NEWS
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Cancel Cambridge
Student calls out ‘racism’ in
PhD withdrawal letter.
T
he University of Cambridge is
making headlines after a PhD
student publicly announced she was
withdrawing from her studies due to the
racism she says she witnessed.
In a piece written for open publishing
platform Medium, Indiana Seresin detailed
the incidents that led to her decision to
leave “the rare privilege of a fully funded
PhD position at what is theoretically one of
the best universities in the world”.
One such incident involved a lecturer
repeatedly reading aloud the n-word during
class discussions and the pushback she said
she faced when challenging the action.
The “final straw” for Seresin, whose
PhD focuses on speculative archives
in contemporary art and literature, was
when staff from the School of Arts and
Humanities’ Doctoral Training Program
invited Ghanaian scholar Akosua Adomako
Ampofo to deliver its annual lecture.
Seresin said Ampofo’s speech – which
detailed anti-blackness and anti-African
prejudice in academia – was framed by the
director of the program as “controversial
and provocative”.
The former PhD student added that the
director said he “couldn’t quite wrap his
head around” the speech.
Medical records ‘heist’
Google and US university face potential class action.
I
t was meant to improve healthcare and save lives, but a project
between Google and the University of Chicago has put the two
organisations in hot water.
In May 2017, the University of Chicago Medicine Center
announced it was collaborating with Google to study the use of
data in electronic medical records to create predictive models that
could help prevent unplanned hospital readmissions and lower
healthcare costs.
At the time of the announcement, Dr Michael Howell, chief
quality officer at UChicago Medicine, said prediction helps to
create better patient care.
“Traditional tools of epidemiology and statistics simply can’t
use free text or images to create predictive algorithms that could
alert physicians and nurses about patients’ risks for problems. But
together with Google we can,” he explained.
6
Seresin wrote: “This method of veiling
racism through a performance of faux
humility and bumbling foolishness,
which is something of a tradition
among the British elite classes, served
to undermine the simple and important
point Professor Ampofo was making.”
As The Telegraph reported, a university
spokesperson said the institution strives
to create a culture “free from racism,
discrimination, prejudice and harassment”.
On the subject of the n-word being
used in classrooms, the representative
said: “The Teaching Forum, which
included students, met and following
a well-informed exchange of views, it
was decided that there should be no
prescriptive rules on what language is
appropriate to reference when reading from
texts, but that academics should consider
the contemporary and political discourse
around particular words or terms.”
The spokesperson added that the
University of Cambridge has introduced
a number of prevention initiatives and
anonymous reporting options to help
staff and students report harassment or
discrimination. ■
Two years on, the team has gathered the data needed, but some
believe it has broken its promise on what it would do with it.
Subsequently, a class action complaint was filed. The plaintiff,
Matt Dinerstein, brought it against both Google and the university.
He alleged the tech giant pulled off “what is likely the greatest heist
of consumer medical records in history”.
“The compromised personal information is not just run-of-
the-mill like credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, or
even social security numbers, which nowadays seem to be the
subject of daily hacks; rather, the personal medical information
obtained by Google is the most sensitive and intimate information
in an individual’s life, and its unauthorised disclosure is far more
damaging to an individual’s privacy.”
In his complaint, Dinerstein said the university gave Google
confidential medical records for its own commercial gain.
At the time of the project’s announcement, Katherine Chou
of Google’s brain team said its healthcare partners ensured that
patient data was appropriately de-identified prior to sharing.
“We then used Google Cloud’s infrastructure to keep the data
stored securely with the highest level of protections and to strictly
follow HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act]
privacy rules. The records are kept separate from consumer data
and will only be used in our partnership research projects,” she said.
As reported in The Hill newspaper, UChicago Medicine
spokesperson Ashley Heher said the lawsuit was without merit.
“[The] research partnership was appropriate and legal, and the
claims asserted in this case are baseless and a disservice to the
Medical Center’s fundamental mission of improving the lives of
its patients," she said. ■