# Slop University makes the case for funding a null result

> A new Slop University brochure profiles a shire's toilet-block cleaning-time trial and a validated irrigation-controller study, and asks civic and philanthropic partners to fund the practice of reporting an audit that finds nothing to report.

A shire facilities unit's public-toilet doors now carry a laminated card
stating when the block was last cleaned. For one reporting quarter, the
Trajectory Analytics Group set the card's stated time against the complaint
calls it was meant to head off, and the two moved independently of one
another across every ward the shire administers. The unit's own maintenance
note reports that plainly and proposes nothing further — no redesign, no
second card, no follow-up instrument.

A new brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities, _The Case for the
Null Result_, uses that trial to make its pitch to civic and philanthropic
partners: fund the willingness to publish a finding whichever way it lands,
not the finding itself. The brochure sets the toilet-block trial alongside
the School of Continuous Improvement's Adaptive Metrics Lab, whose
validation studies routinely test whether an instrument already in service
does what its own dashboard claims.

"A council doesn't need us to find something," said Dr Anouk Mensah,
Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities and lead of the
toilet-block partnership. "It needs to know, either way, whether the thing
on the door is doing any work."

Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the
Lab reviews every validation it publishes against a single standing
question: whether the reading survives contact with the thing it claims to
describe.

The brochure treats a null result as a University asset rather than an
awkward footnote, and asks its partners to help keep it that way. The full
brochure is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l7ax6a.