Voice of Reason
Lord Grade, cigar smoking supremo and the TV moguls TV mogul, once had a dream. It was at the time that Jesus of Nazareth had been made, and Lew was trying to sell it to the American networks. One night he had a vision seeing a large ‘25’. This, he thought, must be the price of the film. Can’t be 25 or 25,000, so it must be 25,000,000. He duly got $25 million, twice what they were initially prepared to pay for it. I also had a dream in which a large ‘18’ appeared. This means nothing, I thought, besides an indication that I must be working too hard. Days later, while wandering through the SCR, as you do, all be came clear. As you know, dear reader, my hearing is phenomenally good, so I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation about ‘18’. As with Lord Grade, it meant 18 million. It’s the Sherfield budget for 1996/97.
As you can imagine my ears pricked up considerably at this stage. I caught the word ‘Estates’, this time from another part of the SCR. My head turned. Apparently, they expect to spend about Ł8 million in the coming year. Fair enough. Big department, lot of expenses, but also with a lot of income from the Halls of Residence. A lot indeed, about Ł695,000 from April to September or minus Ł215,000 after expenses, according to my indiscreet fellow diners. Still, never mind, the planned expansion of conferencing will bring in the drachmas. Oh dear. It’s the students that bankroll Estates, not conferencing which is a loss-maker, due to the already slapdash control of costs going for a Burton as IC kindly offer to employ every student who’s not on holiday to look after the guests and clean the rooms. In other words, the more we build, the more we lose. Realising this, it seems that conferencing, the great white hope of IC and Campus Renaissance, is as safe a bet as a seaside donkey in the Grand National. They also mentioned that Clayponds spends almost five times more on gardening than security contracts, which I’m sure will delight the residents. Walking by the BMS, someone shouted over the noise of concrete mixers that the communal areas, which were cut from 800 to 600 sq m have been further ‘redesigned’ to consist of a coffee machine, possibly on the fourth floor. You seem upset, doctor?
I think I then heard Finance’s name mentioned. I can’t be certain, but I’m sure someone said Ł2.3 million. That seems rather a lot of money spent for a department that is supposed to be careful with the cash, I thought. Still, it’s a big university, lot of departments etc. Hmm. Nottingham University is about 60-70% the size of us. They have less than 10 people in their finance operation, whereas our phone book lists just over 100. Now far be it from me to make crude comparisons, but this looks a tad excessive. Perhaps Nottingham contract work out and if so, why don’t we, since I doubt it could cost more than the current setup. Some careless soul on another table remarked that to ensure that proper checks are kept on spending, we spend nearly Ł150,000 on internal audits. So rigorous are these checks, my own department has taken to cleaning the inside of windows that haven’t had their outside cleaned for 30 years and ferrying students up to St Mary’s in taxis so the poor dears can attend lectures scheduled with no consultation between the two. God help us if we didn’t have an audit.
Registry’s getting Ł2 million said someone on the walkway who should have known better. This seems rather excessive for a department that issues certificates and exam timetables. It’s not short of staff, as I have said before, but for that to explain a budget of more than a couple of hundred thousand, they would need more people than could physically squeeze onto level 3. I just can’t think where all that money goes- answers on a postcard.
In short, you learn a lot from pinning back the ears round here. It’s all very well College constantly pleading poverty, but when details like this come to the fore, it is very difficult to have any sympathy. Academic departments are having to make genuine cuts, but Sherfield ploughs its merry furrow, stuck in the 1970s, oblivious to the real world. IC has an excellent Management School and a central management unaware of its teachings - Discuss
