Today's dual announcements from suite five seem to have taken the entire College by storm. For once, both staff and students have been united in their surprise and indignation at the proposals to rush top-up fees through College Council on Friday, and the announcement of explanatory talks regarding merger with UCL. Incidentally, the December College Council (in about eight weeks) will make a decision on the latter point, which suggests to even the slowest observer that most of the groundwork must surely have been done.

Or does it? If you take a step back from the initial fray, today's announcements tell us much more about the man behind them, Sir Richard Sykes, than we knew before.

When he was appointed Rector, one member of the College senior management team told me: "we're delighted, we finally have an experienced chief executive". He was effectively sacked twelve weeks later in the Glaxo coup which saw Dr Chris Towler brought in as director of strategy at the College. Tohard'wler, who has described himself as "Richard's brain" was sold to senior academics as a man who would give the College a coherent, single strategy around which we could unite, and other words of management-speak which in actual fact mean nothing.

What have these two men achieved since they arrived? Well, they abolished the Management and Planning Group (MPG), replacing it with the Executive Committee, which the Rector said would streamline decision making on a strategic level, as opposed to the clunky, anachronistic MPG. But if you review the reports of the Executive Committee published on Intrinsic (highly bastardised, of course), there is very little difference with the subject matter discussed by MPG. One of the first things abolished by the Executive Committee was the Space Allocation Group; a quick look at this month's minutes shows the creation of a new Space Allocation Group; there is more constitutional back-tracking than a Ganesh-led Student Union.

Today's decisions, however, show how opportunistic and short-termist Sykes and Towler really are. Less than four months ago, it was announced that Imperial College would 'rebrand' as Imperial College London; it is a strong brand, they said; we need to emphasise 'Imperial', they said. Yet now, they appear ready to throw the entire Imperial College name down the pan in a bid to create a new University which may or may not be a competitor to Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard. How much money was spent on that rebranding exercise? How much will be spent on the new rebranding exercise? Will we really be the University of North and West London?

And with top-up fees, the men show they are not fit to run an institution of Higher Education. To announce three days before a decision is due that they intend to make history in this country by introducing a differential fee for the privilege of being taught here (wherever 'here' will be by the time the first students to pay them arrive) proves beyond all doubt that they belived they could bring the merging, large corporation mentality of GSK to IC,L - and the only effect will be richer, stupider people applying - and IC dumbing down.

Tidu Maini claims he wants to encourage Imperial alumni to contribute large amounts of money, Tanaka-style to the College. But which Imperial alumni, seeing that their College now blatantly walks all over its students without so much of a word, would want to invest their money here, especially if tainted with the UCL name? And UCL alumni will think exactly the same, have no fear.

So, before becoming too indignant about what happened today, just think about what it actually means - and breathe a sigh of relief that in no more than three years, you can escape from the first institution of higher education to succomb to the corporate mentality - and die.

[Editor's note: The author is a final year medical student at Imperial College and was ICU President in 1997-1998.]