IF THE PROVOST and President, Professor Malcolm Grant, is the black widow of UCL plc, luring victims to an unwitting and poisonous death, then his web must be the odiously named Development and Corporate Communications Office (DCCO): it was under the auspices of that office that the Campaign for UCL was launched in November 2004 and that our fantastic new logo was launched in August 2005. So “bland, unoriginal and incompetent” are the administrators of that august body (according to one student who has worked there) that it has been suggested that they should hang above the entrance to their offices on 90 Tottenham Court Road Dante’s memorable phrase Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, ‘abandon hope, all who enter here’ (Inferno, Canto iii).
What is wrong with these people, I hear you ask? So they have made some mistakes but do they really deserve total condemnation?
Maybe not. But it is worth investigating the role they play and how they play it especially as in a few year’s time, it will be that office who rings who up to extract a donation from you with all the delight of a necrophile slobbering over a fresh carcass.
Bigging It Up
UCL boasts the largest development office of any university in the United Kingdom. Yes, the largest: not the most productive, not the highest-grossing, not the most successful. Just the largest. And that large team has in fact got larger still over the last twelve months with many teams in DCCO increasing their staffs by upwards of 25%. Strange that at the same time UCL is reducing its academic staff costs by 15%. While academic staff must now meet new targets on research to justify their existence, DCCO are allowed to expand their empire across the university unhindered by the need to justify their existence.
One of the main features (indeed some would argue the only feature) of the Campaign for UCL is its ambition to raise more than £300 million in the next decade. Never mind that, give or two a few pounds, that is roughly what was raised in the previous decade. Not all of this money will be raised by ordinary alumni; some will be raised by wealthy donors and trusts, but how a university interacts with its graduates is indicative of what kind of institution it is or wants to be. As a friend of Mr Chatterbox’s who work in fundraising at another academic institution comments “UCL is going for a glossy, superficial, Americanised model that I am not sure is going to work in this environment. I am very sceptical.”
So Heavily Goes The Chariot
So are some at UCL. Dr Alisdaire Lockhart, jovial, rubicund head of the office, could perhaps be considered one of them. At the beginning of the academic year 2005/06 he “retired”. “There is a feeling that Alisdaire was pushed out because he went against the new grain of DCCO’s corporate style,” said one former member of DCCO staff, who recently left to move onto pastures new, frustrated at the lack of real progress and incompetence within DCCO. UCL has yet to find a full-time replacement for Dr Lockhart.
UCL Futures is the alumni giving programme. It supports the aims of the Campaign for UCL. In the Autumn Term of 2004 it aimed to launch an eight week alumni-giving campaign. That was postponed to January then again to July due to database glitches. The campaign eventually ran from May – July in 2005 and was a success, according to students who worked on the campaign, receiving more than £300,000 in pledges from alumni. DCCO aimed to repeat that success last autumn but failed to by a considerable margin to repeat its success. If current estimates are correct, it looks like a campaign based on the same numbers will raise half the amount.
“And I have noticed that the more ‘professional’ they become,” commented one student caller, “the more we are pissing off graduates… They definitely do not like UCL and few alums have anything decent to say about the Provost.” Another former caller said that a few graduates had been put off giving to UCL because of Professor Grant’s stance on tuition fees and that SSEES and Middlesex Hospital graduates (to name just a few) were annoyed at how they were taken for granted by a homogenous UCL Plc and that felt their old schools had been “swallowed up and forgotten” until it came to fundraising.
What is more, for its autumn campaign DCCO offered several “returning callers” their jobs back automatically for that campaign then retracted the offer when they realised they had to comply with HR regulations. One student who reapplied but was then rejected said: “It was totally unfair and totally subjective – I had to re-apply for a job I had done twice before on the same basis as those who were applying for the first time. I wasn’t the best fundraiser. But they re-employed people far worse than me.”
Pay As You Go
In 1998, an officiator at a UCL graduation ceremony joked that other university graduations resembled a sheepdip, where parents were herded in, dipped in Latin and then “fleeced of the appropriate fees”. Well, there’s still no Latin. But if that man is still at UCL, he must be eating his mortar board over the fleecing comment.
UCL plc is determined to indoctrinate current students in the benefits of UCL’s Alumni Network with UCL Union coordinating with DCCO in a number of student events. The insidious purpose being that graduates feel compelled to give to UCL once they leave. And that moment starts as students graduate, as displayed by the Provost’s cap-in hand speech at last year’s graduation ceremony. “It was totally disgusting,” one parent ranted. “We had just paid for our son’s education and all he could talk about was getting more money.”
What does UCL actually offer its graduates with its Alumni Network? Free access to the UCL library for reference purposes, access to the Union, a free webmail address for life (N. B.: the spam filter costs extra!), an MBNA credit card (last time Mr Chatterbox checked the interest rate was circa a student-friendly 15%) and discounts at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, Bloomsbury fitness and the UCL shop. “It’s rather like a Tesco Clubcard,” said one graduate wag.
If one accepts the current consensus that university expansion has increased beyond the capacity for government to fund higher education in totality, then fundraising from the graduate population (and other sources) is inevitable and necessary. The thing is that UCL plc is just not that good at it. They pay homage to the ideas of creating a community but they are not interested in the ideas of anyone but themselves. With all the inevitability of a pederast’s erection in Mothercare, all that latter-day Fagin, Professor Grant, is really interested in is picking a pocket or two. He is not interested in creating a proper, functioning community of give and take, still less of respecting alumni views of UCL’s future.
So when UCL plc come to you tempting you with their latest offerings, it is perhaps best to remember Vergil’s maxim: timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (Aeneid, Book II).