Dead funny

Graveyards have become a recurring theme at presentations attended by The Diary of late. Jon Baldwin, registrar of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, told delegates at a recent conference that merging two universities was like relocating a graveyard - the occupants tended not to be much help.

Sir Gareth Roberts, president of Wolfson College, Oxford, also has a graveyard gag. He told engineers at City University last week that there was a style of university management analogous to running a cemetery, which he illustrated by the example of a vice-chancellor telling a grave digger: "I have lots of people beneath me but none of them is listening."