At least that is what British justice has meted out to him this past month. To understand how this all happened we need to go right back to the beginning. What I present here is no more than an abridged version of what has been happening in reference to this case and I recommend that you investigate further by taking a good look at a website called www.sirpeterscott.com while you still can, because it is quite possible that this site may well be removed in the future. For now let us begin at the beginning.
Dr Fredrics is a composer and sound designer, not the type of person one would normally associate with the acts of aggression he has been convicted of. He is well respected within his profession and has had a distinguished career in education in the USA for the past twenty years and more prior to his appointment as Senior Lecturer of Music Technology at Kingston University – London which is where the story starts.
In June 2005 11 members of staff at Kingston University were persuaded to file a collective grievance against Howard Fredrics. It would appear that this grievance was compiled in response to various questions raised by Dr Fredrics about some of the internal verification processes of the University. There was also the question of Dr Fredrics refusal to sign a grievance against another member of staff early in 2003. Howard was unhappy with the way this grievance was solicited and in fact asked questions about the legality of putting a grievance together in this way asking whether or not the University had contravened its own policies in handling the matter in this way.
Howard Fredrics was formally dismissed from his position as Senior Lecturer at Kingston University in 2006. It is not quite clear if the website www.sirpeterscott.com was born before or after Dr Fredrics dismissal. What is clear is that Dr Fredrics and other contributors to the site have not been shy about publishing facts about Kingston University which paint a very ugly picture of malcontent and misadventure. In an attempt in May 2009 to shut down the site Sir George Peter Scott (Professor) the vice chancellor of Kingston University appealed to the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) on the basis that the name sirpeterscott was protected as a trade mark however the WIPO ruled that his complaint was not upheld and the ownership of the domain name remains with Dr Fredrics. Having spent four thousand pounds of tax payers money on trying to block the website you can understand Sir Peters disappointment at the ruling although the HEFC’s decision that this was an acceptable use of public funding must have softened the blow. However it didn’t stop there, and soon Dr Fredrics was about to received a summons to answer an accusation of harassment.
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I few minor points of fact correction. I didn't actually do anything actively to formally object to or block the collective grievance against the other member of staff. Rather, I simply declined to participate in it. I did, however, put in a formal grievance about the way in which the separate collective grievance was filed and pursued against me. However, prior to putting in this grievance, I raised a number of other concerns about health and safety, about academic misconduct, about what I found to be plans to effectively water down the rigour of the curriculum, about the way in which we as a School responded to concerns raised by one of our External Examiners, and about various related quality-of-service issues, as required of me in my contract. The website was, I believe, instituted in around April 2007, following a decision by the University to deny allegations that a voice heard on a recording obtained during a Board of Governors' grievance appeal hearing was that of the Vice-Chancellor, and after the University Secretary wrote a series of threatening letters to my wife, to my solicitor and myself between January and March of 2007 in an attempt to obtain control of ALL existing copies of the above recording.
Thank you very much for your corrections. No doubt there will be further opportunities to keep the facts straight as I continue with this story.
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