¡°I have no comment whatsoever to make on the tribunal¡¯s decision, and no comment whatsoever to make on my consistent failure to make any comment at all on the entire disciplinary proceedings.¡±

That was how our Corporate Director of Human Resources, Louise Bimpson, responded to enquiries from our reporter Keith Ponting (30) about her reaction to the news that a university tribunal had cleared Herbert Chapman, our Distinguished Professor of Advanced Logic, of the charge that he ¡°rubbed the bridge of his nose in a provocative fashion¡± when interviewing candidates for a job at Poppleton.

Neither did Ms Bimpson wish to make any comment at all upon our university¡¯s decision to ban Professor Chapman from the campus for the best part of a year during which this alleged provocative noserubbing was under investigation.

Neither did Ms Bimpson have any comment on our university¡¯s failure to follow its own statutes and issue a verbal warning to Professor Chapman for his alleged provocative nose-rubbing before establishing a disciplinary tribunal.

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Neither did she have any comment on our university¡¯s decision to employ a team of highly paid barristers to represent its own case at the tribunal or upon the consequent need for Professor Chapman to provide his own legal support at a personal cost of approximately ?50,000.

Neither did Ms Bimpson feel that she had anything at all to say about Ponting¡¯s intimation that the case against Professor Chapman might not have been pursued with such vigour if Professor Chapman had not been an active opponent of our university¡¯s enthusiastic commitment to the marketisation of higher education.

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Neither was she ready to comment upon Ponting¡¯s suggestion that the entire episode had successfully managed to combine the sinister elements of a McCarthyite hearing with the commitment to rationalism traditionally exhibited by a Whitehall farce.

Professor Chapman himself was also unavailable for comment, but one informant who passed his door earlier this week claimed to have heard the unmistakable sound of hollow laughter.

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Get together ¨C right now

Our university has responded enthusiastically to a report from researchers at the Delft University of Technology that stresses the importance of university employees sharing their offices with staff from other disciplines and areas of work.

According to Mike Cram, our Head of Spatial Optimisation, this process has already done much to undermine ¡°the territorialism¡± that the Delft researchers criticised, even if there had been ¡°a sprinkling¡± of unfortunate incidents.

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These included the garrotting of a psychologist by his new sociological roommate for what the offender described as ¡°crass empiricism¡±, and the fatal stabbing of a senior lecturer in accountancy for what his philosophical assailant claimed was ¡°a persistent category error¡±. However, Cram liked to believe that these were only what his own new roommate from the School of Dentistry described as ¡°teething troubles¡±.

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Thought for the week

(contributed by Jennifer Doubleday, Head of Personal Development)

This week¡¯s lecture in our ¡°Preparing for Xmas¡± series will be given by our ecumenical chaplain, Georgina Spandrel. Her talk is titled ¡°Building an Atheist Crib: Problems and Prospects¡±. All welcome.

lolsoc@dircon.co.uk