Our new Director of Curriculum Development, Janet Fluellen, announced this week that she was giving serious thought to the idea of abandoning teaching at Poppleton.

She explained to our reporter Keith Ponting (30) that the word had unfortunate connotations of "didacticism" that were out of place in a modern university going forward.

"We must", she said, "get away from the antiquated notion that knowledge is something that can be transmitted by a teacher to a student. This is a profoundly unilateral vision."

She intended in the near future to introduce the term "development" as an alternative to "teaching" and to redesignate all current tutors as "development agents". Such a change, she argued, would be fully in line with the university's recent decision to abolish all examinations and tests on the grounds that they create unfortunate "knowledge divisions" between students.

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"We are moving to the stage," she told our reporter, "when we will be able to boast of having a thoroughly democratic university in which no one can claim they know more about anything than anybody else."

Lost Applications

Have you seen any student application forms lying around the campus? Following last week's news that the University of Lincoln has mislaid more than 800 student applications, our Director of Corporate Affairs, Jamie Targett, has initiated a hunt for similarly mislaid forms at Poppleton. According to one estimate, as many as 5,000 forms may have been mislaid in recent years.

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Targett pointed out that if these submissions had been available, Poppleton would now be ranked overall eighth in the university recruitment league table and there would have been no need to close down our departments of Physics, Philosophy, Biology and Applied Clairvoyance.

New Appointments

We are pleased to announce that Mike Doppel, formerly assistant deputy head of signage at the University of Uttoxeter, has now been appointed to the post of deputy head of signage at Poppleton. Mike's previous areas of expertise were No Smoking and No Parking, but he tells The Poppletonian that he is looking forward to new signage challenges in Toilets and Exits. We wish him well in his new (sign) post!

Thought for the Week

(contributed by Jennifer Doubleday, Head of Personal Development)

The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence. It's greener where you water it more!

(A nice thought now that spring is upon us)

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