The briefing begins

In case you missed it, the university's plan to sack everybody bar the Executive Board made the main story on Midlands Today a couple of days ago.

Thrill! To the BS from management!

Swoon! To the calm authority of my union leaders!

Rage! At the stupidity of massive classes, restricted courses and exhausted lecturers!

See it here (UK viewers only, possibly).

More coverage here and here (including a heated argument in the comments section which starts well then degenerates into slanging).

The future of music

I know that many of you are, or will become, fans of Cruel Brother, Wolverhampton University's second best band (only joking Zoot - it's a Flight of the Concords reference). Fret no more: you can listen to them all day by clicking here.

Look who preys on porky lecturers

Our art department is housed in a 1970s block which was probably very fashionable, but is now a rotting heap of concrete. However, kestrels like to breed in the deep shelves between its exoskeleton and skin. I don't go past that block very often, but Dan and I wandered along the ring road today and heard the cry of the kestrel, and took a closer look. (Normally in Wolverhampton, Kestrel denotes an extra-strong lager favoured by those who prefer to quaff al fresco).

So anyway, I tried out my new zoom lens on these birds today. There are three fledglings, and their parents must have been off hunting. I took these photos from my building, about 250 feet away, through windows on each stairwell. The light wasn't brilliant, but it's not a bad first go.

Give us your feckin' money

University fees up to £3,200: grants and loans stay where they are. David Lammy, the minister in charge (ho ho) says 'difficult choices have to be made'. Students will have to make difficult choices about whether to bother with university or not. Difficult choices by almost universally-Oxbridge educated ministers have been avoided: Trident, higher taxes for the rich, more inheritance tax etc. etc. etc: none of these difficult choices have been made.

Rich kids won't notice a few hundred more - everybody else, like Wolverhampton students will struggle, especially as jobs will be scarce.

Another blow to the proletariat from the Labour Party then. Fucking shameful.

Food for thought?

I had the worst meal ever yesterday - and I went to a boarding school for some of my youth. It was at Walsall Campus canteen. I requested the Yorkie Dinkie, assuming it would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

She picked up a frisbee of Yorkshire pudding and dropped two chunks of mashed potato into it with a dull thud. Sausages which looked like anatomical tribal warfare trophies followed, then a lump (literally) of gravy.

On sitting down, I realised that the Yorkie had to be torn by hand - cutlery was useless. The potato was semi-raw and barely mashed: my fillings had problems with the nuggets of raw potato hidden in the cold mash. The only thing lumpier than the mash was the gravy, which was clearly dredged from the bottom of a particularly polluted canal.

The piéce de résistance was the sausages. They looked like they'd spent too long on a sunbed - chocolate brown and clearly deep-fried. The only way to separate the crunchy outsides (impossible to cut into or chew) was to jam one fork through the crust, then employ a second fork to scrape out the barely-cooked 'meat' from the insides. The effort was wasted: the taste was similar to a discarded flip-flop coated in penguin guano. I managed two mouthfuls before giving up, gnawing disconsolately on the Yorkshire pudding in the same way Captain Scott tucked into his shoes towards the end. Next time I'm there (Thursday), I shall bring my own shoes and get them to put them in fryer. At least I know where they've been.

Carry On Up the Greasy Pole

You're in for a real treat today. I'm live-blogging from Aston University's lakeside conference centre, attending a conference on how to keep my job. I mean of course, how to plan an academic career. I'm with three other Wolverhampton teachers, so of course we're sitting at the back being sarcastic and munching pork scratchings. Our leaders here are virtually all white men, so the institutional conservatism of academia is clearly on my side!

I'll be counting clichés ('on the runway' has already appeared) and 'networking' - a term which makes me nauseous. Oh well, perhaps I'll meet glamorous single academics…

Believe it or not

The University of Wolverhampton is a leading British university with an outstanding academic reputation

(Thanks not to Ewarwoowar but to whoever mailed me with this (sorry both of you) - it's from Wikipedia). It's true - even though we're supposedly 102nd in the league tables (as though education can be treated like a pub darts league).

Onions makes it 5-38 on his debut. 5 wickets gets you on the honours board in any case - but in your first match it's stunning.

Happy Birthday, old man (2)

Friday night saw a party for Mike Cunningham's 50th birthday party, held at the rather wonderful Café Maxsim's in Wolverhampton. For those of you who don't know Mr. C, he's a dry, witty politics lecturer, an inveterate author of witty letters to the Guardian, and (on the debit side), a Crystal Palace fan. Photos here

Nomenclature

My carefully worded complaint to management about the silent exclusion of all the humanities subjects from our new name was noted in much the same way that the Milky Way will react to the arrival of the Voyager probes (if they're going that way).

Anonymous friends responded in their own ways:

BCU: Performance, Media and English

Birmingham: College of Art and Law

De Montfort: Faculty of Humanities

Gloucestershire: Department of Humanities

Keele: School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Leicester: Faculty of Arts

Warwick: Faculty of Arts

Worcester: Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts

Wolverhampton: School of Law, Social Sciences, and Communications

Doubleplus good. He pushed the picture out of his mind. Humanities were a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally.

Sounds fair…

My first university was overwhelmingly white - but Bangor University is in North Wales, which has virtually no ethnic minorities other than English. Still there was a fairly substantial non-white cohort. My current employer, Wolverhampton Uni, must have one of the most diverse student populations in the country, both from British-born students and international ones - it's one of the institution's strengths, though I'm never quite sure how well the different groups mix.

In any case, we're much more welcoming than certain universities - these figures are so shocking that it can't simply be written off as a problem with school-level education of black children:

Across all years and subjects, Oxford's student population of 20,000 has around 380 students from a black background, including mixed race, of whom just 175 out of 11,900 are undergraduates.

Cambridge is no better. Perhaps it's partly explained by the greater poverty in minority groups: 40% of Cambridge and Oxford students went to private schools, despite only 7% of children attending such schools. Mmmm…egalitarian