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11 August 2026 - 1:15pm
University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice breached whistleblowing protections, according to the judgment of an employment tribunal this week.
Wyn Evans, a professor of astrophysics at Cambridge, had brought a legal case against the University for tolerating misogynistic bullying, also accusing bosses of retaliating against whistleblowers. Prentice was named in Evans’s case, and was cross-examined by the tribunal over her role in handling accusations of bullying.
The unanimous judgment, published yesterday, found that the Vice-Chancellor was responsible for “mishandling” Evans’s grievances. It also stated that Prentice oversaw “a pattern of complaints being ignored or dismissed without examination”. According to the tribunal, “there was a shared desire to close down whistleblowing complaints which might be damaging to Cambridge University and the Institute of Astronomy.” The University’s handling of the matter was described as “problematic and deeply unsatisfactory”, while the evidence Prentice presented during her cross-examination was also deemed “unsatisfactory”.
Evans, who last year ran to be the University’s chancellor on an anti-bullying platform, alleged that one female academic had been “hounded” out of her job, while others had been left “frightened” by “aggressive professors”. In a written submission to the tribunal, one of the female staff members concerned compared her treatment to “psychological torture”.
Yesterday’s judgment concluded that Evans “was subjected to detriments” for his efforts to highlight discrimination. It added that allegations against him by his department head Richard McMahon were “subjected to a prolonged nearly two-year investigation by the University” despite there being “no evidence to support them”. Evans sought separate legal proceedings against McMahon, with a 2023 issues judgment finding that the department head had defamed him. In defending the defamation claim, McMahon received funding from the University of Cambridge’s insurance policy.
During the hearings, Prentice defended the rejection of one of Evans’s grievances by the University on the grounds that she had undertaken a full review of the relevant papers. The tribunal found this claim “highly unlikely given the volume of material going back very many years and the time and effort that would have taken for anyone, let alone someone in Professor Prentice’s very senior position”. It also concluded that a letter drafted in response to Evans’s claims under the Vice-Chancellor’s name had been “written solely” by then-University Registrary Emma Rampton, and that “Professor Prentice had very little to do with it, save for putting her name to it.”
Prentice was appointed as Cambridge Vice-Chancellor in September 2022, taking up her role the following summer. She previously served as provost of Princeton University, where she had taught since 1988, and received criticism for pandemic-era policies which were considered overly authoritarian. This Evans tribunal judgment follows weeks of scrutiny over the appointment and work of Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor accused of multiple counts of plagiarism and academic misrepresentation. Speaking ahead of this week’s decision, Evans said he had “lost all faith in the basic integrity of senior people at my university”.
