was publicly enthusiastic. In spite of reporting an operating surplus only once in its last ten independent years, instead relying heavily on endowment income and property sales, Wye College went into the merger with net assets of £18.24 million. It had doubled annual revenue in those years to £12.65 million and pivoted away from a dependency on traditional agricultural science courses. The college had just invested £5.5 million in new facilities, and a further £2 million preparing 50 postgraduate courses for the External Programme. Imperial College briefly used Wye College's origins to dubiously claim the status of third-oldest university in England. Sir Richard Sykes was appointed new rector of Imperial College in 2000. He visited Wye and expressed enthusiasm for investment in academic facilities there, placing the campus in the short lived Life Sciences faculty that arose from his early reorganisation of Imperial College. Nevertheless, 25% of academic staff at Wye were offered redundancy terms and took them. Worse still, Imperial College inadvertently did not include Wye undergraduate courses in its prospectus so admissions plummeted in 2000 and 2001. As early as January 2001, Imperial College privately declared the 2000 merger a mistake and sought Higher Education Funding Council for England finance to transfer Wye campus to the University of Kent or a local technical college. As a result of these problems newly installed provost, Tim Clark resigned to be replaced by Jeff Waage. In public however, Imperial College began promoting Wye to potential students. The Higher Education Funding Council did agree to meet legitimate costs Imperial College incurred in the 2000 merger. Imperial claimed £10.2 million. In 2002, the sum to be paid was settled at £2.5 million. During a 2003 lecture to civil engineering students Sykes expressed concern about the integration of Wye College into Imperial College and stated it was not a part of his vision for Imperial College. By then student admissions to Wye were at record high levels, notably from EU residents on Agricultural Business Management courses, and research income was growing. The campus met its first set of financial targets but was disadvantaged by Imperial College's policy to allocate property and occupancy costs at a flat rate across all its sites. Intensively used city centre premises in South Kensington were being charged the same rate per floor area as the many acres of glasshouses at Wye. In private, Imperial College rejected Wye's Department of