I am cheating slightly here. Instead of writing this on Friday I am doing so two days late.  On Friday evening I had a function to go to, associated with the end of graduation week, and I spent Saturday on a family visit to London.  I thought the slight delay might be useful in letting my enthusiasm go down, but in reality it hasn't done so.  I know what follows may seem rather pious and sentimental - but I make no apology for it: I mean what I say.

The end of graduation week leads me to reflect each year on how incredibly lucky I have been to spend my working life in a good university with outstanding students.  In what other job does one spend one's time amongst young people who are keen to learn, who are idealistic about improving the world around them, who are keen to stretch themselves, who have ambition, and who are ready to respond to opportunities?  Yes, I know that as tutors we often have to spend too long on the few troublesome and difficult cases.  But the majority of students fit the description I have just given.

Often we know little of their 'back stories' - of how they got here. And often even the best tutors don't know all that their students do within our unviersity community or in the city of Sheffield.   During the week I have attended 11 degree ceremonies and among those I presided at three as well as reading the names out at one.  When I preside at a ceremony I always ask the Events Team to mark up my script with those who have obtained first class degrees. If the time permits, I always have an extra word with them, and I also always stop and talk to those who have won prizes.  Very often there are students who come across the stage to shake my hand who I have also previously met in other contexts - at widening participation events where they have been acting as student ambassadors providing role models to school children; at Sheffield Volunteering showcase evenings where they have talked about their work with brain-damaged or mentally ill people in the community; at events for international students; or at business competitions in the Enterprise Zone.  Heads of Department and others sometimes indicate students who merit an extra word or two.

I think some of these students that I stop are surprised to find that I am thanking them for their contribution to the life of the university or the city of Sheffield.  But I genuinely feel that while the students are grateful to us, there is often a lot of gratitude owing to them for the ways in which they have entered so fully into the wider non-academic aspects of life as a student.

I have now attended 10 degree ceremonies this week, two as president, one as presenter (on behalf of City College, Thessaloniki) and the others as a spectator on the front row.  The student composition varies hugely between ceremonies - some with larghe numbers of overseas students present, others with none; some with a majority of women, others with a majority of men.

This morning I presided at the ceremony at which, among other groups, the modern linguists graduated.  Something I observed is that we are starting to see a number of UK students from ethnic minority background studying modern European languages.  I find this very interesting, because it contrasts with certain other Arts and Humanities or Social Sciences disciplines.  The very first ceremony this week involved History students, and I don't believe there was a single graduand from a visible ethnic minority.  Similarly on Tuesday I presided at the ceremony for students from East Asian Studies, Sociological Studies and Geography. There was a tiny smattering of non-white faces in Sociology but, I think, only two in Geography.

Why do certain subjects which have a global reach (for example History and Geography) not attract students from ethnic minority backgrounds?  I would be interested to know what the position is at other universities.  I know there is a strong tradition of research and teaching in Black History - is it that students from ethnic minority backgrounds choose to go only to departments with this as a strength?  Is that something that we should be concerned about?  Is geography still seen as an imperialist subject by black and other ethnic minority students?  I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think they are worth posing.  I would welcome comments added to this post.

As a university we are very proud of our diversity.  But in reality at departmental level it sometimes does not show itself.  This year we did see the graduation of some male speech therapists, but I remember years in which that has been an all-female department.  The number of male nurses is small.  Males are still in a significant majority in all the Engineering departments, although the numbers of females seem to me to be rising.  If you want to find a British Asian student look at Dentistry where there are particular concentrations.

Widening participation is generally viewed in terms of the attempt to draw more students from socio-economic groups and neighbourhoods that do not normally send students to university (and I have blogged earlier this week about looked after children).  But perhaps in some departments there are other dimensions relating to the diversity of students that ought to move up the agenda.

When the Bologna process started there were considerable fears in the UK that many features of our university system would not survive the harmonisation process.  The last 3-4 years have been interesting in showing that it has been countries on the European mainland that have taken steps to move towards the UK structures, rather than the other way round.  I have been called on in the past to give advice to two German universities to give advice on how to introduce bachelors degrees in my own subject.  (One of those universities actually decided that it was too difficult to do so and closed down the department instead!)  Today I spent an hour on the phone answering questions posed to me by a colleague in a French university, about how governance structures work here.

My whole acacdemic career has been based on the undertaking of comparative studies.  I know how difficult they can be.  The funding of French universities is very different from ours - there is no intermediate agency like the Higher Education Funding Council between the ministry and institutions.  There is therefore no role for a body like the University Council here.  That is very different in other coutnries: in the Netherlands, for example, the University Chair is as important as the Rector Magnificus (the equivalent of our Vice-Chancellor).

The French system is interesting beacuse it is very difficult for a university like ouirs to strike up alliances with individual institutions there.  A result of the 1968 unrest was the breaking up of many universities into separate fragments - often consisting of a single faculty.  I have recently examined PhDs in both the Paris universities with significant Geography departments (Paris I and Paris VII). Other Paris universities exist for Law, or for Medicine, with no other subject represented. Were Sheffield to want to strike up a strategic partnership with a Parisian institution we would be limited to a very small part of our own wide portfolio.  Therefore it was interesting today to hear from my French colleague that in the city where his university is situated there is now a vision to re-merge the three universities that were split from one after 1968.  That would make an institution that would look much more like ours, or like universities in Germany, the Netherlands or Portugal (other countries that I have had close connections with). 

I am convinced that we need to create much stronger international connections for our university.  Changes throughout Europe are making that much easier for us by adapting structures.  Where the gap now lies is in many embedded cultural attitides within our own coutnry.  Theyt might be harder to tackle.

Sometimes it's the small steps that are the most significant.  One of the things I am most proud of that we have achieved over the last few years has affected only a tiny number of students, but I think we really have changed people's lives.

Young people in care have been the group with probably the second lowest rate of progression to higher education in the UK, after gypsies.  When we first looked into the numbers here in Sheffield we were able to identify only two students from such a background. The frequent moving between foster carers, disruption of schooling, a lack of role models and many other factors lay behind this statistic.

Today, as a result of a campaign that has brought many different people together, we know of 17 such students from care backgrounds in the university.  I know that today one of them crossed the stage and became a graduate - well on the way to a future life in a significant profession.  I take immense pleasure in that.

I will confess that I became interested in the issues affecting care leavers for a very personal reason.  My younger daughter, who at the time worked for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, was asked to play a leading role in producing the green paper 'Care Matters'  that led to awakened awareness of the plight of young people in care.  Her discussion of going round Britain listening to the stories of children in care affected me greatly, and I recognised from her researches how higher education was effectively a closed-off world to such young people.  I then supported colleagues in Student Services and in the Admissions and Outreach team (now relocated within Student Services as well) to develop a programme of support, and we did so in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam.  Academic colleagues in certain departments have enthusiastically joined in.

The organisation that evaluates university measures to help care leavers is called the Frank Buttle Trust.  When they visited us a couple of months ago to look at our programme they described our efforts and structures as 'exemplary.'  That's another source of pleasure for us.  But the real payback is to watch a young person from a care background cross the stage as a graduate, thanks to this university's efforts: that's really 'making a difference.'

The new main entrance to the Union of Students was opened over the weekend ready for this week's degree ceremonies.  I found myself trying to direct certain parents and supporters around it today, despite the fact that I didn't fully recognise where I was myself.  Some of the Union Officers, past and present, were around and they are clearly wowed by the building.  It is an absolutely splendid entrance to what we know is the best Union of Students in a UK university.

I hope, however, that it won't be seen as 'sour grapes' to say that there are few acacdemic buildings that have such an impressive atrium and entrance.  Of course, I know that the footfall of students in the Union is many times greater than in any academic building - even in Jessop West or in the Mappin Complex -  but sometimes we perhaps put a little too much emphasis on the quality of the Union.  Our prospectuses sometimes appear to be selling the Union as much as the selling the acacdemic experience of the university.  That is something that has changed in the last couple of years, but there is a danger that we make the sort of claim that was once made for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London - "nice café with a reasonable museum attached." In our case it could be "fantastic Union with some quite good academic departments to go to as well".

The trick in getting this right lies in our marketing as an institution.  And part of that will depend on each academic department putting forward clear statements, addressed to candidates and students, about the excitement and value of studying their discipline.  What I would really like to see is acacdemic departments all providing the sort of 'wow' factor introduction to the studying side of university life that the new Union entrance gives to the social, cultural, entertainment, campaigning and support side of the student experience.  In my view not all do at present, although some do it very well.

This has been a big month for media coverage of higher education, and I guess it's only going to get more intense over the coming weeks.  Someone texted me at 0930 this morning to ask if I'd read page 6 of today's Sunday Times - which I hadn't at that time.  Sheffield takes a lead role there in a story about how universities are raising their likely required offer grades for 2011 entry, despite the fact that prospectuses were published several months ago showing lower grades.  Universities really can't win in this situation.  If we keep our offers at the levels that seemed plausible back in December 2009 when the 2011 prospectus was being produced we would run the risk of being swamped by students and then fined heavily by the funding council for exceeding the limit they have put on numbers.  The press would no doubt then tell us that we were bad managers of our admissions process.

If we kept the grades as stated but then were highly selective in making offers and rejected many candidates who would have made the original offer grades we would be pilloried for apparently being inconsistent: the papers would alight upon individuals and bring out sob stories about them ("4 As student rejected by university").  If we put up our offers we are criticised for having done so.

In my view we run an excellent admissions process involving very large numbers of people in something that we take very seriously.  But we are doing so at a time when demand exceeds the supply of places in many programmes in universities like ours, and when the level of mis-understanding amongst many journalists borders on the wilful.

Other press stories of the last few weeks have, of course, been around the universities' funding issues and the future of student fees (or a graduate tax), and around the possibility of more private providers and degrees taught in FE colleges.  I heard the representative of one private provider recently talk of how his organisation would soon have a distributed full-scale comprehensive university running in all the major cities of the UK. I asked him when they would be opening their first department of Biomedical Science: of course there was no answer. Private providers will only go for low-cost bulk numbers programmes.

This blogging week coincides with graduation ceremonies.  I am scheduled to attend 11 of the 15 this week.  I am sure that thoughts occasioned by some of the ceremonies will appear in this blog, but there will be other things in my life as well.