How can University College London be taken seriously after the Tim Hunt affair?

Question: which comes out worse from the Tim Hunt affair – the lynch mob on Twitter which brought him down, or University College London, which pulled the rug from under both him and his immunologist wife once they gathered that one of their own had said something off message? It’s a tough call, but I reckon, UCL, on the basis that it formerly had some academic and intellectual credibility whereas rationality was never the strong suit of the Twitter mob – the contemporary equivalent of the women who, in Greek myth, tore Orpheus to pieces for reason’s we’d better not go into.

Tim Hunt and Mary Collins have had their say in the papers over the weekend, in The Guardian and the Mail on Sunday, and the pieces make heartbreaking reading. His wife observed of their treatment by UCL:

‘I was told by a senior that Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked – though I was told it would be treated as a low-key affair.