University under fire for My Little Pony conference

Campaign groups have criticised the University of Brighton after it admitted to funding a My Little Pony Conference and research on penalty shoot-outs. £400 (US$660) of public money was spent on the day-long My Little Pony conference, with nine hours of talks on the 30-year history of the brightly coloured horse toys, reports The Telegraph.

A profit of just £16 was made from the event after 14 people paid £30 each to hear discussions on the ‘gender representation and mythology issues’ of the figurines and their ‘links to poetry and photography’. Delegates travelled from as far away as Finland to discuss My Little Ponies in a hall with room for just 45 people. The university also confessed that an academic study into the best method to score a penalty took 200 hours of research.

Campaign groups have now demanded to know whether the university's funding of lectures on children's toys and studies on penalty shoot-outs are worth it.
Full report on The Telegraph site