APPLICATIONS WELCOME FROM AXE-WIELDING MANIACS
The search for a permanent full-time Principal for UA92 has begun. As our own HR department was clearly not up to the job, the task of finding the right person has fallen to posh recruitment consultants Anderson Quigley. Prospective candidates logging into their website will discover a mine of information to help their applications. Candidates, we are told, will need to ‘embody and exemplify the values and behaviours through which UA92 has been founded’ – (a trawl through numerous back issues of subtext will be of enormous help in this regard). However, they do not have to come from ‘an academic background’ to be eligible, clearly a recognition that the academic claims of UA92 will be somewhat elastic. But they will be required to provide ‘evidence of adopting a disruptive approach to teaching and learning’ (we’re really not making this up). Good to see that UA92 encourages applications from all sections of the community.
Our recruitment specialists also provide a lot of useful information on the thinking behind UA92. Central to this is the Target Talent Curriculum (TTC), with its ‘Ten Principles that prepare UA92 students for life’. They then go on to list eleven. It seems that a grasp of simple arithmetic will not be an essential requirement for this post.
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‘I’M UA92!…NO, I’M UA92!
One of our friends from the M32 Masterplan and UA93 Facebook group has spotted some rather curious anomalies concerning the entity known as ‘UA92’. It seems there is more than one of them. There is ‘UA92 Ltd’ registered at Companies House (managing director, Brendan Flood). This, it transpires, is actually ‘Undergraduate Academy 92’, a part of UCFB, the rival Man City-linked outfit based at the Etihad Stadium which Flood wants to become ‘the Harvard of sport’. Another Flood manifestation of the title is ‘UA92 Manchester Ltd’. Then there is ‘University Academy 92 Limited’ and ‘UA92 Old Trafford Limited’, both based in Enfield in London and both naming one Clifford Donald Wing as chief officer. To complicate the picture further, Wing is a business associate of Gary Neville and sits alongside him on the board of Zerum Consult Limited, one of a number of Zerum companies linked to Neville and all registered at the same address in Manchester.
So where is the Official UA92? Or even the Real UA92? And is there a Provisional UA92 and a Continuity UA92 lurking somewhere in the background? Will students know which one they’re signing up for? But perhaps there is a more mundane explanation for this proliferation of UA identities. Could it be that some of Gary’s erstwhile business mates have stolen a march on him and registered all the varieties of the UA92 brand, rather like internet domain names, hoping to flog them back to him at a later time?
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SPACE RACE
We have received reports of Acting UA92 Principal and Dean of FASS Simon Guy and his team being ejected from a meeting room for failing to go through room bookings. It is standard for bodies which aren’t ‘officially’ a part of the university to have difficulty securing space on campus, as the Putin fan club has found (see story below). Since, according to the VC, we’re still seeing if our partnership with Gary Neville ‘hangs together’ (even though we feature in most UA92 publicity and news coverage), it makes perfect sense to ensure that only officially affiliated bodies and societies get first dibs on space. Well done to all involved.