ABSTRACT
Duckpond is the university “at the end of the railway line” in a remote part of Wales. It has a poor academic background and a reputation for being “run” by the trade unions and the Welsh Labour Party. Its remoteness allows it to ignore many of the basic principles accepted by other universities and it is renowned for its cavalier attitude and non-conformance to: employment law; the Freedom of Information Act; the Data Protection legislation; and “whistleblower” protection. It is, in fact, the only university in the UK, in a thousand years, to have been investigated for corruption and mismanagement by the Privy Council (the body that ultimately grants university status). There is a heavy left-wing presence in Duckpond University and the region: the local government is extreme left-wing Labour, the regional government is left-wing Labour, the Chancellor (titular head) of the university is a former left-wing Labour leader of the regional assembly and campus buildings are named after left-wing Labour politicians and trade union supporters. Even when the UK overwhelmingly elected a Conservative government in 2015, the senior management reaction at Duckpond University was “not in Wales, they didn’t!”.
