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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, Number 10. 22nd May 1975

A Simple Request of the Vice-chancellor

A Simple Request of the Vice-chancellor

Dear Bruce,

Could I ask, thru the good services of your paper, the Vice-Chancellor to confirm or deny a scurrilous rumour which a little birdy told me; to wit, that the Victoria University of Wellington Budget is .... Confidential. Having been brought face-to-face with harsh reality by my birdy friend I endeavoured (naturally) to procure a copy of said Budget for myself. At length efforts were rewarded and I now possess (thru fair means not foul, I believe), a xeroxed copy of the 1975 VUW Budget. However, what intrigues me still it why this mess of almost unintelligible gobbledegook book-keeping is ... Confidential. My suspicions lead me to suspect that either a) D.B.C Taylor (Vice-Chancellor) and him cohorts X,Y,Z and C pass suffer from that modem bureaucratic disease Maxwell Smart /Brig. Gilbertian Paralysis of the filing cabinet (symptomised by a fervent desire to keep whatever isn't already widely known from becomming so); or b) that some of the contents of the Budget are highly controversial and would disturb the peace of the populace.

The former case seems, to me, the more likely, as such things as the f $5,500 set aside for Remuneration of Sir John Marshall at Visiting fellow for 1976 (Pg. 2, item B12), the peculiarities of the recurrent nature of the so-called Non-Recurring Grants (refer Pg.9), the $2,000 budgeted for the Commonwealth Vice-Chancellors fund (Pg. 9) or the staff/student ratios (Pgs.16—18 incl.) which reveal that the Arts faculty has a consistently high ratio while the Science faculty has a consistently low ratio, would, I feel, be of interest only to those students interested in their University.

I would greatly appreciate an effort to get answers from the Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor, or other appropriate filing cabinet, and publication of the outcome of such an enquiry.

I am, yours in anticipation,

Bryan Mulligan.