Kingston University London Dissenter's Blog

From: Professor and Gold Commandant Sir Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier, Vice-Clown, Kingston PolyUniversity

Sent: 08 November 2023 16:55

To: All Staff Types and other Peasants

Dear colleagues,

There is no doubt we are 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 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). It enables us to work towards and deliver a better future, not just for your careers but also to save my bacon, rather than simply managing difficult circumstances with the very few resources I have made available to you. Our transformative mission and four supreme values in the Clown House Strategy – inclusive, innovative, ambitious and enterprising – far from being fancy words I merely plagiarized from a textbook I found at Kingston Hill, drive what we are delivering, not just over a cliff or on to the rocks, but with increasing impetus (good word, eh? Almost as good as ‘transformative’. Took me ages to find that one).

The challenges facing higher education are unlikely to abate any time soon, despite the current financial model we have operated at Kingston being, frankly, unsustainable. I have spent millions on new buildings so that I can leave my mark, and legacy, at Kingston, and exciting new buildings are still planned, but – regrettably – tuition fees are still languishing at the £9,250 set in 2017, something we forgot to build into our financial planning forecasts. Had they kept pace with inflation, the fees would now have reached £14,000 a year, and I would have been able to build yet more ‘legacy’ buildings. At the same time, Kingston is contending with spiralling operating costs, and the financial squeeze hampers my ability to innovate and build yet more wonderful buildings in honour of my supreme leadership.

Student numbers

Of immediate concern in the current climate, in addition to all the damage this is doing to my reputation as a ‘transformative’ V.C., is that you have not met our recruitment targets for undergraduate and postgraduate students by some measure. What the hell have you been playing at, you useless sods? This is due to problems with our own processes, such as staff not working as hard as I clearly do, as well as changes to the market. We are addressing both. I have been busily reading the business pages of the Daily Torygraph, my newspaper of choice, which I am going to make freely available at all the main campus entrances, and which I hope to see being embedded into our Future Skills strategy by all staff.

Not meeting our student numbers directly affects our financial plans. I still need loads more cash to build lots more buildings, and to secure my future (and, dare I say, inevitable peerage). We are already changing our recruitment and conversion processes to deliver our recruitment targets, have adjusted Faculty and Directorate budgets (i.e. cut them), will exercise tight cost control (apart from the thousands of pounds of spending I needed to do on all the nice banners for my our TEF Gold rating), and, at least temporarily, curtail our plans for investment.

Process review

To begin addressing these challenges, I have already instructed the Execution Director for Students to convene a Conversion Task group (great title, eh? I found that one in a old manual left by my predecessor), which will cover both UG and PG recruitment, with an immediate focus on conversion for the January intake (yes, I told you, our mess is bad). I have also instructed Senior Managers to start pressurising offering the weaker and less able members of teaching staff, such as some of the old duffers you see around Pen Rd and Knights Park, a nice VS package. Cutting down on staff and saving costs in this way has always been my favourite option, and it is now a familiar tried-and-tested model at Kingston, which we like to roll out whenever we face deep shit dire circumstances. I have instructed my favourite bagman, Dr. Dave ‘the knife’ Mackintosh, to oversee this difficult but necessary process. Despite him being the oldest man in the University, if not the Universe, Oddjob (as I fondly call him), or Axjob as most of you have named him, has consistently refused VS himself, as he has plenty of experience and skills in cutting staff and even whole departments (for which I paid him a special bonus to keep him sweet). He has already set to work on identifying all low-recruiting courses that could be quickly culled. We did this before, and we’ll do it again! This is what Future Skills are all about – past skills employed in ever more innovative and Futuristic ways.

We are also conducting a very quick review of all our recruitment processes, and have already removed unnecessary criteria that hinder offer making. Basically, in the future, if a student wants to come here, we shall say ‘yes, you’re in’ immediately, no questions asked. We are that desperate, you see. We are also:

• Undertaking a detailed review of our marketing, recruitment and admissions processes, and will recruit a few students to leave leaflets on buses, on public benches in parks, and at the check-out tills in Sainsburys.
• Developing a Polyversity-wide strategy for overseas recruitment, which is now much more competitive given that every other University in the UK is doing exactly the same thing. It will also enable me to have more trips abroad and stay in nice hotels, something that is a vital part of this strategy. I can also test my Future Skills by visiting the best restaurants and tasting the local cuisine.
• Reviewing markets, those strange things we claim to understand but we don’t really, and what we offer, focusing on those bits of the world with the most potential to boost numbers and save my skin. We shall leave KU leaflets at all major sites across the whole of China, India and South America, including at all public conveniences and on park benches.
• Continuing to improve those programmes that are not performing well academically and therefore not attractive to applicants (yes, you know who you are, you idle so-called Profs). We envisage a radical slimming down as the outcome of this transformative process, ideally with just a handful of younger staff in each Faculty, all on fixed-term contracts. Simple.
• Continuing to embed Future Skills in the curriculum, even though hardly anybody understands what these really are, and driving advances in knowledge exchange and research (still sounds good, though, doesn’t it?), to ensure we are sought after as the world’s leading institution at which the most talented people (such as myself) want to study and work.

Playing your part

So, staff types, the Senior Leadership community (as we now refer to ourselves – good, eh?) is committed to returning Kingston Polyversity, er, University – under my truly inspired leadership – to a position in which we can invest yet more cash in future inspierational (get it? Good, eh?) buildings and cut down on burdensome waste-of-space staff. Because of the shorter timeframes attached to all this, if we take the correct approach as set out by me (with a bit of advice on wording from Simon Moron-Worthless, our innovative Professor of Sleeping Around Studies), we should be able to remedy this swiftly. If we don’t, then I will have to hold all of you responsible, and take action accordingly. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. We have overcome all the great challenges and failures that have happened on my watch in the past and, once again, we must come together to navigate through the situation I have accidently created through no fault of my own.

All Senior Leadership Team members have been holding meetings with their teams to discuss the current situation in more detail and encourage people to seriously consider whether they wish to stay. If more of you do not accept our generous offer of VS, then don’t moan or cry when we put you out of our misery. Our Interim University Secretary, Mr. Adrian Parrot, has been working on the Heath and Safety aspects of this process, and we shall take strong action against any of you who decide to shout abuse at Senior Managers or make fun of the V.C.’s weird contact lenses. I know I can count on each and every one of you to support the vital activity needed to save my job and reputation. By coming together to drive these improvements I am confident I can keep positioning KU as the institution of choice for all who read the Daily Torygraph and therefore secure my place in HE as one of the most admired Vice-Clowns you have ever had the privilege to serve under. To ease the pain of what is to come, I have also placed a nice statuette called ‘Striding full-length female nude’, just outside my office, and I invite all staff types to book a time with my PA to come and gaze in wonder at this piece of innovative sculpture, a piece which brings me a great deal of personal pleasure.

With best wishes,

Steven ‘two jobs’ Spier,

Vice-Clown and Dear Leader

If more evidence was needed of the ongoing turmoil at the top of KU and the great disillusionment that has set in with the VCship of Gold Commander Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier, the following could be offered in Court, M ‘Lud. A brief news item quietly slipped out by the Uni Comms mob on 21 June revealed that SLT Silver veteran and Deputy VC Prof Martyn Jones has joined the growing number of managers who have had enough of Spier and his Clown House Strategy obsessions. Jones has handed in his resignation and is stepping down this autumn. Also going is the Uni Clerk Andrew Boggs. The lifeboat is getting crowded.

Jonesy the Silver surfer first joined KU after spells at the University of Kent and University of Wales. He was appointed Pro-VC for External Affairs at KU in 2007 and was promoted to Deputy VC in 2014. Prior to his time in academia he was in the British Army, something that impressed Vice-Clown Spier enormously (during lockdown, it was Jones who apparently gave Spier the idea of having senior managers assume military ranks to manage the emergency, such as ‘Gold Commander’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ status, and so on, the kind of thing military-types seem to love). Spier and Jones also shared a common distaste for trade unions, and often moaned about how ‘ungrateful’ staff are.

However, as numerous KU managers have found, including various members of the SLT, Vice-Admiral Speer, who sees himself as one of the world’s greatest architects and as an expert on Swiss cheeses, likes to bang on about skills but has very few himself of any worth, especially managerial ones. He prefers to dump (sorry, ‘delegate’) much of the hard work of running KU on others. Poor old Prof Jonesy ended up doing loads of work. Just look at all his responsibilities while he was leading KU’s Directorate for Corporate Services: he had to manage Governance, Legal services, Brand and Communications, Public Affairs, Health and Safety, Risk and Business Continuity, as well as Development, Alumni Relations and Engagement. According to those in the know, the poor old Silver-haired Prof simply became worn down by the sheer burden of all this, and increasingly pissed off and resentful at the all the work Commandant Speer kept pushing his way. Who can blame him?

But Spiersy has clearly been thrown off course by the impending departure of another of his Silver workhorses. After all, he relies on the SLT lapdogs to give him new ideas and to massage his ego about the Clown House Strategy and ‘Future Skills’, which has badly lost its momentum in recent months. To add insult to injury, the news release included a notably petulant comment by Spier about the loss of his Deputy. All he could offer was that Prof Jones had made ‘a significant contribution to the University across a number of years’ and he wished him well. Oh yeah?

The news release added that, with his impending departure, and also that of University Clerk Andrew Boggs, the Uni will be ‘repurposing’ (one of Spier’s favourite words) the Deputy VC role to that of ‘University Secretary’. According to our sources, the ‘Secretary’ (who is yet to be appointed) will also be heavily involved in the ‘People Plan’, another incredibly exciting but meaningless plan dreamt up by Spier and a member of the SLT, as the Vice-Clown is getting desperate to get the Clown House Strategy back on track. We have had Plan 2020. Plan 2030. Now the People Plan. We can’t wait. Plans ahoy!

Why the long face? KU’s VC and ‘Gold Commander’ Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier has been looking particularly glum in recent SLT and Board meetings, despite the happy chappy image he likes to put on in all the Comms photos he loves to issue. Why so? Simple. His ambitious plans to convert the Uni into a Polyversity, or ‘Multiversity’ as he likes to call it, are not going the way he hoped. Quite the opposite. Far from rising in Uni league tables, KU is dropping. A lot.

Spiersy has spun much spin in recent times about how, under his inspired and glorious leadership, KU is ‘going places’ and is racing ahead of all its rivals to become an institution that is pioneering a ‘new progressive model of education’ through a ‘future skills’ campaign. He dreams of eventually grabbing himself an honour from the government as a nice reward for all this and for his retirement. But the masterplan is looking more shaky than ever before, and he knows it. In their hearts, so does his lapdog SLT, who appear enthusiastic about the Town House Strategy in public and to his face, but increasingly lampoon it behind the Vice-Clown’s back (and they have their salaries to protect, of course). To add to his woes, the Board of Governors (BOG) are increasingly cynical about the Clown House Tragedy, sorry, ‘Town House Strategy’, as well. Some of the BOGsters have always held doubts about Spiersy, and those concerns have been reinforced by recent events.

Look at recruitment. Spiersy and his close mates persuaded themselves that investing in big buildings rather than in staff would somehow magically draw in loads of student applications, all stunned and in awe at the sheer size of the Clown House and excited about big plans for a new giant Middle Mill building project. But Undergraduate and Postgraduate recruitment is looking poor. Recent panicky Board meetings have been given some dire figures which show a number of Faculties failing to meet their Home UG targets, with FBSS – to give one example – 13% behind target. And FBSS was one of the Faculties that was culled and slimmed down on Spiersy’s orders! Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Why would students want to apply to a Faculty that has had so much damage done to its reputation? KSA is not faring any better. It is 12% away from Home UG target. Two other Faculties are also struggling. The figures for International UG recruitment are also looking grim. Both FBSS and KSA are reportedly 9% behind target.

At Postgraduate level, PGT Home applicants are very weak for all Faculties across the Uni, and PGT International applicants are also looking very poor (FBSS is 20% behind its target and HSSCE 7% behind). The Uni’s Finance Committee have now started pressing the SLT for updated figures on projected numbers, as they sense things are looking very dark, and the finance team are hinting that a new plan should be drawn up to now include ‘some re-profiling of targets’. That is polite talk for ‘bloody hell – things are looking really shit’. Spiersy’s promises of great numbers for September are plain nonsense and everybody in the know sees this, even if he refuses to face up to the fact. Let’s be clear: this is all happening on his watch and because of his own crappy managerial strategy.

And consider the latest league tables. To add further misery to the overpaid Vice-Clown’s woes, KU was ranked joint 87th out of 130 institutions in this year’s Complete University Guide league table. Yep: 87th! The fact is Spiersy’s ‘flagship’ Uni has moved down a stunning 9 places in the overall rankings from last year. Yes, that’s right – let that sink in: KU has crashed by 9 places and gone into embarrassing reverse. Predictably, and hilariously, the KU Comms team issued a big piece of typical Spier spin on this, which tried to put a positive light on the results – ‘there were a number of strong subject-level performances’, blah, blah, blah. But nothing can hide the obvious truth that, under Spiersy’s supreme but tragically unenlightened VCship, KU is falling into serious decline. The Comms spin put out on the Uni website included a comment from the man himself, where he said that while moving down the table nine places was (clears throat) ‘disappointing’, there were still ‘positives to be taken in a number of areas’. You could hear the laughs across the whole Uni, if not the whole HE sector. Who does he think he’s kidding?

Regurgitating some of his favourite managerial-speak from his dusty Kingston Hill ‘How to manage’ textbooks, ‘Two Jobs’ also said it was ‘clearly a disappointment to lose some momentum from our upward trajectory in recent years’, but ‘improvements’ in a number of subjects and overall metrics ‘are encouraging’, and he was confident KU could still deliver on its TH Strategy. Confident? Does he really believe all this desperate rubbish? Sadly, we suspect he probably does.

Roll up! Roll up! Vice-Admiral Steven ‘Two Jobs’ Spier is getting ever more desperate to make his ‘flagship’ Clown House Strategy work, and wants to re-sell the Tragedy, sorry ‘Strategy’ to his long-suffering and underpaid KU staff yet again. The Polyversity Comms team has invited KU staff to a Town House Strategy ‘all-staff event’, to be held in the rather hollow ‘courtyard’ of the the Town House on 27 April. Yep. You read that correctly. Staff have been invited, once again, to hear about ‘Town House Strategy updates and developments’ from our very part-time Gold Commander and, this time, he will be joined by Mystic Meg, sorry, ‘Futurologist’ John Vary, one of the world’s foremost experts on horoscopes. Spiersy will no doubt be hoping that Mystic John will use some creative Future Skills to include a confident prediction that the VC will inevitably be rewarded by his close mates in the government with a Knighthood. The Vice-Commandant feels that he deserves this honour for all his work creating what he (laughingly) calls his ‘progressive new model of education’, otherwise known as the ‘basic skills model’ by most other Universities (and which many of them dropped ages ago).

As the academic year draws to an end things have not been going well for poor old Spiersy and his plan to become ‘Sir’ Steven. Since the launch of the Future Skills campaign a full two years ago, a shed-load of money has been thrown at the Clown House strategy and it has been re-launched over and over. But there has been little interest from KU staff, and there’s hardly been an avalanche of interest from industry. The Town House Fellows scheme, sold to staff as ‘a very special opportunity’ to contribute to the ‘delivery’ of the TH Strategy, has been disastrous, with hardly any interest or applications. This is hardly surprising, as it involves a lot of casual donkey work for very little in return. Spiersy and the SLT (Senile Leadership Team) have been so stuck for ideas they hoped that exploiting some eager members of staff as ‘Fellows’ would bring some fresh creative thinking to make up for their own empty-headed approach, hilariously deemed ‘workstreams’ by Spiersy’s ultra-loyal SLTer Simon Worthless-Moron, KSA’s notorious Professor of Sleeping (around) Studies, who has written much of the Town House Strategy bullshit.

But it’s all gone horribly stale for them, and panic is setting in. Spiersy has also become aware that other VCs across the country are beginning to watch this failure pan out in real-time. In a sign of how desperate the world’s leading architect and expert on contemporary Swiss cheeses has become, Admiral Spiersy recently ordered his loyal bagman David ‘Mac the Knife’ Mackintosh, the oldest Dean in the University, if not the Universe, to step down as Dean of the Faculty of Health, Science, Social Care and Education, and concentrate instead on TH Strategy ‘implementation’ – i.e. giving the Town House Strategy momentum again before the ‘flagship’ hits the rocks and sinks. Mackintosh could hardly say no, as he was given a large (secret) bonus by Spiersy for overseeing the disastrous split with St. Georges and for making huge cuts to courses across the University.

For sheer entertainment value alone, the ‘all-staff’ meeting should give any staff who can be bothered to attend (and face the mind-numbing tedium) a good opportunity to get some ‘updates’ on how spectacularly wonderful everything is going. Just be careful of the tumbleweed as it flows through the courtyard. And for God’s sake don’t ask any questions! The VC does not like to be embarrassed. It’s bad for his nerves.

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.