When Kissinger got the Nobel peace prize irony……

by reestheskin on 14/03/2018

Comments are disabled

On the: Office for students (OfS).

We learned last week that not only was DfE’s compliance with the Commissioner’s requests woeful, but the interference by special advisors in Number 10 led to the effective no-platforming of candidates with any ties to the National Union of Students. It can now safely be said that we’re in a post-irony world. The minister also broke the rules about public appointments when choosing to appoint Ruth Carlson to the student experience board position, despite her not having been interviewed for the role and for not consulting on the appointment.

And if you thought that the way in which the whole episode was handled was as if Jo Johnson was writing his own episode of The Thick of It, we haven’t even got to the fact that Toby Young’s appointment was made without even a cursory glance at his Twitter history. By contrast, the original student experience role candidates had extensive checking by the “No 10 Googlers”, to see whether they had ever expressed any negativity about the Prevent duty, or dared to whisper the word “union”. The OfS board appointments were a shambles of the omni variety.

WONKE: Monday Morning HE Briefing – 5th March, 2018 and see here (OfS board appointments and the death of irony).

So, Orwell lives, and business as usual. Some are indeed more equal than others.