My "Tibet Thing": The Leads Keep Tumbling

I have a powerful feeling I'm heading for another disappointment with what even I have come to think of as "my Tibet thing" and Northampton University. I've been given another lead. Another chance to make my point. To get my voice heard. But it seems to be going the same way as all the others.

I've been stonewalled by the powers that be here for so long now I wondered for a while if my emails were even getting out. You look for reasons. Rational, if paranoid, explanations that might justify the total lack of engagement by anybody in authority with your complaint.

Here's a simple one: they don't give a shit. There's just too much money involved in the university having a high profile in the business community for it to risk being viewed as (excuse the expression) ethical. And there's too little money being made from my presence as a student here for my dissenting view to matter. Students aren't even supposed to have a dissenting view. People aren't supposed to have a dissenting view. The world that the hierarchy at the university is preparing its students for is one in which we are all obedient cogs in the capitalist machine. As that great philosopher Puff Daddy once said, "It's all about the Benjamins" and university is teaching you how to get more of them than people who didn't have your privileges.

As another great philosopher, Hunter S. Thompson, once said, "Shit on that." (See what a vast storehouse of quotable knowledge I have after two years at university?)

My "lead" is a member of staff. He/ she is supposed to be the go-to person when it comes to disputes. I won't name them here or mention who told me about them. But I did feel a cautious sense that I was making some progress when I was advised to contact them. They, I was assured, would speak out not only for me, but for all the lecturers who didn't know Zhou Xiaoming was coming and would not have been thrilled about it if they'd been informed. They, I was led to believe, would take up the cudgels without hesitation and get things sorted. I had acted alone for long enough.

And they still might, I suppose. I don't want to give up hope too quickly. But I wrote to them nine days ago now and I've been met with the same silence I got twice from Nick Petford. I hope they don't turn out to be another person who cares until it really matters.