University staff ask for ‘a little TLC’; senate delivers a fucking massive building instead
The Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC), a gopping and apparently purposeless edifice, may be the result of a small misunderstanding.
Underpaid academic, administrative and cleaning staff at Warwick Uni have apologetically accepted partial blame for the loss of Tocil Field — the last decent area of grass in central campus — and with it any chance of a return of the mythologised, long-lost Summer Party.
After learning last year that they were to be paid entirely in Ernst and Young promotional biros, a group of university staff approached their bosses and demanded — unwisely, it emerges — ‘a little TLC’.
University management, as all Warwick students know, labours under the misapprehension that all problems can be solved with cranes, construction contractors and new buildings (with the exception of problems related to the humanities building, which cannot).
“Unaware of such terms as ‘tender’, ‘loving’ or ‘care’,” said Bill d’Alotte, postgrad lecturer and leader of the rebel group of uni staff, “the university senate must have sat around trying to decipher the meaning of ‘TLC’.”
“Presumably they came to the conclusion that TLC stands for Teaching and Learning Centre, and that when we asked for ‘a little’ of it we were exercising comic understatement.”
The expensive new building has been built on top of Tocil Field, making the field no longer a field, and has a name that broadly describes the activities of a university rather than the building’s specific purpose.
P.S. The university appears to have taken to calling the building either the ‘Teaching and Learning Hub’ or ‘Teaching and Learning Building’, which complicates things. Don’t worry though. They’ll probably hold an official opening and name it after a dead professor soon.