"Nobody's perfect." That was the reaction of Louise Bimpson, our Corporate Director of Human Resources, to the complaint by Bill Wakeham, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth, that physics departments contained too many upper middle-class white men. While admitting that the description fitted the Poppleton Department of Physics, which currently consists of 14 upper middle-class white men, she claimed that such imbalances were endemic in universities.
"Our Sociology Department, for example, contains more than the average number of lower-middle-class whingers. There is also an abundance of cigarette-smoking aesthetes in the English Department, a surfeit of very elderly men wearing brown corduroy in the History Department, a plenitude of demented crystal-gazers in the Department of Complementary Medicine and a superfluity of people in higher management with extreme language difficulties," she said.
Ms Bimpson said she expected such differences would iron themselves out in time. "You only need to look back to the bad old days when this university was seriously overloaded with academics committed to a life of the mind. Just look at it now."
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