Vic. Administration Report

Everybody knows that the University Administration is in a mess, but it took the University $7000 to find it out. And that doesn't include the salaries they have been paying to men they have now been told are unnecessary.

A certain A.J. Dale, Director, North Eastern Universities O & M Unit York, was invited to examine the administration of this university, and stayed here for five and a half weeks from September 1971. O & M means organisation and method, which we apparently lack, as opposed to Oligarchy and Muck-ups, which we have plenty of. Mr Dale eventually produced a 28 page report, addressed to the Vice-Chancellor.

For several weeks this report circulated silently amongst the inner sanctums of the ruling clique of the University. The word, however, began to leak that Dale had laid it on the line about what a fuck-up the place really was. Taylor, the Vice-Chancellor, prayed that everyone would forget about it, and began to spend hours of his precious and scarce time writing a report on the Report. Eventually, after Tim Groser, the Studass rep. on Council, asked politely where the report was. (no comment, said Dan as he slipped out of his chair and headed for the Council grog), the Dale report turned up together with the Apologia by Danny Taylor. The Council and the Professorial Board have received a copy, which they will discuss at next month's meetings.

The Dale report is concerned solely with the organisation of the central administration of the university, which on its own is pretty boring. Still, it says something about the state of the University when an efficiency man has to be brought out from the mother-country. What do our administration departments do? Are they really that incompetent? And the other interesting question the report raises is this: if the guy Dale is so bloody marvellous that he needed to be brought out here at no little expense in a tight financial year, why is there so little apparent inclination to adopt his recommendations, which are reprinted here for the benefit of the students and junior staff who are most unlikely to be consulted on the matter.

"Before you continue to denigrate the student faculty as a whole with your petty generalisations, may I be allowed to point out that I am in fact the Vice-Chancellor."