Admiral Spier drops crackpot Uni name change plan

There was a sigh of relief among the KU Senile Leadership Team (SLT) and the Board of Governors (BOG) a few weeks ago when their useless boss backed off from what many of them privately regarded as an incredibly stupid plan. Staff across the University will no doubt also be hugely thankful, if pissed off that the plan was even given the time of day in the first place.

Dissenter can now exclusively reveal that Kingston Uni Vice-Chancellor and part-time Admiral Steven ‘two jobs’ Spier has dropped his secret pet proposal to re-name Kingston University as part of his so-called Town House strategy. For a while he appeared to be determined to make the change and force it through, given how desperate he is to make the ‘Clown House’ Future Skills plan work. He had originally planned to announce it as part of his June 2022 update on how brilliantly the whole Town House strategy (launched in June 2021) is going (we kid you not), and how ‘Phase 2’ of its ‘entrepreneurial innovation’ will save Kingston, shower the Uni with accolades and awards, impress the government, and eventually secure our piss-poor VC a Knighthood (or so he dreams).

According to our disgruntled source at the heart of things (many thanks ‘X’), part-time Spiersy, who trousered a gobsmacking £352,000 smackers in 2021 alone (national average VC pay is £269,000), has a second job, and who likes to splash out Uni money as if it was from a bottomless pit, was prepared to spend a ginormous amount of money renaming the University, which would have led to rebranding and redesigning all Uni paperwork, mastheads, websites, and all public-facing signs across all campuses. Bloody hell! The looney Clown had commissioned outside consultants to suggest proposed names and to set out ‘the way forward’ and the ‘scope of works’ for the Town House strategy. All sorts of names and new titles had been thrown about at SLT and other ‘strategy’ meetings, many of them variations on ‘Kingston Town House University’ (KTHU) or ‘Town House University’ (THU). For a long while Spier was adamant that ‘Town House’ had to appear somewhere in the new title, much to the frustration of some of the BOG, who could see no sense in the nutty idea.

However, in the end, and much to the sad old Clown’s disappointment, even the hugely overpaid consultants saw some sense and had to advise Spiersy that there was no appetite for developing a new Kingston University brand and a new name in line with strategic ambitions, and it would also have to entail a massive financial investment. Instead, the consultants recommended to the Gold Commander and his Senile Leadership Team that the Uni would be better off just focusing on creating a ‘brand toolkit’ and on things such as lobbying for a ‘new model of higher education’ (pioneered by Kingston) and the creation of a ‘Future Skills Council’. Spiersy’s proposed name-change is now dead in the water (for now, anyway), and that long-desired and rather pathetic fantasy he holds of getting a Knighthood for services to embedding ‘future skills’ in higher education has slipped further from the Gold Commander’s greedy grasp. His face has been much longer than usual over the last few weeks, despite his best smiley face in the regular publicity photos released by the Uni Comms team. Now we know why.

The world’s greatest architect and expert on Swiss cheeses must now think of other things to waste the Uni’s finances on, such as yet more buildings. Staff, as always, will come second. But we should thank our lucky stars we will not be working for ‘Town House University’ or ‘Kingston Town Uni’ or some such empty-headed or embarrassing name.