I'm not a regular reader of archinect, a site whose aims I applaud but whose occasional degeneracy into the worst depths of architectural gossip, self-congratulation and preening about subject of utter irrelevance to the real world is an inevitable consequence of its aims. However, for some obscure reason I ended up on the site this evening and found myself reading the truly awful discussion forum on the new head of the AA. It's an awful comparison, but is this situation not akin to the whole Malcolm Glazer/Man U debacle? a whole bunch of fans moaning their heads off and trying to predict the future, taking up lots of airspace without realising that most of the rest of the architecture world doesn't give a damn what happens to them because they think you're irrelevant and arrogant (and that's being polite), and the longer you stay with your heads in the sand, the better.

Sorry - I do wish the AA the best possible future. But until it loses its Man U (or, more aptly, Real Madrid)-like arrogance and starts to realise, as Jeremy Till quietly pointed out in his submission (which seems to have been completely overlooked by all the students) that architecture, like football, isn't about galacticos but about teamwork, true creativity, and social and political responsibility, then unfortunately the school will still continue to turn out a lot of the whizzbangs that give architects a really bad name in the rest of the world - the Beckhams in expensive Japanese clothing who proclaim their genius without building more than a whimsical pavilion, whose obscure pseudo-theory is so much easier to ape than the real job of architects, which is to build decently yet beautifully, responsibly yet radically and without self-indulgence.

(A bit like the Arsenal play football? oh no, enough now...)