Out of the closet
There is, of course, no greater honour than to receive a mention in the august organ that is the Poppletonian. Following a piece on ‘the people below stairs’ in the Times Higher, this important matter was followed up on the back page:
Louise Bimpson, the corporate director of our ever-expanding human resources team, has warmly welcomed the proposal by Paul Greatrix, the registrar of the University of Nottingham, that a ban be placed on the use of the term “back office” to describe university administrative staff.
She told our reporter, Keith Ponting (30), that she agreed that the term not only demeaned administrative staff but also suggested that they were more expendable than other members of the university.
Bimpson said that she was already taking steps to remove the term from all official documentation. But when pressed by Ponting, she was unable to say whether this ban might be extended to such other traditional Poppletonian terms for administrative staff as “pen-pushers”, “bean counters”, “faceless bureaucrats” and “time-serving lickspittles”.
Thank you Ms Bimpson. (And apologies for the self-indulgence.)
