I wonder if my employer, a British university, has lost the plot about what a university is. Seems to me quite simple; a university is about two main things - research and teaching. Pushing the frontiers of knowledge and disseminating the new discoveries to the widest possible audience without favour. Or to avoid long words it is about finding out new stuff and telling people about it.

Sadly the Vice Chancellor of my institution seems to have swallowed a 90's management guru's book whole and is spouting all kinds of gibberish about 'enterprise' and values and mission statements. There seems to be a small group of people around her who feed this fantasy, whilst every member of staff I interact with regards it as an irrelevant joke.

It wouldn't matter if they weren't spending a small fortune printing full colour booklets to send to every member of staff outlining wordy and worthy values and ambitions in green and purple type seemingly laid out by a child and printed on 16 sides of glossy full colour heavyweight A5 paper. Still it carries an FSC logo on the back stating that it came from "Mixed Sources" so that's all right then - NOT!