2020 Vision

"Smeders I want you to look at this!"

" 'Funcaster: 2020 vision' are we opening and optometery department
Vice Chancellor?"

"No no no Smedly this is the VISION for the future of The University
of Funcaster! I plan to usher in a Golden Age in which Funcaster is
ranked among the best Universities in the country, in the World"

I mentally switched to a scene from a Bond film in which a megalomaniac
villain plots world domination while stroking a Persian cat. I was just
getting to the bit where he says "this organization does not tolerate failure"
and I disappear down a trap door in to a tank of hungry sharks when I found
my self back in the room with No 1 still explaining his fiendish plan.

"We will recruit five Nobel Prize winners, dozens of Highly Cited authors,
our scientists' papers will be so prolific that Nature will practically be their blog.
We will shoot up the Shanghai Mah Jong League Table of World Universities
like a rocket! "

"But Vice Chancellor, how are we going to pay for it?"

"I knew you would ask that Smudley, always watching the bottom line!
Of course in RAE terms in the long run it will pay for itself, but in the short term
I have prepared a fully costed plan in which we dispose of some of the University's
surplus real estate to be developed as trendy urban flats, we milk the oil industry
of their surplus profits in exchange for promising to solve all their difficult oil
extraction problems and hire a fund raiser to charm our alumni out of some of that
money they have been making as chanting accountants and merchant bankers."

"I see Vice Chancellor. And you are going to do all that by twenty past eight
this evening?"