A new Slop University advertising campaign puts the Horizon Register's own composite ranking on public display, crediting the instrument first for flagging a café specials-board swap before the board is wiped clean.
A new bus-stop and campus-screen campaign puts the School of Emergent Priorities' self-scored ranking on public display, a café specials board standing in for the catch
A café blackboard only tells the truth for as long as no one has picked up the chalk. Slop University’s newest campaign turns that narrow window into a ranking.
The artwork, unveiled today across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus digital screens, sets a specials board mid-rewrite — one hand rubbing out a line the other hasn’t finished chalking — under the line “First To Flag The Swap.” The tall portrait format is built for the University’s signage network, with a matching evening rendering for panels running after dark.
We used to think the interesting question was how a plan drifts from what’s written. The interesting question turned out to be what a specials board can teach a five-year strategy about drifting in front of an audience, instead of behind one.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The claim is real in the sense that the University controls every part of it: the Horizon Register composite behind the ranking is the School of Emergent Priorities’ own instrument, and the University is the only body it has ever measured. Six quarters running, the composite has placed Slop University first for the gap between a specials board changing and a table noticing — a placement the School treats less as competition than as a standing self-audit with a leaderboard of one.
“Grading your own homework is usually a complaint,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation. “Grading it in public, on a bus shelter, is at least honest about the arrangement.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1nlzjm.