It’s difficult to argue against the claim that league tables such as cug are a misleading amalgamation of largely irrelevant, massaged and (often) outdated data. However, the tables remain implicitly tied to the public perception of a university, and so a fair proportion of a university’s resources are devoted to sustaining the illusion of prestige that occurs as a result of the successful bodging of these ridiculous metrics. So, given that this illusion of prestige is correlated with position in the league tables, and sustaining this illusion is advantageous to the continued success of an institution, the question really is: why has keele, as a university of relatively considerable age, wealth and historical reputation (at least when compared to the likes of Liverpool hope etc), so struggled to effectively massage the data?