GMIT data breach shows ugly reality behind screen of aspirational inclusivity

A data breach at GMIT revealed offensive remarks made by professors of students. The Covid crisis can’t be used as an excuse for delaying issues of diversity, writes Úna Kealy

A nurturing, respectful and egalitarian culture is important within any work and learning community — it is vital within communities where diversity is welcome and facilitated: so, where did it go wrong for GMIT?

We have all experienced offensive and hurtful behaviour, similarly, we have all said and done things we regret and which reflect badly upon us. 

The reverberations and effect of behaving and speaking in careless and offensive ways or in being subjected to such language or behaviour is so much more humiliating and painful if this happens publicly.

Last week, two members of academic staff in GMIT made offensive remarks about students who had presented assessed work on Zoom: the lecturers did not know they were not alone in the Zoom classroom or that their conversation was recorded. 

Excerpts of that conversation, complete with students’ names and details, were subsequently published on social media as video files by one of the students involved. 

On Monday this week Dr Orla Flynn, President of GMIT, apologised “for the data breach that has caused such deep hurt and dismay” describing the Institute as “student-centred” insisting that “some of the comments” made by staff did not reflect the values of the Institute. 

Flynn articulates these values within the Institute’s 2020/2021 prospectus as “nurturing, respectful and egalitarian”; important principles given that GMIT facilitates access to third-level programmes through the Higher Education Access Route (HEAR) and the Disability Access Route to Education (DARE). 

HEAR offers third-level places on reduced points and extra support to those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds while DARE provides an alternative admissions scheme for school-leavers whose disabilities have negatively impacted on their second-level education. Additionally, GMIT offers Sanctuary Scholarships supporting those in the International Protection System to access third-level education. 

A nurturing, respectful and egalitarian culture is important within any work and learning community—it is vital within communities where diversity is welcome and facilitated: so, where did it go wrong for GMIT?

Perhaps a clue is found in the fact GMIT publicly apologised for the data breach but not for the offensive comments made by staff members suggesting the Institute is unwilling to acknowledge that, like many organisations, ugly realities and behaviours are active behind screens of language espousing aspirations of equality, diversity and inclusivity.

While GMIT references equality, diversity and inclusivity in its various online publications it offers no detailed definitions of these values: nowhere on the GMIT website does an equal opportunities policy exist suggesting that EDI matters are not carefully articulated or communicated within the GMIT community. 

While an EDI committee and an Athena Swan Self-Assessment Team exist and the GMIT 2020/2021 prospectus provides an overview of GMIT’s intention to attain technological university status within the Connaught/Ulster Alliance, there is no mention of how the values of equality, inclusivity and diversity will be pursued or demonstrated within that alliance. 

Also, despite the fact that diversity, equality and inclusion are grouped and listed as a strategic goal in the GMIT Strategic Plan 2019-23 the values are not identified as strategically enabled through innovations in teaching, research, cross-disciplinary projects, collaborative culture or facilities and infrastructure. 

It appears, from the Strategic Plan at least, that diversity, equality and inclusivity can be compartmentalised; included in some high-level goals but excluded from others.

For an organisation to demonstrate meaningful commitment to improving equality, diversity and inclusivity aspirational language must be made real, in carefully implemented action. This action must be strategically considered, implemented and monitored across all aspects of an organisation in order to educate staff and students that collective values, priorities and attitudes are shaped and exposed by language and behaviour. 

Language creates and reflects ideology, values and beliefs: derogatory judgements of anyone’s physical or intellectual ability, or the ways they may present these abilities, is offensive and inappropriate in any context. As is sharing people’s personal details in the public domain, even when doing so exposes offensive or inappropriate behaviour and language. 

The student who shared the lecturer’s conversation shared comments that related to students other than himself: the issue is complex; two ‘wrongs’ don’t necessarily make a ‘right’ in this instance. Some GMIT students involved in the assessment procedure last week were harmed initially by the comments made about them by professional educators and again when the recording of these comments went online and was shared and shared ad infinitum.

Failings in EDI awareness, integration and implementation are not particular to GMIT. In 2019 the Labour Court found in favour of Louise Walsh, a lecturer in Waterford Institute of Technology in a case of sexual harassment, when the court found that WIT did not do enough to prevent the harassment from taking place and, in September this year, Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin revealed the difficulties she experienced in taking a case of workplace harassment against a professorial colleague in UCD. 

Industrial relations and harassment cases, such as those taken by Walsh and Ní Shúilleabháin, attest to the fact that organisational culture is slow to change and that EDI reform within higher education remains challenging, difficult and is often compartmentalised.

Needless to say, coronavirus has not helped: academics, like everyone else, have been busy moving online; the GMIT website states that the last EDI event held within that Institute was in November 2019. My own organisation, facing similar challenges, has also postponed equality work and directed resources elsewhere. 

Una Kealy: "Language creates and reflects ideology, values and beliefs."

However, as we can see from the transcripts of the conversation between the two GMIT lecturers last week, matters of equality, diversity and inclusivity don’t stop for a pandemic: good and bad practice simply moves to occupy other spaces — in this case an online space which was vulnerable to an endless duplication of the damage. 

Organisations, of every sort, which may have paused EDI work as a result of the pandemic should now reflect on whether or not they can afford to compartmentalise or deprioritise activities that seek to reify aspirational values of equality, diversity and inclusivity. 

Organisational culture, language and behaviour must move away from that which discriminates, humiliates and perpetrates inequality and admitting ugly realities, as opposed to apologising for data breaches, can be a first step on the road to meaningful change.

• Úna Kealy is a lecturer in Theatre Studies and English within the School of Humanities, Waterford Institute of Technology. She currently serves as Equality Officer for the WIT Branch of the Teacher’s Union of Ireland and co-chairs the WIT TUI Equality Task Force.