Pi Magazine
Last year, we reported that Pi Magazine had wasted an estimated £600 on printing excess copies of issue 668 (see CG 17). This sort of thing became a regular occurrence, with Pi spending perhaps one third of its Union money printing copies nobody would ever read.
“Consistent lack of quality”
Despite still hanging onto a runner’s-up award from a 2004 tabloid competition as evidence of non-shitness, Pi’s writers were brought down a notch earlier this year when the Union said their magazine suffered from a “consistent lack of improvement and general lack of quality”. Pi’s budget was later cut, despite an online petition from a staggering three people. The money saved is now instead wasted on The Onion, a glorified events calendar that costs the Union an estimated £6,000 per year to produce.
Bursaries
Having refused a Freedom of Information request from The Guardian, UCL eventually revealed its undergraduate bursary figures to The Cheese Grater. We now know that more than a million pounds’ worth of maintenance bursary money from the last three academic years was not allocated to students.
Disappearing cash
The bursaries are intended to counterbalance the £3,000 top-up fees, with one third of the extra money made from top-up fees going into the bursary budget.
The Sanctuary
Last year, Pi kicked up a fuss after 3,000 copies of the profit-making Sanctuary newspaper were binned by the Union (see CG 18). This was hardly a scandal: the advert-ridden Sanctuary was not affiliated with UCLU, and copies were officially banned from Union premises. Meanwhile, the offending newspaper had rebranded itself as UCL | LSE Sanctuary and targeted the London School of Economics. According to an LSE Union Officer, their student union tried to clamp down on distribution, but had no official policy on Sanctuary “other than widespread agreement about how shit it is”. Despite this, the pisspoor paper is rearing its ugly head again.
UCL Academy
Before Christmas, we looked at UCL’s sponsored construction of an Academy in one of the more affluent parts of the Borough of Camden (see CG 19). With both UCL and the local and national government standing to gain, widespread complaints from students, staff and locals were ignored. Local parents even lodged a case at the High Court claiming that UCL had been handed the contract without any competition, but the case was dismissed.
Widespread complaints
Back then, this rag commented that UCL Provost Malcolm Grant might be after ‘the power to fast track gifted students into UCL through his own pet secondary school’. We may have been right — during the summer, it emerged that Camden council will be bringing in an aptitude test that would allow the UCL Academy to bring in high-scoring students from other parts of London.