A message from your Gold Commander

Subject: Open forum invitation, additional leave and meat-free weeks

Sent to: All staff

Dear peasants colleagues,

As we approach the end of the academic year, it is timely to reflect and recognise all I have achieved for you during a most challenging year but also to start to think about my hopes and plans for the PolyUniversity’s future.

Vice-Commander and Senior Lack-of-Leadership Address

To this end, as your VC and Supreme Leader, I would like to invite you to a wonderful and truly unique event I will be generously hosting on Wednesday 14 July, 2pm-3pm, both virtually and on-campus, where you will be able to bask in my golden glory and hang on to my every word (if you can stay awake). I will set out my plans for making Kingston into a full Polyversity and how we are sweeping away useless arts and social science subjects and anything that involves thinking. Thinking is dangerous. Instead, I want an innovative power-house of ‘doers’ and ‘makers’ (do-makers), not so-called ‘thinkers’. I want those who can make do, not those who think through.

My talk will be the highlight of the academic year and round things off nicely as we embark on further doings, dos, ventures and restructures over the summer while most of you are away. I will also formally unveil our new African Parrot*, which symbolizes my strong commitment to complete openness, transparency, mutiplicity, squwarking loudly and to saying the same things over and over and in a variety of delightful but exceptionally monotonous ways.

*Please note: Under no circumstances should on-campus attendees at the event try to feed the parrot, poke its plummage, or ask it to write SLT policy documents. It has written more than enough of those this year.

I will be joined by several members of the senior lack-of-leadership silver team to deliver a few rather bland updates on something called education, people (yuk), KU’s financial disaster of recent years, our fantastically successful, world-beating and oven-ready replacement for Plan 2020, KU2,222++, our new FOM (Failing Organisational Model), and any other bits I may think of at the very last minute, and to answer questions put forward (as long as they are not genuine questions designed to embarrass me or stupid moans about such trifling matters as job cuts or the big rows between St. George’s and Kingston). Members of the Board of Governors (BOG) will also be in attendance but will remain incognito for their own safety (in case they are pestered for autographs or quizzed about the costs of their recent slap-up annual KU dinner).

The event will be livestreamed online but there will also be a very small number of spaces* available for any peasants staff who wish to join us on the day and have a good laugh in our amazing new Town House backyard courtyard (which, if I may so say, ought to be declared the eighth wonder of the world, and is already a source of awe among architects and Swiss cheese-makers the world over. In fact, I weep with joy every time I step inside this incredible space which, if you ignore all the fumes pouring in from Penryhn Road, will also take your breath away and leave you sobbing in ecstasy). In a special exclusive deal with the new GB News channel (Brillo is a good mate of mine), my speech will also be broadcast in all the corridors of the University, via cutting-edge large screens. Buckets will also be placed at those same spots for your convenience, in case you feel the need to vomit as I dazzle you with my incredibleness.

I am also pleased to announce that the speech is being printed in a special gold-edged pamphlet format on 80gsm de luxe paper, which will be made available to purchase (at a discount) to all members of staff and their families as a unique souvenir of the event. This will have an image of our new parrot mascot on the front cover, and an introduction specially written by our very own Professor of Groping Sleeping Studies, Simon No-More-than-Worthless. As colleagues will recall, Prof. Worthless was given oversight by me earlier this year for Kingston’s Equality and Gender Objectives for 2021-2025, which went down like a lead balloon very well with female colleagues across the University. He will no doubt update you on his latest erection construction of the Gender Equality Programme and the drive to get more women into his office senior leadership positions.

Also present at this unique event will be Dean Jill The Scoff from FBSS and Dean Mandy WhoHer? from KSA. The Oldest Man in the World may also be wheeled in briefly from SEC to entertain the waiting audience.

*Please note: Due to limited seating space, any staff who are members of HSCE, FBSS, KSA, or IT services will not be admitted. PAs to Deans will be given time off to attend, but must return to work after 30 minutes. A cleaner will be present in the Courtyard to quickly mop up any unfortunate incidents of projectile vomiting during the VC’s speech.

To help us manage this event in a safe and sick-free way, and in compliance with the Gold Commander’s restrictions still in place, I would appreciate if you do not boo or heckle during my speech and if you could indicate, using the three buttons below, whether you would like to join me virtually, or in physical form on campus, or as a small hazy hologram, or have a legitimate excuse to run far far away on the day to join the rebel cause in a distant galaxy.

  • I would like to attend on campus
  • I would like to attend virtually
  • I have much better things to do

Questions

Due to the Covid-19 restrictions still in place, and to accommodate the pitifully small handful of colleagues who may be watching the live stream while they do the ironing (or viewing the glossy extended feature film made of this very special event), I am asking any pesky lecturers who want to be a nuisance and try and ask questions to submit those questions beforehand using an online form. Please use the link below to submit your question so that we can vet it very carefully and select only those that I feel like answering. Can I remind colleagues that under no circumstances can challenging, trouble-making or subversive questions be posed (and any staff present in physical form at the event who try to ask such questions live will immediately be removed by campus security and subjected to a ‘consultation’ on their job role. You have been warned).

Online form: www.dump/bin/quickly/1

Meat-free weeks and additional leave

The past academic year has been another testing one for me, as I could not go off gallivanting around the globe to places like Hong Kong or Macau or stay in my favourite hotel, the Hilton in New York. My overall feeling has been one of jealousy and admiration for your sustained professionalism, tolerance and bendability, in contrast to the SLT’s own behaviour and bitchy back-stabbing. I am constantly reminded how fortunate I am to work in a community of proper academics who are dedicated, skilled and determined to support our students, advance my ambitions and shield me from the moaning minnies in our local community. Some of the locals even had the gall to claim that our £41.3m seriously-behind-schedule Town House looked like an old German anti-aircraft fortress. I was outraged (it is also completely untrue that I changed my name from Speer to Spier before I came to the UK).

I am acutely aware of how difficult this has been for most of you but less so for me. I know that many of you claim to have caring and other responsibilities and have had to juggle those alongside your work and ongoing worries about all the consultations I have launched. Well, tough titty. Live with it.

Following the positive response to a meat-free initiative we took recently, and to make up for the embarrassing cancellation of our four-year eByke programme (I never rated it, to be honest, but had to keep the extinction rebellion greeny sandal-wearing types happy for a while), I am pleased to announce that I have designated three additional weeks as free of meat eating in the upcoming year. This will help colleagues who have recently experienced a big decline in wages and can no longer afford to eat meat, and will also create more space for us to reach the sustainability promises we made a few years ago or whenever it was. I recommend a diet of beetroot sandwiches during those three additional weeks, as this will also be a more realistic reflection of what you will be able to afford on a lecturer’s wage in 2021-22.

And, by way of thanks for your dedication this year, the senior lack-of-leadership team, on advice from our outside contractor, E.B. Scrooge Ltd,  has decided to designate Saturday 25 December 2021 as an additional day’s leave for University staff (except for part-time staff, as Unified cannot cope with anything pro-rata or slightly complicated).

I hope this will help you spend some time away from work and and focus on your personal wellbeing and mental health given all the stress and job insecurity I have created for you in 2021, as well as that of your family and friends (if you still have any left). Your wellbeing will be at the forefront of my thoughts on the day as I tuck into a well earned turkey feast on my private beach in the Bahamas.

Our Civic Contribution

Our campuses will be quieter for the next few weeks and you will no doubt be relieved to hear that I will disappear for weeks on end, but the SLT will remain at the forefront of the civic contribution in the battle against innovation and knowledge coronavirus. This includes the critically significant partnership with local public health authorities and Royal Borough of Kingston, but not those scumbag tossers colleagues at St. Georges, who will soon go their own way (and good riddance, I say). We will continue to keep our community safe and contribute to our local effort to axe as many staff as possible as we look to adjust workloads and welcome students – new and returning – to Kingston for the academic year 2021/22. We will keep staff and students updated on new developments as soon as more detail is available and I can be bothered to look at my emails.

Once again, thank you my peasants for all that you are doing and will do in the weeks to come if you manage to hold on to your jobs after all the fresh wave of consultations I am about to unleash. I hope to see you on the 14 July (I have purchased some new contact lenses specially for the day).

With best wishes

Commander Steven Speer

Vice-Admiral and Your Beloved Supreme Leader

 

 

 

 

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