Big news from LSE tonight (I think, anyway). I was in a meeting with colleagues in which I’m pretty sure I learned that we will be selling the campus in its entirety because we have no further use for the buildings.

I say “pretty sure” because my kid was on Fortnite and the WiFi kept dropping out.

But the gist of it was: everyone is so completely comfortable with working, teaching, learning, researching and so forth at home that we really don’t need this massive investment in bricks and mortar, so why not sell it?

Word is, Mike Ashley is interested in turning the Old Building into a Sports Direct and Tim Martin has made a very reasonable offer for the Three Tuns.

Someone with a cat avatar in MS Teams said:

LSE has a grand tradition, stretching back at least two weeks, of making bold decisions and acting on them swiftly. We are proud to be the first of the Russell Group universities to follow the Open University into the online space. Stop hitting your sister with that. Don’t make me come upstairs. One… TWOOOOO

The advantages are legion, and even I can think of at least one, despite having been woken by my children at 04:30 because someone thought it would be fun to put the clocks forward in the middle of a pandemic.

No you shut up.

As I was saying: the “academic hour” is at an end. No longer will I have to scoot across campus from Clement House to 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and show up late for a meeting. I can simply drop out of my eleven o’clock and spend the following ten minutes saying: “Can you hear me? No? What about now? Ugh! I hate this computer. Wait, I have a headset somewhere…”