Beyond the Drawbridge

Brunhilde is agog at some of the language in the latest HR newsletter:

SydneyRecruitment manages the end-to-end recruitment of staff and the on-boarding of new staff.

On-boarding sounds like the sort of thing young, fit babes might get up to at Bondi.

I’m afraid I never read those emails anymore. They’re full of such stuff. I retrieved this month’s copy from the trash and chose a few lines at random:

…cancellation of any sponsorship rights going forward.

SydneyPeople is divided into HR teams that work together to service all your HR needs

advice and guidance to [clients] on strategic and operational human resources issues impacting the University’s performance.

…proactive development of internal talent…

…ensures the principles of workforce diversity and EEO are embraced

..ensuring the University’s overall remuneration strategy meets the domestic and global
competition for talent.

I thought ‘meeting competition’ was a great concept, but I’m worried that I’ve been re-aligned:

With an effective date of 1 August 2008 the HR Service Centre will have re-aligned the support of the University’s groups/schools/units to different HRSC Team Members.

Do you think that might impact my performance to such an extent that I might need to proactively embrace internal talent development and be serviced by HR?

This is what you get when stuff is written by people from the Centre for the Mind. Seriously.

We take great pleasure in being able to invite you to the launch of the
new University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions […] This new multi-disciplinary Institute will be a focal point for some of the world’s leading thinkers, researchers and
educators in disciplines such as renewable energy, land and water
sustainability; economic development; population growth and public
health; and food and energy security.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. People are worried about sustainability, yes? So they’ve built an institute, yes? To be followed by

a debate on sustainability

Let me remind you that this is the University of Sydney (the Sustainable Campus), which has just spent tens of millions of dollars on knocking down several buildings, digging up a park, and building a new Law Faculty and shiny spaceship admin block. And it’s still a fucking swamp outside Biochemistry.

Does anyone have a spare brain? Mine just exploded.

I am pleased, nay delighted, to read that

Phase 2 of the brand project kicks off this month with the development and testing of several different brand concepts developed from the market research we conducted in Phase 1.

I once worked for a ‘market-led’ company.  Let’s just say that I discovered that ‘market research’ is code for “we’ve got no imagination so we’re just going to get our potential customers to make stuff up, and deliver it about five years too late, by which time those self-same customers will have got bored and bought from someone else”.  You can add in your own thoughts on how much money such exercises leave for things like, oh for example, research and development.  (There’s a rant brewing.  You can tell, can’t you?).

To help us manage this process, we’ve established a network of specialist sub-committees

Eight sub-committees to be precise.  I couldn’t be bothered counting the names, but there are nine on the steering committee. On average, at least five people on each sub-committee.

We are doomed, aren’t we?

Word reaches TheCardinal that a portrait of a venerable Professor in our department has been comissioned at the modest sum of, er,  $18,000.

A greater sum was presumably spent on the new portrait of a senior administrative academic that has just popped up the foyer of the Edward Ford building.

TheCardinal would like to advise students with some artistic talent to ditch their scientific career and get a job as academic portrait painter.  There are clearly enough egos around to provide a rich customer base…..

Viking Biochemist writes:

Our lab meeting was invaded this morning by corporate zombies who wanted to show us our “new brand”. Our logo looks like a computer power switch but is supposed to be “a cheeky reminder of a copyright logo” which we then stick over every image in our ads.

Apparently we now own babies, butterflies, eggs, tablets and bees.

This is all so when our granny asks where we work, we don’t have to say
“It’s like the Garvan”, because of course that’s what we all did.

… and this is the place I will have on my CV for the rest of my life as
where I did my PhD. Maybe I should add a note:
I started at the Centenary before they turned evil

Fortunately, there is a good trashy action movie out today, so I can go
and sooth my soul with a giant mechatronic man smashing stuff for two hours.

This reminds me of a strange email that went to everyone on the University HR list a few days ago, the understanding of which yet eludes me:

In 2002 the University determined that dissemination of all text-based, third-party copyright materials required for student course work would be carried out by the Library. However, a decentralised approach was adopted in the case of images, diagrams and artistic works included in lecture presentations and lecture notes. It was agreed that these could be located on individual course web sites and on learning management systems.

The University is party to a new agreement with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) which places greater emphasis on the monitoring process and in the future details of all images, diagrams and artistic works communicated to students under Part VB of the Copyright Act will have to be recorded during any monitoring of electronic copying and communication exercise.

It continues in that vein ad nauseam. And I am thoroughly sick of corporatization, wank, and arsepaperwork.

TheCardinal has been lying awake at night worrying about a vexed issue. He was beginning to feel that there was no hope… that people of great diplomacy and insight would never step forward to circumnavigate the torturous labyrinth of political intrigue and history underlying this great problem…. but GOOD NEWS reached us today from UberControl….

We are pleased to advise you that University Venues and the University of Sydney Union’s Venues Collection are merging to form The University of Sydney Venue Collection.This new venture will provide a single streamlined venue booking service and professional catering and events management services

At last we can sleep soundly….

This post is primarily for the benefit of those who are are not enCagéd.

After the mindless Dilbertism described in my previous post, I had a little email chat with Mr JM, making exactly the point that we’d rather spend the money on something useful. He mistakenly thought I’d emailed the entire Cage, but after that agreed with me that collective tongue-biting was probably in order.

However, my young apprentice had few such calms, and sent the following masterpiece to everyone:

I took a poll of the students in our room. Half of us prefer the red books to the blue as there is more room on each page to write on. Those who prefer the blue based this on paper quality, room for the date, and especially the gridlines. We all agreed that it was not worth branding the lab books as your work should be enough to make you proud, the appearance of the lab book shouldn’t really matter.

I am so, so proud of her.

One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.

The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.

We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.

Yay! We cheer.

And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says

To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?

It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back

Yes

or even

Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us

(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)

It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?

Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.