Kingston University London Dissenter's Blog

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.

The RMT, trade union for train company staff, including drivers, has been in the news lately. Its leader Mick Lynch has gained a reputation for competence and skilful handling of the media, much like his predecessor but one, the late Bob Crow, as well as leading effective strike action. This is why the average train worker salary is £44,000, and just under £60,000 for drivers. Compare this with the average academic salary of about £40,000.

To be a lecturer requires a minimum six years in university education. A train driver needs GCSEs. Driving a train is of course a highly responsible job, but I imagine most lecturers feel they are underpaid in comparison. The trade union for university academic staff, the UCU, has not been very successful in negotiating real pay rises for university staff. Our pay has declined over the decades. The latest pay offer is 3%; inflation, in case you haven’t noticed, is running at 10.1% (CPI). This comes after frozen pay from 2010 for two years, and 1% rises between 2013 and 2017. Last year was zero.

There have been several periods of industrial action organised by the UCU over the years, yet university pay has slipped further in real terms. Why has the RMT been so effective with strike action compared to our union? The principal reason, other than Lynch, is because strikes are well supported by RMT members. Of course, loss of train services has far more impact on the country than academics withholding marks or cancelling lectures, but the truth is lecturers are very bad at looking out for themselves. UCU membership is under 50% and support for industrial action lower still. Picket lines outside university entrances are often a handful of people, especially at Kingston. I’ve heard several excuses for not supporting strikes. The most frequent is worrying about the students, though action is usually so brief there is really no long term damage to their education. Most lecturers say nothing and keep their heads down.

This is a poor show from the staff. In the face of aggressive university management, which has adopted the harsh right wing policies that afflict the country, pay and conditions are now in such decline that academics are more likely to leave than suffer the indignity of declining pay and being undervalued. It would make more sense to stand up for ourselves collectively and stay with the job we like. But I can already see the heads going down. Watch Mick Lynch on TV and weep.

What is it about big buildings that gets Vice-Chancellors so excited and creaming their pants in ecstacy? A number of Uni bosses across the land have been axing staff and departments with shocking zeal and terrible consequences for the employees concerned, but at the same time are more than happy to spend zillions on lavish and poorly conceived vanity projects.

Dissenter has described recently the KU Vice-Admiral’s sad obsessions with architecturally grandiose vanity projects, the latest, of course, being the Clown House at Pen Road, which hoovered up millions and opened well behind schedule (with no penalties for the builders concerned). ‘Two Jobs’ Spiersy’s big buildings ego trip has seen him busily instructing members of his SLT (Senile Leadership Team) to cull whole departments and subjects, such as Politics and Human Rights, citing the need to ‘restructure’ Faculties and save on budgets. At the same time, though, as the contact-lensed one has turned a blind eye to the devastating consequences of these cuts for his loyal and hard-working staff, he has been more than happy to lavish Uni capital on big building projects with wild abandon. The self-proclaimed ‘Gold Commander’ and Chinese Polyversity fan seems to think that big shiny new or revamped buildings, such as the disappointingly bland Mill Street building, the ‘refurbished’ Holmewood House (new sofa anyone?), and the giant aircraft hangar known as the Clown House, will somehow lead to masses of new students all fighting each other to desperately get into Kingston Uni. It won’t.

The idea that new applicants and their parents will be eager to crowd into the Clown House to get selfies next to a few bits of rusty old industrial leftovers posing as sculptures on the ground floor is a sad delusion, and the product of Spiersy’s increasingly desperate ‘Courtyard’ imagination. The recent Open Days held in the Clown House have not exactly been huge successes. And woe betide any hapless student who gets too close to the ‘sculptures’ – you must ensure they have ‘space’ around them. Or you will get told off. Or forced to view one of the VC’s vlogs.

As Estates will confirm in increasingly exasperated tones, the VC’s ‘vision’ for Pen Road now includes a giant new glass-style front entrance (think Kew gardens greenhouse but much less attractive), for which a huge load of loot has been approved and work has already begun. Spiersy seems to think this will further entice and impress new applicants into Kingston Uni, all stunned and in awe at the sheer scale of his ‘developing new strategy’.

Big buildings syndrome combined with money-saving cuts seems to be the new philosophy among the UK’s VC class. The latest edition of the satirical magazine Private Eye (1 July) has also now noted these disturbing trends for course cuts combined with huge Estates spending in Britain’s post-92 Universities: ‘Arts, languages and humanities courses are taking a hammering at universities, with staff cuts and course closures announced this month as vice-chancellors claim to be feeling the postpandemic squeeze’. The Eye added: ‘More than half the academic staff at the University of Roehampton have been told they are at risk of redundancy, as it carried out a brutal cull of entire subject areas’. The Eye continued: ‘Roehampton bosses claim the “restructuring” will mean a shift towards “skills-led” vocational studies’. Sound familiar? Well, read this as well: ‘Eye readers will not be surprised to learn that the university recently completed swanky major building projects, including a £13.7m remodelling of the former library into a new multi-media building, after spending £35m on a new library in 2017′.

It’s the same at De Montford Uni, Leicester. The staff were reassured by the VC as recently as 2021 that while the sector was struggling with job cuts, “We’re not going to do that. We’re in a good financial position’. In fact, during 2021, De Montford gleefully pushed ahead with opening a deluxe dubai campus and still has extravagant plans for ‘DMU London’. But now the Uni has confirmed it is looking to cut 58 jobs. Sound familiar?

Spiersy’s obsessions with giant new buildings to match his ego has already gobbled up the pounds in lorry-loads and, hilariously, he has now even come up with a brilliantly original new name for his ‘transformative’ vision – it’s called the ‘Town House Strategy’. Yes, you read that correctly: the TOWN. HOUSE. Strategy. He’s actually selected a name for his corporate ‘mission’ that is so mind-numbingly bland he might as well have termed it the ‘Garden Shed strategy’ or the the ‘Spare Cupboard option’. The image of the Vice-Admiral and his SLT lapdogs patting themselves on their backs at the adoption of such a stupid title for their ‘vision, mission and strategy’ just about sums up the emptiness of the drive to convert Kingston into little more than a glorified technical college.

To add insult to injury, when Spiersy’s second ‘Future Skills’ report was grandly launched at the House of Commons recently in front of ‘Business leaders, MPs, policymakers and local stakeholders’, the publicity sheets dished out at the event to those who had the misfortune to have to sit through the VC’s speech included a list of KU’s ‘proud’ achievements in the REF2021. This highlighted Units of Assessment that scored above the sector average for impact, and ‘Politics’ was included. As one of the MPs present commented, that’s a pathetically bold claim given that Kingston has just axed Politics.

Not everybody at the top is happy with Spiersy’s obsessions with big buildings and ‘Town House’ skills. A source has leaked to Dissenter that a number of voices have privately complained behind Spiersy’s back that they think his ‘vision’ is hijacking everything, warping all the medium- and long-term strategic decisions that are being made. The trouble is, the Vice-Admiral does not tolerate any dissenting views on this. And those who have disagreed with him in the past have felt his revenge. Dissenter can reveal that the previous Dean of KSA, Colin Rhodes, who suddenly resigned, was not just eased out because he was ‘handsy’ in the Morgan-Wortham tradition. Rhodes clashed with Spiersy over what the KSA Dean wanted to do with the area covered by Middle Mill. Rhodes put forward a highly ambitious plan to develop and transform the area into a spanking new buildings complex with state-of-the art KSA lecture theatres, meeting areas, new studios, new offices, and other facilities. The trouble is, this seriously clashed with Spiersy’s expensive ‘vision’ for Pen Road. When Rhodes excitedly put forward his plans, the VC made sure it was rejected outright. Rhodes was humiliated.

Spiersy remains determined to leave his mark on KU. Expect more big buildings to come to house the spacious emptiness of his ‘Town House’ philosophy.