This satirical article on The Daily Mash made me smile today, and seemed to be begging to have a few words changed around in order to make it even more appropriate for academia. Enjoy:
Universities have revealed new measures to help you spend all your time doing work and publishing papers.
As well as radically extending university opening hours, universities will demolish your house and put your children in “permanent daycare” as part of plans to ensure all academics live on campus by 2020.
By Jeff Hawkes
New plans to rejuvenate working conditions for Ph.D. students in the UK were revealed today, receiving a poor reception. The plans are being introduced due to an explosion in PhD student recruitment over the past few decades.
“It used to be that having a degree was fantastic for ones employment opportunities, but over the years the UK has allowed the value of higher education to decrease and become gradually less relevant to a candidates eventual job. Now go-getting youngsters who want to ‘get the edge’ on their rivals are having to earn an extremely specific research doctorate in order to apply for any job earning more than minimum wage”, said social analyst Frank Bosser.
“We’re expecting that over the coming years the average Joe will need some years of teaching experience at university level in order to leave higher education with any employment prospects whatsoever”. It’s quite a normal ‘educational inflation’ effect when there aren’t enough jobs to go around and so people by default continue to get more qualifications. The problem is that the universities stay the same physical size, so ‘something’s gotta give’” Continue reading ‘Battery’ PhD students to increase UK university productivity by ‘up to 75%’
Disclaimer: The following post may not be factually accurrate
Ben Fogle’s attempt to swim the Atlantic, in a wetsuit that will capture information about various aspects of the ocean, has reportedly given the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) an idea for their next round of budget cuts. In a world exclusive, head of NERC, Barry Bureaucracy, revealed to Words in mOcean that the new plans would see “oceanographers given the opportunity to form themselves into ‘one-man swimming research vessels’, freeing up millions of pounds for the Tory government to put directly into bankers’ pockets”. Under this proposal, NERC’s current fleet of research ships (RRS Discovery, James Cook, and James-Clark Ross) would be converted into luxury yachts and sold, at knock-down prices, to hedge-fund managers and Russian billionaires.
Continue reading One-man swimming research vessels set to save UK a fortune
Words in mOcean 