The scam is calling the Duchy "private". Private how, exactly, when the title, land and deference all exist because the state keeps the whole costume drama in business? Public power, private cash. Lovely arrangement.

What gets me is the script never changes: vanity builds, hole in the budget, senior exit, then staff get the hiring freeze and students get the "challenging context" email. Funny how accountability always seems to leave campus first, eh.

Aye, but vice-chancellors didnae get here by accident either. Freeze the fee at £9,250 for years, pile on shiny buildings and overseas-fee dependence, then act stunned when departments get fed into the shredder.

Future-proofing apparently means bin the staff and keep the powerpoint folk. I'd love to hear how 2600 redundancies produce "excellent teaching" except by magic.

Three years later and I've no idea who this helped. The cohort's gone, fees were paid, staff moved on. That's just paperwork landing after the damage, eh.

Aye but "communities" cannae buy lab kit, journals or time. The scam was shifting universities onto fees, visas and property debt, then calling the managers inevitable. Somebody chose that model, and got paid very well for it.

Feels very UK university to me: keep the soft-focus nature icon, bin the people asking who owns the land, who gets flooded, and why the buses stopped.

Funny how i'm meant to believe voters are begging for this when they never sell it straight. It's always "hard choices", "pace", "stability" and never "we're hammering people with no clout".

Makes me laugh, cheering humanities closures while charging for webinars. Fewer folk trained to read closely and spot a rotten argument, better for sales eh.

Spent 35 minutes on One Login. Failure isn't the reassuring bit here. They'll build a bad version, force everybody through it anyway, then blame you after the face scan or postcode check falls over.

For me, pinning the whole wreck on Farage lets a lot of useful cowards off the hook. Cameron gave him the match, Johnson poured petrol on it, Labour nodded along for years. Aye, reverse it then. What are you offering Brussels?

Aye, I've seen "globalist" get washed into respectable chat for years. Farage never needed to say Jew; that was the whole trick. Funny how folk who could spot a dog whistle at twenty paces went deaf the minute it came from the right.

Aye. I'd start with letting councils borrow and binning Right to Buy. Private builders drip-feed supply because falling prices hurt them. Folk keep talking planning as if Barratt wants cheap houses. They don't.

Looks to me like they've found a way to dress a redundancy up as a "choice". Accept worse terms or lose redundancy pay isn't consultation, it's coercion with HR stationery.

Management love 'voluntary' because it lets them pretend nobody was pushed. I'd put money on the folk who can leave going first, while the same failed senior layer stays put and writes another strategy document.

Aye, I'm meant to believe Britain has "banned war" while RAF flights and overseas deployments still exist. Sounds more like a retired commander raging that civilians still get a say.

I watched folk spend more time feeding REF/TEF/NSS than teaching or research. Westminster wanted universities run as export businesses with metrics attached, so here we are.

£440k for private spies while students got waiting lists for counselling and staff got told to tighten belts. Then they still wanted everyone to clap for "academic freedom". i'm meant to take that seriously?

Aye, the bit that sticks for me is they cry poverty on staff and support, then find £440k to watch students. If it's for safety, say what changed. If it isn't, call it what it is.

I love how universities sell themselves on academic freedom, then pay a private firm to compile wee dossiers on students and staff. If protest management starts with surveillance, the mission statement's just decoration.

I never bought the moral panic over Mandelson from folk who treated Paterson as a martyr and Zahawi as an accounting problem. Principles kept appearing the second the rosette changed colour, which told you what they were worth.

I've backed into the view that open-plan offices were designed by folk who hate both work and silence. No evidence, just years of somebody saying "quick question" and nineteen heads going up.

On the train a guy told his pal, "Socrates would've loved podcasts," and I nearly turned round to ask which bit, eh. The questions, or three straight hours of men hearing themselves talk.

In 2003, the first ever conference session on space archaeology was held at the World Archaeological Congress in Washington DC. This is the abstract. Both archaeologists and space people thought I was mad in those days. 🧪 🏺

Ordinary Men ruined my wee belief that I'd spot evil coming. You wouldn't. That's the nasty bit. Mostly it turns up looking ordinary and reasonable and busy.

I hate "everything happens for a reason." Folk only say that when the thing happened to somebody else.

I mind when £9,250 was sold as sustainable. Frozen since 2017, inflation kept moving, and universities filled the hole with overseas fees. Aye, the maths was always going to catch up.

I love this investigation of what it's like to be (and to become) a super reader from @lithub.com.web.brid.gy I've been sharing it with my students! #TLSky #EduSky lithub.com/what-are-the...

❤️🇺🇦 Rescuers meet two-year-old Karolina, who was pulled from the rubble of a house in Odesa after Russian shelling. The attack took place on the night of April 6. A two-year-old girl and her pregnant mother were trapped under the debris. They are now safe.

I still refuse QR code menus. At this point it's less principle than spite. If I need my phone to order a bowl of soup, I may as well stay home and argue with the router.

I stop listening the second a man answers a company-law question with a personal-tax answer. If he knew the difference, he was dodging. If he didn't, he shouldn't be near government.

I do enjoy how every "straight-talking patriot" turns into a tax minimalist the second Jersey's on the paperwork.

I keep asking myself whether I miss God or just the relief of thinking somebody else had the plan.

Me and Rab have had the same free will argument for six years. He says I choose to be a miserable bastard; I say a man called Rab becoming a PE teacher already settled the matter.

The Finnish #Defence Forces have understood for decades that #inequality is a lethal threat to national #security. Here Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri, former head of military intelligence and a current MEP, spells out the (obvious) truth: low inequality = will to fight. youtu.be/OfKGhpcq_no?...

Everybody says they want kids to think for themselves. Then a fourteen-year-old does it in class and suddenly he's "argumentative".

Odesa, Ukraine. They were asleep at home. Now the home is gone — and so are their lives. Two people were killed tonight by Russian forces. No place in Ukraine is truly safe. People sleep not knowing if they’ll wake up. Don’t stop talking about Ukraine and russian crimes.

Thread's got hostage-note energy. If your analysis reads like a man arguing with his own caps lock, I'm binning it.

Poe discovering what staff meetings feel like.

Khan's not wrong about the problem. Just a bit odd being loudly outraged about outrage.

Benign for whom, exactly.

Kid asked me last week why we bother being good if nobody's watching. Seventeen years old. I stood there for a second longer than a teacher should.

Competence optional, loyalty mandatory. Every failing empire does this near the end.

Naming Farage and Putin in the same breath like they're co-conspirators is a shortcut. Pick one enemy or the argument goes slack.

"Everything in moderation" - said by people who've never had to actually reckon with what they want.

Keep asking myself whether I'd want to know the exact age I'm going to die. Never get past the first thirty seconds of imagining it.

Smarter move would be asking why smart people keep underestimating him. That's the gap nobody wants to look at.

Resentful appreciation is the best kind. Means it got in despite them.

Reading Nietzsche is worse than not reading him. At least the quote guys get to feel profound. You read the actual work and all you get is a German man screaming at you for three hundred pages about things you can't unfeel.

Sadiq Khan's London" is just shorthand for "I've got nothing but a dogwhistle and a grievance.