According to the latest leaks from the KU comms corner of the Uni, Vice-Admiral and part-time VC Sir Steven ‘Two-Jobs’ Spier has been getting very anxious and red-faced about the less-than-impressive student applicant numbers. He has been turning the screws on Faculty managers, urging them to do much more to reach recruitment targets. With his peculiar obsession with Naval terms, the grossly overpaid VC is clearly at sea and at a loss about how to bail out his sinking leadership. And panic over student numbers is part of this.
Staff have been told they need to market and ‘sell’ the Uni to potential applicants with greater urgency and more energy. The comms staff have also been told to ‘big up’ Kingston’s image for public consumption and to get more parents interested in what KU has to offer. Presumably the thinking is that if KU can draw in parents, the parents will eagerly tell their offspring what a great place Kingston is.
Comms have therefore been putting out regular messages on X and other social media platforms to catch the attention of more potential applicants (sometimes with two-three messages daily), with lots of glossy pictures of trees, the River Thames, Kingston’s older-looking buildings, and overhead images of the Town House, seen from the air or from an odd angle in Pen Road (which nearly got the photographer run over by passing traffic).
Some of this has reached predictably farcical proportions. Anybody looking at the images KU has put out of Knights Park campus, with the photo angles designed to deliberately emphasise all the lovely green trees and foliage enveloping the KP buildings, would easily get the impression the campus is in the middle of the countryside rather than near the grotty old Hogsmill and close to suburban streets. One pic of the Town House at Pen Road had a golden sunset in the background, all designed to make it look as if Pen Road is some kind of sophisticated and glamorous paradise. There have also been some misleadingly glossy pics of Kingston Hill put out, designed to reel in Business applicants and other money-generating punters.
The Gold Commandant has also ensured that some cheesy-looking pics were released on the launch of the latest ‘Future Kills’, sorry, ‘Future Skills’ report at Parliament, clearly in the hope that potential applicants will think that this so-called ‘sector-leading’ BS somehow has the backing of the Government itself. It has all been really painful to watch, especially how all this spin has been adorned with glossy pics of very satisfied looking ‘students’ with big smiles on their faces. And it is doubly insulting to see the VC engaging in spin at the House of Commons when one of his recent acts was to destroy Kingston’s Politics dept.
So what is really going on here? The truth of the matter is that it’s all a sign of how desperate Spier and his Senior Silver Surfers in the SLT have become to try to boost numbers and generate more income. Despite a £7m surplus for the financial year of 2023-24 and huge reserves of £400m, the financial mismanagement of Kingston under Spier’s truly dire Vice-Chancellorship has left the Uni in a dangerously precarious position. To try to stop the financial rot, the VC has ordered Estates to identify what could possibly be flogged off in the future, and (as many staff now painfully know) he has aimed for £20m in savings over two years, axing staff and course portfolios, cutting Faculty budgets through the charmingly-named RAM (Resource Allocation Methodology), and has ordered external consultants to identify how Library and Learning services could be dramatically shrunk. It was also no surprise to see that there has been yet another reshuffle of the Senior Leadership Team, with changes to size and make-up of the SLT (just how many reshuffles of the crappy SLT have there been over the years? We have lost count). And much more pain is in the pipeline for 2025-26. After all, Spier has foolishly committed the Uni to spending yet more millions on a giant shiny new building at Middle Mill, so he’s under even more pressure to be seen to ‘deliver’.
The tragedy of all this is that Spier seriously thinks he can spin his way out of the mess that he is mainly responsible for and create the impression that all is well at Kingston. But staff in the know have realised that, with all the brutal cuts that have already taken place, and all the new ones still being planned, very real and lasting reputational damage has been done to Kingston Uni. Is it any wonder that potential students are reluctant to apply and that numbers are down?
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Sack overpaid underperforming professors at Kingston Hill. None of them can get another job , they are lazy, play politics 24×7, are engaged in corrupt practices. I was told that if a forensic HR audit is done on how people were hired in the last 3 years, it will reveal nepotism and corruptiom
Unfortunately the captain of the ship is totally clueless according to ex-colleagues although I must admist his research profile is the strongest i have ever seen in hill.
what a shitshow. the threat to library services is particularly worrying. they just don’t care though.
All the above is very true. I was present at two recent Open Days and could count the number of interested students on one hand. It was an embarrassing waste of time for staff who had to sit at tables and twiddle their thumbs. Drank loads of coffee to stay awake.