Post 29 – 20/05/23 – We Take Being A Good Neighbour Seriously
As you may recall, we sent a letter to the new Principal back in early February to see if she would like to meet us to discuss student ASB. And you are right, that is quite a while ago now. Below is a timeline of the touch points with regard to this correspondence along with links to the pertinent communications.
6th Feb – Sent letter to Julie Sanders, Royal Mail, Recorded Delivery. A copy of our letter is below.
7th Feb – Letter received. (According to Royal Mail.)
28th Feb – Follow up email sent to Pam Kaur, Julie Sanders’ assistant.
1st Mar – Pam replies advising that not in receipt of the letter. I advise that I will send a copy of the letter by email in reply to expedite. Email sent.
18th Mar – Follow up email sent to Pam.
31st Mar – Follow up by calling Vice-Chancellor & Principal’s Office. Message left with Alison Garden requesting Pam to contact me.
13th April – Follow up by calling VC & P’s Office. Voicemail left requesting Pam to call me.
20th April – Follow up by calling VC & P’s Office. Speak with Pam. She requests that I resend the email. Email resent. At this point I was beginning to think that the VC & P’s Office might be in need of a shake up but that possibly Julie didn’t want to meet us. (I am pretty sure that if we were offering to make a donation to RHUL we would have received a slightly better experience here!)
24th April – Receive email from Helen Gronendaal. So after all of that, Julie did not want to meet us to discuss this matter after all. Genuinely very disappointed. A copy of Helen’s email is below.
26th April – Reply to Helen. A copy of my reply is below.
17th May – Having not received a reply from Helen after 3 weeks, Andrea, Trevor and myself agree to send the below email advising that we no longer wanted the opportunity to meet with Julie Sanders as time had moved on. A copy of our email is below.
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So that is where we are at with trying to get the attention of Principal Julie Sanders. I was hoping that she was going to acknowledge the problem herself, and even more hopefully she was up for discussing it. I was hoping she would come at it with fresh eyes – but perhaps I had set my expectations too high?
Or perhaps the culture within the senior management team is so entrenched that she is finding it difficult to instil her mark? Or maybe she is all too familiar with the problem and is also of the mindset that the community comes second to RHUL? Or that she feels that she ought to empower her team to deal with these matters? I can only speculate. What I am almost certain of, is that RHUL don’t take being a good neighbour seriously.
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/more/local-community/
I wait with bated breath as to whether she will make contact following our last email. But I now think that a different approach might be required to get her attention. More to follow soon.
Best wishes,
We Need To Talk About Royal Holloway