Beyond the Drawbridge

I whinged, open channel, about a particularly troublesome speaker. He was from the Human Nutrition department, obviously.

What I didn’t mention was how nauseatingly self-congratulatory they were. ‘Of course, we all know we need low GI versions of Kelloggs Cornflakes’ and stuff like that. What was striking was how little adverse or hostile comment there was. Go to a proper science seminar and inevitably someone will throw you a curve-ball. That’s what science is about, that’s peer review.

I didn’t know enough about the subject to ask searching questions (although I did laugh out loud at the one scatter graph he presented:  a straight line through it with an r of about 0.2)—and I refrained from commenting that despite any data to support them, he was making recommendations based on what ‘everyone’ (i.e. the HN dept) already ‘knows’.

And these are the people the meeja worship.

Fucking medics. We’re all doomed.

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?