My achievements in 2023-24: A special message from your Commandant

Another day, another leak: Dissenter has been given the original draft of the latest piece of Spier-spin and, in the interests of transparency, the text is reproduced below.

From: Gold Commandant and Vice-Clown Professor ‘Two Jobs’ Spier, Supreme Leader, Kingston Polyversity

Date: 11 July 2024

To: All Staff Types and other associate peasants

My Fellow Canadians Kingstonians,

As we put another terrible hugely successful academic year to sleep, I thought you would like to hear my thoughts on my achievements in 2023-24 and join with me yet again in celebrating what a wonderful institution Kingston Poly University has become since the advent of my enlightened and sector-leading Viceship.

I promise I will keep my thoughts short this time, as I note a considerable number of you made sneaky anonymous complaints about my last message, something I deeply resent and think was very unfair. It takes me many days of hard toil to write these messages to my staff. I also have a large team of up to thirty admin staff to help me with this task, so I am actually stimulating the local economy. If I ever identify the moaning culprits I will ensure they are demoted or, as per the traditional KU way, are subjected to compulsory redundancy. I have found the latter usually works wonders and quickly closes down such miserable voices. My close friend Dave ‘Axjob’ Macky the Tosh may have gone, but I take special pride in continuing the staff management strategy he pioneered (at my urging). To celebrate his major impact on KU managerial techniques over many decades, if not centuries, I can exclusively reveal that plans are being hatched to name a building after Dave, or at least a bit of a building, or perhaps a tree. Watch this space.

Anyway, as I approach the summer break and look forward to my many impending holiday trips to sunnier climes in all corners of the globe (I have already packed my KU branded gold-trimmed bathing trunks and my new vampiric contact lenses), I wanted to take a moment from my enormously busy schedule (holding down two jobs is very tiring, you see) to reflect on some of my many excesses successes this year and to again grudgingly acknowledge your contributions to my amazing achievements during the past academic year.

I think you will all agree that I have made further incredible progress in the transformation and reshaping of our institution, and that our reputation for innovation, entrepreneurship and speaking in embarrassing 1970s business style language has left all the other VCs across the whole sector simply green with envy.

As I have said before, there is no doubt we are still operating in a particularly challenging national context, which has nothing whatsoever to do with my poor leadership skills or failing Clown House Strategy. That is why my ambitious and truly visionary Clown House strategy is so important, and why we need to work even harder to maintain my unquestionably high reputation as the UK’s foremost V.C. and the world’s leading architect (and expert on Swiss cheeses and line-dancing). It enables us to work towards and deliver a better future, not just for your careers but also to save my job, rather than simply managing difficult circumstances with the very few resources I have made available to you.

A real highlight for me this year, especially as I am your Gold Admiral Commandant, was the award of an overall rating of Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), as well as securing Gold for student experience, student outcomes and student debt. As you all will no doubt be aware, I had been working flat-out to achieve this award on behalf of yourselves, and it enabled me to spend a very welcome wad of thousands on nice big signs and banners placed around the PolyUniversity celebrating my our achievement, including some big ones at the back of the Uni on some old railings (which have now been removed). I also awarded myself a nice big gold pen and some natty little gold cufflinks, which I have already worn to BOG (Board of Governors) dinners. The BOG were very impressed, or at least most of them were.

As I told the BOG, our transformative mission and four supreme values in the Clown House Strategy – inclusive, innovative, ambitious and enterprising – far from being silly words that I merely plagiarized from an old textbook I found at Kingston Hill, fundamentally drive what we are delivering. It is a drive to deliver, driven with all the deliberation that drivel drive can achieve. Just look at how the Uni is being transformed (a favourite word of mine – good, eh?): during 2023-24 you have been dumped with given a new Curriculum Management System, which took us years to develop (oh, alright then, days); the new ground-breaking KERIs (our four Knowledge Exchange and Research Institutes) are taking shape and will simply dazzle the world, even though many of you have no idea what the hell they will do; and our equally amazing Pen Road buildings ‘transformation’ project, which will include extensive use of fake glass panels and the creation of three dedicated Future Skills Learning Areas, complete with some vending machines, is about to enter its second amazing stage after all the noise, dust and disruption caused by the first stage (cough).

As a further sign of this sector-leading transformation, staff and students can now go and see the newly built environmentally-friendly pavement garden area at the back of Pen Road, which we have poured many thousands of pounds into creating, and which I confidently, and modestly, predict will quickly become the new Hanging Gardens of Babylon, an eighth wonder of the world right here in the Uni’s own backyard former Fasset Road car park. You can now enjoy looking at some greenery and sitting on some concrete seats, modelled on the concrete seats available in the courtyard of the Clown House. You can even test how long you can sit on them before your backside goes numb – it is another sure way to pick up a Future Skill: the art of endurance and the surefire knowledge that your bum will inevitably harden over time. Cheeky, eh? In fact, I predict that KU will contribute many new hard bums to the economy of the future. Bums the word.

This is certainly something I will emphasise when I am next interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, my paper of choice. As I gaze daily on ‘Striding full-length female nude’, the beautiful little sculpture I have had placed just outside my office door, I am able to ponder at great and tedious length on the enormous strides KU has made under my superior skills. By the way, there is nothing pervy about my choice of sculpture, and I completely reject the underhand comments that have been made by the woke types in UCU. The sculpture has given me many hours of visual pleasure. Simon Moron-Worthless, our innovative Professor of Sleeping (Around) Studies, has also praised this celebration of the female form, and has even suggested the image could be used in all our recruitment and marketing material in the future, something I will reflect upon carefully (Simon did seem a bit too excited when he urged me to adopt this).

So, staff types, it is glaringly obvious that the Senior Leadership community (as we now refer to ourselves – good, eh?) is committed to transforming Kingston Polyversity, er, University – under my truly inspired leadership – to a position where we can invest yet more cash in future inspierational (get it? Good, eh?) buildings and cut down on burdensome waste-of-space staff. If we take the correct approach as set out by me (with a bit of advice on wording from Simon Moron-Worthless), and have our Future Ills Skills programme at the very heart of everything we do, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we should be able to beat off all our rivals and become, quite simply, the most innovative and transformational Polyversity University in the whole of the United Kingdom, if not the Universe. If we don’t achieve this before I retire, and I don’t become Sir Steven (as I am so desperate to be), then I am afraid I will have to hold all of you responsible, and take action accordingly. Even better, I will insist that one of our new buildings is named after me, so that, as with Axjob Macky, my name will also be up in bright lights, a true legacy for the University and our shrinking pool of students. Blackpool eat your heart out.

We have overcome all the great challenges and failures that have happened on my watch in the past year and, through our Future Ills Skills programme and Clown House Strategy, many great things still await us. Just you wait. Success ahoy!

Prof. Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier,

Vice-Admiral and CEO,

Kingston Technical College University.