A PROFESSOR claims she was dismissed after blowing the whistle on mismanagement at a Liverpool university “dogged by macho culture”.

The former director of Liverpool John Moores University’s language school, Prof Linda Archibald, made the claims at an employment tribunal yesterday.

Prof Archibald, who was at the university for nearly two decades, told the hearing that she had been bullied and undermined as the university carried out a restructuring programme.

She said: “I’ve lost my health, career and soon I will lose my home as well as my most valuable possession, my reputation.”

The 50-year-old academic alleges she was subject to sexual discrimination and eventually given compulsory redundancy from her £62,000-a-year job, in December, 2006. It all followed her blowing the whistle on massive institutional problems, she said.

The lecturer said: “There were phantom students, wrongly registered students, visa problems and students of dubious immigration status and fee problems.

“It was frustrating to see spreadsheets with one or two students on them when I had just come from teaching these classes in which there were 15.”

She went on to say there was “growing secrecy about faculty finances and any data produced created very huge levels of error.”

She added: “There was a cavalier attitude towards academic rules and that overspending was rife and no-one had a grip on realities.”

In addition, she said, staff were working without approved contracts and the dean, James Kirkbride, was mismanaging the faculty.

Prof Archibald told senior human resources officer Julie Lloyd of her concerns.