Connie St Louis - A Very Flawed Accuser (Of Sir Tim Hunt)

By Mike Buchanan: Another ‘academic’ nominates herself for a ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award. Connie St Louis is an ‘academic’ at London’s City University, where she’s been employed for over 10 years to run a postgraduate course in science journalism. Her report on remarks in a speech made by Sir Tim Hunt (72) – a Nobel prize-winning biologist – led to his resignation as an Honorary Professor at UCL. The university has made it clear it’s not prepared to reinstate him, despite a well-deserved outcry against his treatment.
Guy Adams has written an outstanding piece on Ms St Louis, which appears in today’s print version of the Daily Mail. It’s a lengthy piece, which is spread over two pages of the paper, but this excerpt should give you a flavour:

Earlier this year, she stood, successfully, in an election to become a board member of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ). As part of the election process, St Louis was required to present a detailed CV to voters.
This document, which stretches to six pages, is still on the WFSJ’s website. It contains several deeply questionable statements.
In an early passage, she for example writes: ‘I am a regular contributor to ABC News Worldview TV programme.’ Yet ABC News Worldview has not aired for roughly five years.
Factiva, an online search engine which carried transcripts of it, suggests that the last recorded contribution by Connie St Louis to the show was on May 31, 2006.

In another early passage, St Louis writes that she has a second career working for quangos.
‘In November 2002, I was invited and subsequently appointed by the Minister responsible for media, sport and culture to be a board member of UK Sport (the former UK Sports Council) . . . My term of office ended last year but I continue to serve on the audit committee as an external member.’
UK Sport describes things differently. A spokesman says St Louis was appointed to the board in November 2002 but she left in 2005.
St Louis did not respond when asked by the Mail how she can, therefore, claim, in a CV published in 2015, to have been a board member of UK Sport until ‘last year’.
Elsewhere in the six-page CV is a section devoted to ‘Qualification and Training’. In it, St Louis trumpets the fact that she is ‘a member of the Royal Institution’.
Again, very prestigious. Or so it seems, until a spokesman for the Royal Institution told me: ‘Anyone can be a member. It’s simply a service you pay for which entitles you to free tickets to visit us and gives you a discount in our cafe.
‘It’s like having membership of your local cinema or gym.’
Why would someone include such a thing on their CV?
‘Actually, that’s a bit of a problem,’ the spokesman added. ‘We have heard of a few people using membership on their CV to imply that they have some sort of professional recognition or qualification. But it means nothing of the sort. It’s very, very odd to see this on a CV.’
St Louis did not respond when the Mail asked why she cited this membership as a ‘qualification’.

 

(Photo right: Sir Tim Hunt)

 

Source