‘Laura Laughs and Professor Cheese-Dog!’ chortled Vince, as the two of them sat over a hasty coffee in the student café on Monday morning. (Pat and Fatima were using the relative privacy of their office to deal with a student who had just been thrown out of her parents’ house for bringing home the wrong colour boyfriend.) Jenny sensed he’d been laughing on-and-off all weekend. ‘What a team! What can possibly go wrong? No wait!’ he reconsidered: ‘Professor Cheese-Dog and the head dinner lady! Well, at least you won’t have any trouble cooking the books when it all goes tits up!’
Jenny choked slightly on her coffee and unintentionally spat a little back into her cup. Actually though, she couldn’t afford to waste it at this price. Apparently, until last year, all the food and drink outlets had been run internally, and subsidies had kept prices down. Now, with corporate logos everywhere, prices had soared: doubled here in the ‘Costa’ coffee shop and it didn’t even taste like Costa coffee!
‘Yeah, I notice you’re not too eager to volunteer for these things?’ she snapped back. She was steadily developing the robustness the Cack Shack required for long-term survival. ‘You’re bloody welcome to join us if you like?’ Despite, or maybe because of, her outward show of composure, she realised she was trembling again.
‘No, you’re OK,’ Vince smiled in refusal. ‘Bill knows that’s not my sort of thing at all.’
He looked at her more closely and smiled again. Jenny thought it was a nice smile but wasn’t entirely sure – she was never entirely sure.
They finished their drinks and headed back to the department offices. As they passed through the main foyer on the way, Jenny heard a familiar name mentioned. A sheepish, reluctant-looking young man, almost certainly a student, accompanied by an irate older woman – she seemed to be his mother – had presented themselves at reception and asked for ‘Mr. Olding’. Jenny had never met John Olding but she recognised the name of her predecessor on the electronics module immediately, having picked up so many of his ‘loose ends’ the past two or three weeks.
She thought no more of it. However, by the time they’d walked the short distance back to the department, a ringing phone was to be heard from the office John Olding had shared with Sebastian Cooke. It wasn’t being answered. As Jenny entered her office (Pat and Fatima had gone), she could hear that John’s phone next door had stopped and, within a few seconds, hers rang.
A few months’ experience, or a wise head to advise her there-and-then, would have told Jenny that this was precisely the time not to answer a phone: someone randomly ringing around the department for anyone that would pick up was never going to be good news. However, she didn’t have either the experience or the advice, so she answered, and wasn’t entirely surprised to find it was reception – and that it concerned the student and his furious mother.
Apparently, John Olding was a bad man: the receptionist relayed and sanitised the mother’s expletive-laden rantings in the background. (A touch workshy maybe, Jenny thought as she listened, hopelessly disorganised probably, but not exactly ‘bad’ as far as she could tell: there was the faint whiff of rat.) However the student, but mainly his volcanic mother were adamant. John was the first-year student, ‘Nick’s’, personal tutor and was not giving him any support. Nick had been to John’s office on numerous occasions to ask for advice and clarifications on the course, different modules and individual pieces of work but had never received any help from him. Sometimes he wasn’t there, missed appointments or had refused or been too busy to talk; other times, he’d been rushed or unhelpful: he’d not explained things properly, left Nick more confused than before or occasionally even been rude. (Again, Jenny could square what she knew with some of this but not all: the rodent smell grew stronger.) As a result, poor Nick had been unable to complete a single assignment this whole academic year and was now going to be thrown off the course, and it was all John’s fault. (The stench of rat had become unmistakable.)
Mother, close to eruption now, wanted to see someone immediately. Reception hadn’t known John was off long-term sick and needed someone to step in to stem (divert really) the lava flow. There seemed to be no-one else around (Vince had disappeared remarkably quickly) so Jenny’s second rash decision within two minutes was to agree to speak to student and mother face-to-face. Reception would send them both up to her office: they would be there in a minute or so.
She waited; two or three minutes passed. No-one appeared so she went to her door and looked in both directions along the corridor; it was empty. After about five minutes, she thought she saw two figures crossing the stairwell at the near end, but heading off in the wrong direction. After ten minutes or so her phone rang again: reception once more.
‘They can’t find your office!’
‘Really? Did you give them the number?’
‘Yes, but they can’t find it.’
‘That’s odd. OK, tell him my office is right next to Mr. Olding’s, where they’ve been meeting. I’ll keep a lookout.’
‘Will do.’
She went back out to the corridor. Another five minutes passed and a couple could be seen briefly passing across the opposite, further end of the corridor, away from her. She called but they’d already turned out of earshot. Another ten minutes and her phone rang once more.
‘Er, do you think you could come down?’
She sighed. ‘Yes, OK.’
By the time Jenny reached reception, mother had erupted, Krakatoa-like. But her hapless son was now taking the full force of the blast. The logical denouement from an impromptu tour of the campus: not knowing where his personal tutor’s office was (or the entire department for that matter), though never having been there, not attended a single lecture or lab, to not having engaged with the programme at all, was complete pretty much before she got there. Jenny tried to pacify mother and propose recovery action to the student; she suggested another meeting to look at what his options were, but they were soon gone: ‘But Mum,’ whimpering into the distance as she almost dragged him away. She never saw either of them again.
Jenny didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was sad or absurd enough for either, whichever way you looked at it. But, equally regrettably, it was soon forgotten. She had too much else to worry about: a brand-new, multi-level, fully online degree programme (that she didn’t really understand) for several hundred students across ten (or so) distant countries wasn’t going to write itself!
*
So, over the next few weeks, Jenny assumed the role of ‘programme leader’ for the ‘Combined Undergraduate and Postgraduate International Online Programme in Engineering’ (‘CUPIOPE’) and, with it, more stress than she’d previously realised existed in the world. Even that bloody acronym itself had issues from the outset – and was an omen of things to come. The pronunciation intended by senior management was obviously meant to be ‘Coo-pee-Ope’, or something pretentiously classical-sounding like that, but the rest of the engineering department (apart from Bill Wiggins) immediately decided it was going to be ‘Keepy-Uppy’ and would never again refer to it as anything else. Someone even produced a logo: a stylised outline of a footballer with a mortar board balanced on her raised knee, which then persisted on documentation, web pages, and the like, for years without either explanation or challenge.
And the rest of the ‘small team she was to be a focus of’ were completely useless, of course – at least in an academic sense. Laura Potter was permanently busy doing ‘something else’ and never once visited Jenny in her office or responded to meeting invitations. Once or twice, in the early days, Jenny went to find her in the rarefied air of the directorate suite and, having tiptoed apologetically across the only carpeted section of the entire campus, past the VC and DVC’s offices, to find her, immediately regretted it. Not only did Laura know nothing about anything, and seemed incapable of learning it either, she deeply resented any conversation that threatened to get anywhere near to exposing the unhappy truth. Jenny realised quickly that the mutually optimal working relationship between them was for each to forget that the other existed. To pursue it any further was clearly going to make for more work for her, not offload any of it.
Obviously, George Jolly was equally pointless from an academic perspective although, unlike Laura, he recognised and accepted it with his usual beaming cheer. He clearly had nothing better to do so was on hand a fair amount of the time – almost impossible to get rid of, in fact. His previous one-day-a-week on campus quickly became two, sometimes three, occasionally four. They both realised quickly that he wasn’t going to contribute much of value to Jenny’s task, but it didn’t deter him. He was supportive and enthusiastic to an extreme, completely unburdened by any idea of what it was all about. For a while, Jenny tried using him as a proof-reader for documentation she’d produced but either he didn’t read well enough to be able to do it or his natural good nature wouldn’t allow him to find any fault. Everything she showed him was ‘marvellous’, ‘couldn’t be better’. Jenny soon gave up on that line too.
He did have a redeeming feature though: he wasn’t short of money and his financial generosity was of more practical use than his time. He kept Jenny supplied throughout the day with morning coffees, biscuits, lunch sandwiches, afternoon teas, chocolate bars, etc. (even at The Shack’s new exorbitant prices), which she didn’t have the heart to refuse as it was clearly all he could contribute to the project. Over time, they developed a fairly decent working relationship so long as they didn’t do any actual work together. After a while, Jenny had to admit that, in a strange way, she actually quite liked the guy although she also rather looked forward to his absent days when she didn’t have to ingest sugar every hour or so and could instead starve herself until early afternoon and enjoy a proper meal.
So, unsurprisingly (neither to her nor everyone else in the department) ‘CUPIOPE’ (or ‘Keepy-Uppy’) became her project. The rest of the engineering team would contribute their subject modules in time but, for now, it was her responsibility to get all the ‘top level’ stuff ready for the first stage of approval. Obviously, she had the experience of those that already had PL roles (Fatima, Pat, Seb, Kevin, etc.) to guide her but no-one could take the grunt work from her. And she still had all her other lecturer’s work to do. Her days grew longer; she started earlier, finished later and barely saw her home in daylight at all.
There were a few positives, she supposed – apart from seeing her mother less. Bill Wiggins eventually agreed to take a module’s teaching and marking off her ‘to lighten the load’. (‘One fucking module!’ she realised with horror she’d shouted out loud on the bus home one night.) And she’d rapidly become a person of some importance as far as the overworked admin folk were concerned. An ordinary programme leader meant nothing to them in the general run of things – entirely ignorable, unless they wanted something from her; but PL for Alan S-K’s ‘special project’ seemed to inject a reciprocal sense of urgency when she needed something to be done. So things moved relatively quickly when she got them right, which she was slowly learning how to do.
In truth though, she was learning on two fronts, or in two ways on the same front, or … oh, it didn’t matter; but she was learning! Aside from getting to grips with NSU processes in the conventional sense, she was learning how to circumvent them. At first, this had been with Vince Plumb’s help but she was quickly becoming his equal in it.
Jenny’s research background, although engineering by name, really entailed software more than hardware. Her PhD was optimising smart energy networks; she wrote code and designed and built intelligent systems. She was essentially a software engineer or, more accurately in old money, a process engineer, a systems analyst. And she was good, very good. She had a knack of seeing the big picture above the detail. She could spot where things worked, for real – and where they didn’t; where parts joined up – and where they wouldn’t … or couldn’t. And this natural procedural instinct, combined with Vince’s experience, quickly led her to an inescapable conclusion … that most of NSU’s regulations, processes and procedures were utter bollocks!
Why they were bollocks didn’t really concern her – it was probably a convoluted history of incremental damage from successive, oft-restructured committees and the like, or a rolling tide of new admin managers each wanting things to be done their way – but they were bollocks nonetheless. If you could pick apart the individual components then step back enough to understand them for real, you could drive a coach and horses through them. One thing contradicted another so there was always an easier path. Some defunct committee had once specified that something-or-other was needed – in a particular form, but nowadays another committee would receive it – often in a different form. The rules said such-and-such but there was no-one in the chain to check that such-and-such happened because what really happened was …, and so on. It was wide open to short-circuiting and, well yes, exploitation (for the best of purposes: efficiency, naturally, she argued). She started to put it to the test …
At first, she trod carefully. She signed off a form herself and sent it two stages ahead, bypassing the person who should have signed it. If anyone had questioned it, she would have claimed an inexperienced misunderstanding but no-one did, and the final approval came back nearly a week quicker. She became more ambitious by degrees: she found ways of combining several files for approval into one email with a cleverly open-to-interpretation cover letter; most documents went unread but all got approved. She learnt the daily patterns of the various managers: who was most amenable first thing in the morning, or later in the day when they wanted to go home, or after a liquid lunch, or where they went for a smoke if she needed something signed quickly – and without much scrutiny. She wasn’t always sure whether it was her subterfuge or simply that Alan S-K’s project just had to get through on time but, either way, she was soon steaming along.
Eventually, she convinced herself that no-one in The Shack really checked anything they didn’t have to: they were all so busy, so she tried the ultimate test. To eliminate the Triple-A factor from the experiment, she tried it with one of her own in-house modules, nothing to do with CUPIOPE at all. When it was time to write a new assignment for students resitting over the summer, she wrote the task as best she could but, at the end, instead of listing the module outcomes the assignment was supposed to test, she pasted in her weekly shopping list. The final section of the assignment read:
Learning Outcomes:
On successful completion of this assignment, the student will have demonstrated the ability to:
- Two aubergines
- Onions
- Mushrooms (cheap ‘wonky’ ones if they’ve got them)
- Carrots (ditto)
- Potatoes
- Bread (1 white, 1 brown)
- Marg (normal and low-calorie)
- That nice thing in the deli section: can’t remember the name but rhymes with ‘sofa’
- etc.
It was the module she’d inherited hurriedly from John Olding so she had no ‘mentor’ to send it to for approval: it could go to anyone in the department really. She didn’t want to get anyone she particularly liked into trouble so she sent it to Bill Wiggins. It was returned the same day with the moderation form duly signed off and a terse comment that it was satisfactory (including ‘appropriate coverage of learning outcomes’). He hadn’t read it. She sighed, replaced the shopping list with the correct learning outcomes and sent it off for official keeping.
She reported all this back to Vince a few days later over a coffee; he roared with laughter and beamed at her with something that almost seemed like pride.
‘Well, I’ve not tried much of that,’ he confessed. ‘But it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest! There are some diligent souls here but they’re few and far between. Everyone wants to do the job properly but there just isn’t the time. So folks concentrate on what they have to do, which is what they’re going to get shouted at for not doing. Everything else just gets botched through in the seconds before someone else’s deadline.’ He suddenly looked reflective.
‘In fact, I’ve often thought …’ he mused, tailed off, then changed course. ‘I mean, it’s not just this internal moderation stuff that’s no good. Our processes for the way we treat actual students isn’t much better. I’ve been here a long time: I’ve seen all sorts of things. I’ve known of marks getting entered for the wrong module and it not being picked up; lecturers in relationships with students giving them high marks then filling in second marking sheets themselves – or not entering a mark first time then making an excuse for them why they should have a second chance without penalty; then putting the high mark in over the summer when there’s even less scrutiny. That sort of thing. And it’s not always much better at the exam board itself.’
‘Don’t exam boards pick up on mistakes then?’
‘Sometimes, but not always, and often the real mistake is buried in earlier documentation the exam board doesn’t see. External examiners are only human too and probably eager to get home so they’re not always as on-the-ball as you’d think. Having so many online boards now certainly hasn’t helped either. And sometimes they just make it worse!
‘Really, How?’
‘Well, they always run on too long and people lose concentration, and there’s always too much pressure on admin staff. I can think of loads of cases, but my favourite was when we nearly gave a degree to a guy who’d hardly done any work at all for his final year!’
‘How on earth did you nearly manage that?’
‘Well, it was a while ago, admittedly, when things were less electronic. There was only one woman from student exams there and she was struggling to keep up with the minutes as we were trying to rattle through the last few students. He was initially marked down as needing to repeat the year but then someone asked a question about his previous results profile. No-one really knew the answer, most just shook their heads and stayed quiet (to be honest, I wasn’t paying attention to begin with either); but someone said ‘pass’ – you know, like a Mastermind ‘I don’t know’ ‘pass’. We moved on to the next student but Alison, who only caught the last few words, crossed out ‘Repeat Year’ in her minutes and wrote ‘Pass’ instead.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, Bill Wiggins and I were sat each side of Alison. I’d seen what she’d done but it hadn’t exactly registered with me. I was also trying to remember the student; I had a vague idea he’d had a lot of personal problems that year so I was toying with the idea of not saying anything.’ Jenny hissed through her teeth in disapproval, but Vince continued, undeterred. ‘Anyway, Bill also spotted it, called Alison out, got it put right and got her into a little bit of trouble for a while. Washed over quickly enough though.’
‘So what’s your point?’ He was obviously driving at something.
‘Well, I’ve often wondered,’ he started as before. ‘What with our processes being so leaky, just exactly what we might get away with? If we wanted to, I mean. It’s bad enough when people make genuine mistakes but imagine if we were actually trying to get something dodgy through?’
‘Like lecturers having affairs with students and raising their grades?’
‘No, on a bigger scale entirely.’
‘What then?’
‘Well, I’ve often wondered,’ he started for the third time, but finally followed through, ‘whether I could get a degree for my cat!’
Jenny actually flinched, widened her eyes, and stared at him, honestly not sure whether he meant it.
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, why not? As an exercise in showing how flawed our systems were. A completely fictitious student, ‘A. Catt’, ‘Andy’ maybe. Like Andy Capp, but Catt.’
‘Who?’
‘Sorry. Old-fashioned Daily Mirror cartoon, still going, I think. Anyway, we create and enrol a completely bogus student, A. Catt, find ways of bypassing his attendance, engagement, give him some results, progress him through the years, and eventually give him a degree. He then turns out to be my cat! Seriously, I think it could be done.’
‘But why?’
‘Because we can? Because it’s a bit of fun – and we need something to cheer us up in this bloody place? It’s not like we’re giving a false grade to an actual student: no-one would actually benefit from it. Because it might finally show the shower in charge that all the rules and regulations, and processes and procedures they worship and try to beat us with aren’t worth shit? Why not?
Jenny sighed. She didn’t like it, but there was an unmistakeable twinkle – almost a small fire – in Vince’s eyes. He’d been sitting on this for some time, she realised. And now he’d given it voice. Details to follow, maybe, but it was clearly going to happen.
And so indeed the concept, no the legend, that was to become Andy Catt had been born.
(End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 will be available on 1st July!)
Prometheus for Sale 