The Disorderly Conduct of University Research Support Services

by Seth Rerek

It is a fact of Nature, as true as teeth, that the administrative services within UK universities are in a constant state of flux, and there are two schools of thought as to why this is so. One school contends that the year-on-year re-disorganisation of the services is simply a manifestation of the universal tendency toward maximum entropy, while the second focuses on the exponential increase in their dysfunctionality and maintains that this can best be formalised in chaos theory, using jerk functions. In the research detailed here, we restricted consideration to the turbulent world of science research finance departments and sought to establish which of these alternatives more closely models the post-pandemic evolution of these departments across 42 of the UK’s leading universities. Interviews with the 17 long-suffering individuals who still work in these departments and have done so for the past 5-10 years, yielded nothing but hysterical laughter and replies peppered with expletives. However, a survey of the 85 staff who had recently been redeployed to science research finance – the majority from catering and car parking (but some even from business schools) – revealed that only 0.02% had any notion as to how scientific research is funded (and what it actually involves), only 4.2% knew why Microsoft Excel files contain lots of little boxes, 5% confessed to being puzzled as to why they were quizzed about a London 2012 sports venue at interview, while 92.5% regularly committed £10 a week to the Euromillions lottery, hoping for a very early retirement. Mathematical simulations of the structures and staffing of the departments yielded nothing to support either of the proposed explanatory models, and it was thus concluded that their perennial disorder has little to do with jerk equations, much more to do with the fact that their structures and staffing are dictated by jerks.

Professor Seth Rerek holds the Mandelbrot Chair of Computer-generated Jazzy Images’ Research in the Department of Sexy Art and Doodles at the New Pyramid Institute of Science & Technology in Giza. Among the eclectic collection of artefacts adorning the window ledge in his first-floor office he has a life-size replica of Schrödinger’s cat, a half-set of crayons once used by the young Ada Lovelace, and a gold-plated Newton’s Cot‡.

‡ much like a Newton’s Cradle but with bigger balls.