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Durham University has a wonderful category…

… on its faculty bios: INDICATORS OF ESTEEM. Of which Professor H M Evans has many.

He’s a medical ethicist, and has written papers with intriguing titles like Madness, medicine and creativity in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

And speaking of wonderful: Here’s a wonderful photo of Professor Evans holding his Advanced Purchase First Class train ticket.

A university professor who alighted his train one stop before his final destination was stunned when he was asked to pay £155 to leave the station.

Martyn Evans was told he would have to pay up after leaving the train at Darlington, near his home, rather than wait until Durham where he works at the university’s philosophy department.

… Station staff said his ticket was invalid because he had left the train too early, and was told he would have to pay some £155 – the price of the same ticket from Birmingham to Darlington.

Ethicists tend to be particularly prickly.

“The whole process made me feel like a wrongdoer from the beginning and that disgusted me more than just the money itself.”

He’s made such a stink, the trains have said okay, forget about the money.

Margaret Soltan, September 27, 2010 8:14AM
Posted in: professors

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One Response to “Durham University has a wonderful category…”

  1. Polish Peter Says:

    Actually, “esteem indicators” or “indicators of esteem” appear on most British faculty CVs thanks to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (and perhaps earlier iterations of this exercise), in which these were taken into account in determining a department’s quality ranking. I’m often amused by their self-reverential quality, even when I know the owner of the CV is hardly that sort of person.

    The last line in the article about Prof. Evans is choice:
    “‘We have contacted Professor Evans to discuss this with him and, as we accept this was a genuine mistake on his behalf, we have cancelled the excess fare he was charged on this occasion as a gesture of goodwill.” In other words, he acknowledged his guilt and the railway out of the goodness of its heart let him off with a reprimand. Swine.

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