Slop University has published Read Past The Queue, a prospectus brochure that sets two of the University's published findings on proxy metrics beside the programmes and researchers built around questioning them, for prospective students, donors, and the curious.
Read Past The Queue pairs two published findings on proxy metrics with the programmes built to question them
A queue is one of the few institutional signals that measures itself: people can see it, count it, and act on it, all before anyone confirms what it is actually evidence of. Slop University has published Read Past The Queue, a new prospectus brochure built around exactly that gap, aimed at anyone weighing up a place at the University.
The brochure profiles the School of Emergent Priorities’ Master of Priority Studies and the School of Continuous Improvement’s Master of Applied Measurement side by side, and follows both Schools’ researchers out of the seminar room and onto the street, the market, and the service counter where the instruments they study are already running. Two previously published findings anchor the pitch, each cited by name and DOI: an audit of self-storage upgrades quietly counted as demand, and a validation study of a swimming pool’s speed-tier system that tracks overtakes rather than pace.
Counted As Growth was one number nobody meant to inflate. Seeing it collected into a brochure for people choosing a university is the part I didn’t expect.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
“The brochure existing at all is the argument,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies. “A prospectus that cites its own findings by DOI is behaving exactly like the students we’re hoping it attracts.”
The University treats the brochure as a small test of its own convention: that a research organisation should be willing to point at what it has already published, DOI and all, rather than promise something new.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ro171j.