Occupation

The new JIF building at the University of Newcastle finally prepares to welcome its occupants. Malcolm Young provides the update.

27 October 2001
I’ve got a new job. The Enemy makes the first move, and so I have to respond. I try to wriggle when the cross hairs of the Selection Panel fall on me, but our new VC is adamant, and so now I’m a Provost.

Looking this unfamiliar term up reveals that I am to be some sort of regional Scottish Magistrate, but I suspect it isn’t going to be that much fun. Supposedly I can protect my lab time better, but having seen it attempted, the reality will be turning up on rare visits like disconnected Royalty, and irritated research colleagues.

5 November 2001
The new JIF building should have been delivered five days ago, but while certainly glassy, it looks like another heroic month for the builders to me. Meanwhile, what’s this ‘Polyptych’ business surrounding my JIF diary? Must be the Editor’s doing: sounds like something uncomfortable and undesirable to do with the lower bowel - and I had so much wanted to stay off that topic.

11 December 2001
RAE results day. They’re collected by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, and brought to the Executive Board. There’s an agonising wait for the agenda item, against a backdrop of life-destroying contract-range negotiations. Try to read sideways what our fate may be. Looks bad: Seppuku? The checkouts at Tescos? Maybe a holiday rep in Ibiza? Finally, we are put out of our misery...

On returning the department, I summon everyone into an immediate emergency meeting, which, with my new powers, they interpret as imminent mass sacking, or a three-line whip awayday to the cat food factory. Spin it out for effect, winding up to a big finish: "I have two words to say to you all..." Wait for it... Wait for it… "Five Star!"

Tired and emotional by lunchtime, there is much heart-felt commiseration with our old Golden Triangle friends, many of whom seem not quite so pleased with their results.

18 February 2002
We’re finally taking possession of the new palace! Or at least my PA and I are. My glassy new office feels eerie, as lights are turned on as you walk through the building then turned off behind you. HAL9000, though less personable.

27 March 2002
My colleagues move into the new building. Seems strange, sharing ‘my’ domain - who are all these people, anyway?

18 April 2002
Teething problems. Our planned gossip space - the central design principle of the building - in which scientists can annoy everyone with every daft idea before it evaporates, has been bisected by insensitive placement of fire doors, yielding a balcony and a corridor. The doors will have to go, in an accident with an angle-grinder one Saturday morning.

Further fire-safety bisection concerns an automatic fireblanket, which will descend to decapitate my valuable postdocs at the first whiff of smoke. My postdocs in the open-plan, who now need absolute silence to work effectively, are put off by noisy clerical high-heels on the wooden floors. Only stockinged feet may now bestride the decks. It’s an ill wind.

Worst of all, I am denied my front door on security grounds, and so must enter via the main Medical School corridor, like Rommel having to sashay through the 8th Army’s Sergeants Mess on his way to command the Afrika Korps.

3 May 2002
We’re now well into planning a Big Splash to inaugurate the new building. It’s all here: Art, with a capital A; a fantastic line-up of speakers; the river cruise, with especial opening of the Millennium Bridge; stylish ash-trays to aid Mike Dexter doing the honours; and ravenous piranhas in the pond. Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s various headquarters could never compete with this! Perhaps the Trust could be persuaded to stump up for a monorail to complete the picture. It’ll all work out wonderfully, if they ever get round to cleaning the windows.

Professor Malcolm Young is Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Newcastle, and now Provost of the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering.

Occupation

See also