Big Buildings, Small Minds: Kingston has caught BBS

There is a frightening new disease spreading rapidly across much of the HE sector, and it has also contaminated large parts of FE across Britain. Labelled by scientists as ‘Big Building Syndrome’ (BBS), the new plague has infected many University Vice-Chancellors and their managerial hangers-on in Senior Leadership Teams, those unaccountable daleks who hide within the overpaid elites that now claim to run the UK’s Universities.

The Gold Commandant and Vice-Admiral of Kingston Uni, Sir Steven ‘Albert’ Spier, who is quite clearly (in his own mind anyway) the world’s greatest architect, as well as being a major expert on Swiss cheeses, has gone down with a particularly bad bout of BBS. Even his contact lenses have gone misty, inhibiting him from reading his Daily Telegraph properly or gazing at his favourite little ‘Striding Full-Length Female Nude’ sculpture located just outside his office door (and how bizarre is that?).

Obvious symptoms of BBS include a maniacal desire to build BIG shiny new Buildings worth millions of pounds, coupled with an obsession to have the Building named after them, or at least have a large lecture hall within the new building bear their name.

Once infected with BBS, there is no known cure, except resignation. But that rarely happens, and Spiersy is not going anywhere until he secures that precious ‘legacy’ – a giant new building. SpierSpace, anyone? Or the Spier Centenary Dome? BBS sufferers, who are convinced they are always right, will refuse any medication or offers of alternative solutions. Previously known as Big Bullshit Syndrome, the latest new variant of this truly sickening disease leaves the sufferer with a really high temperature, the shakes, a massive inflation of their already-large ego, and an overwhelming desire to spend loads of money Bigly, money that their University simply cannot afford and does not have. In some of the worst cases, the sufferer, usually a former but failed academic with delusions of grandeur (such as believing they are somehow a CEO of a major company), runs off to the bank to arrange massive loans, or dips dangerously into the University’s emergency reserves, or persuades their Board Of Governors (BOG) to sell off parts of the University estate in order to raise badly-needed cash. Sound familiar?

In the most acute cases, VCs try to persuade themselves and others that they are whizzo property tycoons, wheeling and dealing in ‘real estate’ and huge capital projects. Kingston’s Vice-Admiral is a classic case of this. Rather than invest properly in staff and in quality education, which is what he was hired to do in the first place, BBS sufferers see everything as game of monopoly, where risk is a given and the challenge is to accumulate as much money as possible in order to Build Big, Build Bigger and ‘Build Baby Build’.

This is the reality of the so-called ‘Town House Strategy’. It’s not about ‘navigation’ and ‘Future Skills’, the vacuous marketing BS that Spiersy is so fond of – its about seeing everything Bigly and claiming your institution is ‘sector-leading’, ‘innovative’, providing a new ‘approach’, etc, etc (contin. p.94). ‘Old’ buildings are deemed as outdated and irrelevant to the VC’s new ‘vision’, as the BBS sufferer will often make bland and yawn-making statements which set out a desire to Build Big and have a ‘state-of-the-art’ giant edifice with ‘landmark’ teaching spaces.

But Big Buildings soak up loads of money, and sufferers of BBS quickly realize, but won’t admit (see Prof. Spier’s case profile) that in order to pay Peter you have to rob Paul. Instead, BBS sufferers ramble on endlessly about the need to ‘realign all parts’ of the University with the VC’s ‘mission’ in order to find new, ‘visionary’ and ‘innovative solutions’, etc, etc. Or they pontificate for hours about ‘sharpening our offering’ to ‘ensure investment in areas of growth’ and have a ‘targeted’ course portfolio (eh?? No, me neither). Yet the money has to come from somewhere. Where to go to get cash?

Sell, Sell, Sell

One solution is to sell off parts of the estate. This has been happening Bigly in recent times. Here’s just a few examples. In 2021 Kingston Uni sold off its Kingston Bridge House to raise Big sums for the new multi-million pound ‘Town House’ building (which went badly over budget anyway). In 2023 the University of Leicester sold off five buildings for a huge sum. In 2024 the University of Gloucestershire announced it was selling off its Hardwick Campus, while the University for the Creative Arts sold their Rochester Campus. In the same year London South Bank Uni (LSBU) announced it was looking to sell off its New Kent Road building in the name of ‘efficiency savings’, and is closing its Havering campus in 2027. Wolverhampton Uni recently announced it was closing its Telford site. And on and on it goes. In late 2024, it emerged (through a leak) that Kingston Uni had secretly instructed its estates team to draw up plans to identify what buildings and land could be sold off from its Kingston Hill campus, with a view to possible disposal of the whole site at some stage in the future.

Desperate times, desperate measures. Some critics might say all is just a sign of Unis raising funds for future emergencies, given the decline in international students and squeezes on research funding. But is this the whole story? No! The reality is that BBS is often at work, rampaging through the brains (or lack of them) in the heads of VCs, who seem obsessed with ever more Big Buildings in order to attract future students. It’s a damaging illusion and, in many HEIs, just serves to put the institution at even more risk of decline and insolvency.

Sometimes the financial decision-making of VCs and their inept arse-licking managers makes no sense whatsoever, and is enough to make all good accountants weep into their hands. In 2022 the University of Westminster, after trying (and failing) to back a new technical college for 14-19 year-olds, and having just spent £16m on a new Big Building for the college in central London, closed and off-loaded its Sir Simon Milton Technical College (UTC) near Victoria Station. The building had been open for just four years. In any other sector, the VC and senior managers would have been dismissed for gross incompetence and woeful decision-making. But this is HE, remember, where, no matter how much is thrown into the bottomless pits of ‘prestige’ buildings, the perpetrators are never held fully to account, but just continue regardless, trousering huge sums in salary.

VC’s BBS

Kingston’s Vice-Admiral has been showing major signs of BBS for a long time now, but his SLT just meekly say nothing (apart from occasionally leaking things to Dissenter, all part of the infighting you see going on behind the VC’s back). But the most frightening signs of a VC suffering Bigly from BBS is when they turn on their own staff and target departments for cuts or ‘savings’ in the name of ‘efficiency’ or ‘restructuring’. It is symptomatic of the sufferer having no regard whatsoever for those below him, and who believes – contrary to all the objective evidence – that culling staff, or axing ‘loss-making’ courses, will somehow raise loads of extra cash that can then be redirected towards yet more spending on Big shiny new Buildings.

On Wednesday, 26 February, 2025, Kingston’s staff were given a classic example of their VC’s BBS in action. Two Faculties, the KSA Faculty and the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences (FBSS) held special staff meetings where, in both cases, the Dean gave a presentation, which consisted mainly of praising the so-called ‘Town House Strategy’ to high heaven, then announcing major cuts to courses and staff. Both Deans then did a runner, cutting the meeting short and disappearing quickly, not even bothering to allow staff to ask questions. It was a truly terrible way to treat hard-working staff, and has left much bitterness to add to the misery of staff hearing that jobs and courses will go. To add insult to injury, staff quickly received the very same day emails ‘inviting’ them to one-to-one appointments with line-managers in 4-5 days time to discuss Voluntary Severance (or, if they reject VS, compulsory redundancy). Apart from the fact that one would be very unwise to go to such a meeting without a representative to accompany you, this was requested at insultingly short notice. And who are the line-managers tasked with doing this ugly deed? Managers who are completely untrustworthy. In KSA, for example, one of the managers is our old mate Simon Moron-Worthless, whose past interest in ‘sleeping studies’ and reputation for ‘handsy’ behaviour is enough to put anyone off, while the other is Janice ‘not-nice’ Miller, who most staff have never seen in real life, and who tends to lose her temper if one even has a brief question.

Vice-Admiral Spier and his gang of nitwits and daleks have clearly made a huge mess of the Uni’s finances over last few years. Yes, they will blame low student recruitment, decline of international students and so on. But that is not the whole story, and all this has happened on their watch. In any other industry, a CEO would come under great pressure to resign. But in HE, a VC can get away with, if not murder, then the nearest thing: the  mismanagement of money to a point where it brings the destruction of the careers and livelihoods of others.

The real story behind these latest cuts stares us right in the face: the truth is our VC has acute BBS but, due to exceptionally poor and inept financial strategies, the Uni has run out of money to finance his pet projects. He wants to save £20m over two years and realign budgets using a ‘resource allocation methodology’ (RAM) (these idiots just love their BS terminology, don’t they?). At the same time, and we kid you not, he wants to spend £23m on a Big shiny new Building at Middle Mill, and has already invested a ton of dosh in having a shiny new glass entrance at Pen Road. It’s an Alice in Wonderland approach to economics, ill-judged, irresponsible and plain nutty. But it also has dire consequences: in order to satisfy his vanity and have more Big Buildings to secure his ‘legacy’, Speer is prepared to throw staff under the bus and destroy courses and disciplines that often took years to develop and in which staff invested many, many hours of their lives.

And if you think this is only happening to two of KU’s Faculties, think again. This is about this financial year. The latest cuts will only save £10m; the cuts for the next £10m will come in 2025-26, when other Faculties will be ‘targeted’. There is more pain to come in the next year, and nobody, wherever they are in the Uni, is safe. BBS is driving everything, and is the disease that refuses to go away.