With the ongoing lockdown of the country extended until May 5th, the country will remain at a complete standstill for weeks to come. That means essential workers only can travel to work, there are no educational facilities running, and all non-essential travel is banned outside of 2km of your home. But despite everything, I’m sure there’s one question that everybody has been anxious to have answered… what’s going to happen to UCD’s profits? We at the Turbine were as worried as all of our readers, and so we investigated.

In our quest to make sure that Andrew Deeks was okay, who took home a salary of €194,175 in the 12 month period prior to September 2018, we faxed him directly. We never got a response, which led us to worry that he may potentially be struggling to pay for his phone bill. 

Our next step was to try and figure out what the university was still charging for, and what they were not charging for. We learned that despite the term still continuing, some lecturers decided to distribute their notes with no other material (including no online lectures), which means that UCD can continue to still charge for the school year whilst not needing to adjust their infrastructure as much, or potentially spend extra on support for lecturers. 

Given that contacting him directly was clearly a dead-end, our next port of call was to take a look at the financial figures which the university released in 2018, alongside Andrew Deeks’ own salary. The university was found to have its total revenue for 2018 up by €35.2 million. This has been on an upward trajectory for many years, and in short, it would appear that UCD is making fucking bank.

 

Agam Cowbag – Turbine Muppet