PU

The Ability Division

At Perfunctory University, we are proud to announce the creation of our newest strategic initiative: The Ability Division. This bold, innovative and administratively convenient department has been designed to help us focus on the one category of student difference we are currently comfortable discussing.

Some institutions waste time examining class, poverty, prior attainment, attendance, aspiration, family educational capital, peer culture, geography, safeguarding, institutional standards, academic identity, motivation and developmental readiness. At PU, we believe that sort of complexity can create unnecessary workload, awkward meetings and, in extreme cases, actual thinking.

We therefore prefer a simpler model: identify a visible category, write a statement, form a committee, add a colourful logo, and declare progress.

Our Commitment to Selective Concern

The Ability Division exists to ensure that disadvantage is only taken seriously when it can be converted into a policy document, a staff training session, or a performative email from the Vice-Chancellor.

We do not ask, “Who is not developing, and why?” That would require data, courage and a willingness to look beyond our own institutional mythology.

Instead, we ask, “Which student group allows us to sound most compassionate this year?”

Our Methodology

Our research process is robust, inclusive and reassuringly vague. It consists of the following steps:

• Choose one explanatory category.
• Treat it as morally superior to all other categories.
• Ignore anything that complicates the narrative.
• Produce a strategy document with the word belonging in the title.
• Lower expectations while calling it support.
• Celebrate our progress before measuring whether anything has improved.

Why Develop Students When You Can Categorise Them?

At PU, we understand that development is difficult. It requires honest feedback, academic challenge, support structures, attendance expectations, study discipline, cultural change, and teachers brave enough to say, respectfully, “this work is not yet good enough.”

Categorisation is much easier. It allows us to appear morally serious without having to construct the conditions through which students become more capable.

This is why our Ability Division does not focus on developing academic identity, improving study habits, confronting anti-education peer cultures, rebuilding confidence, increasing intellectual authority, or helping students move from dependency to capability.

Those things are very hard to put on a lanyard.

Our Standards Policy

High expectations can be problematic, especially when students have been admitted with weak preparation and the institution has no coherent developmental plan. Our preferred approach is therefore to reduce the demand, inflate the reassurance, and describe the entire process as inclusive pedagogy.

We believe every student deserves the right to be protected from the very developmental friction that might have made them stronger.

The Official PU Position

Race may matter. Class may matter. Sex may matter. Poverty may matter. Geography, aspiration, family expectation, peer norms, attendance, prior attainment and institutional standards may also matter.

However, at Perfunctory University, we find that holding more than one idea at a time can place unnecessary pressure on the committee structure.

So we have chosen simplicity. Not because it explains the problem, but because it helps us avoid it.

The mature institution studies the disadvantage the data reveals. The immature institution selects the disadvantage that confirms its ideology.

Welcome to Perfunctory University, where access is confused with transformation, statements are confused with strategy, and development is what happens after the committee has finished designing the logo.