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This is the choicy part about Suprenant's hire:
North lasted as Dean until the following year, and then quit:
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It would be a lot more fun if I could work out if Harrop was in any of her classes or, god forbid, one of the lucky recipients of her can't-be-bothered-to-read-this-shit As. It's an odd coincidence that he claims to have been punished for rushing off to the States to see his grandmother, when Suprenant seems to have been rushing off to the States when she failed to read those exams. <shrug>