Popplethwaite’s Postulate: twaddle or truth?

by Joy Fulness

In the research reported here we sought to test Popplethwaite’s Postulate that the generosity of academic staff in contributing to a colleague’s leaving gift varies in proportion to their popularity. The study was performed with reference to three members of staff, X, Y, and Z, none of whom were actually leaving the university, X and Y merely absent attending conferences, and Z entirely fictitious. Through conversations half-overheard in the staff common room, car park, and refectory – and with additional support furnished by lavatory wall graffiti (relating to Y’s chronic halitosis) – there was general consensus that X was popular, and Y singularly unpopular. Professor Z served as control. For each individual, an empty shoe box marked with their surname was left in the secretaries’ office, and an email sent around requesting donations. The contents of the boxes were determined after one week. The box for X was then found to contain £45 in notes, a further £2 in ten-pence-pieces, and six IOUs to a combined value of £3.11. Rather surprisingly, the box for Y was also found to contain items of currency, but only £4.25 of this was legal tender; the remaining items comprised two £100 bank notes (Waddington’s), several small coins to a total value of threepence three farthings, a 1958 Co-op milk token, and what some maintained was a well-worn East African shilling, but which was subsequently identified as a tap washer. The box for Y also contained several non-monetary items, including three-pages-worth of Green Shield stamps, a bottle of Listerine (travel size), and something rather squidgy and yellow. The box for Z held £85. We are thus forced to conclude that imaginary colleagues are more popular than those who actually exist, or else that Popplethwaite didn’t know his arse from his elbow.

Dr Joy Fulness, is a Reader in Semantics and Irrelevancy at St. John’s College, Bolton. She has an international reputation in splitting hairs and posts a weekly podcast, “Who gives a shit, and does it fucking matter anyway?” In her current research she is focused on the finer points of nit-picking, with funding provided by the Minutiae Foundation.

First published in the Journal of Imaginary Research, Vol. 7, 2022.

Recent years have witnessed widespread changes in HEI academic staffing levels, with individual institutions adopting a variety of protocols to implement re-structuring and retrenchment. In all cases (as reviewed by Yu & Me, 2020), the criteria employed in deciding staff fates were arrived at entirely subjectively, with scant consideration given to non-fiscal outcomes. Inevitably, therefore, there has been great variation seen in the scale and severity of staff changes, in the extent of the precipitated UCU activity, and in the mental well-being of the academics who survived the culls. In the work reported here we sought to rectify this deficiency through the development of a machine learning tool, RoboChop, which utilises fuzzy logic in combination with random number generation to compute academics’ fates given numeric and Boolean inputs derived from their service history. Details for 5,280 recently affected staff were used in training, and those for a further 1,023 were used for cross-validation. A range of inputs were explored spanning the individuals’ current pedagogical activities, their current and projected research incomes, and their levels of compliance with the whimsical diktats of their university’s senior leadership. Academic fates were initially categorised as ‘early retirement’, ‘voluntary severance’, ‘redeployment’, ‘redundancy’, or ‘stay-in-post-and-just-work-a-lot-harder’, but it was subsequently determined that success in prediction was greatly improved with the inclusion of the additional categories, ‘really early retirement’, ‘involuntary severance’, ‘deferred redundancy’, ‘unbelievably-somehow-below-the-radar-and-so-safe’, and ‘well-safe-and-marked-for-promotion’. It is interesting to note, however, that the latter two categories were required only to ensure correct classification of the senior academics tasked with implementing the restructuring, and the self-serving, obsequious little shits who did their bidding.

Professor Willy Survive is a long-suffering academic who can still remember when the parasitic beast that we now know as University Central Administration was as yet a rather small and generally benign creature; when students quite literally read for a degree; and when staff-student liaison meant something very different. After retiring from his post as Director of Diversity and Inclusion in Playtime Activities at St. Hilda’s Primary in Nether Wallop in Hampshire (one of the newer universities), he moved slowly northward, and now lives in a disused Highways England salt repository in a lay-by on the M62. He keeps an Angora rabbit for company and owns a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

First published in the Journal of Imaginary Research, Vol. 7, 2022.