I was attending a guest lecture today and found myself sitting next to someone who had travelled down from Leeds University to attend.   He beamed at me and explained that I wouldn't remember him, but he certainly remembered me because I had taught him when he was a student at Sheffield.  He is now the head of a significant administrative department in Leeds.  He went on to reminisce fondly about the field class I had taken him on to Paris in 1984 - he having apparently blagged his way out of a class in Iceland that he should have been on because he thought that my class would be more interesting.  I too remember that class - we turned up at a newly refurbished small hotel in the 11th arrondissement where the key numbers didn't match the door numbers such that the hotel receptionist ended by using the master key to let our students into their rooms, and then did so again later for other guests who arrived while we were out having a meal so that when we returned several students found other people asleep in their beds. The owner also had a pet dog who marked its presence in various places, generally in dark corners on the stairs.

Last week I was giving a lecture at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London and a senior serving air force officer came and introduced himself as someone I lectured to in the early 1980s. Again he went on to talk about a number of the Sheffield staff who had impressed him as an undergraduate.  A month or so ago there was a knock at my door and someone I taught on a field class in Normandy in the late 1970s entered: he was bringing his daughter to study at Sheffield, having persuaded her that since he had such a life-changing time here she would enjoy it too. He is now a professor in Japan.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a very productive time for me in research.  I won a research grant from the SSRC (forerunner of the ESRC) to undertake a study of rural depopulation in France.  I was invited to join a research group at the University of Caen.  I published my first two books (one joint with a colleague and the other a single-authored volume on European cities that established a reputation for me across mainland Europe).  I was publishing a good flow of articles in high quality journals. On the basis of this record I was promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Today I guess that none of my research output from that period is ever read.  (Actually that's not quite true - an article I co-wrote with two others on red-light districts in European cities was recently hailed as pathbreaking.)  But many of the students I taught at that time still remember me.  Few academics will ever write the seminal article that changes the thinking in their field and becomes a long-term citation classic.   But many academics will be remembered 30, 40 or even 50 years afterwards by the students they taught. Therein lies the longest-lasting reputations for most of us.

That's the end of this month's blogging.  By this time next month perhaps the implications of the Browne Review and the Comprehensive Spending Review will be clearer.

A couple of days ago a UEB colleague who doesn't blog asked me what sort of numbers read my occasional thoughts.  He was wondering what the reach of a blog might be.  That set me to looking through the hit rates for my blog entries since I started in January of this year.  It's interesting to look at a 'league table' of the nost read entries. Inevitably the most recent postings tend not have been read quite so often, and it will be some months before I see whether they reached a wide audience.  There are also three postings that I know from references on cross-tagging achieved a global audience outsdie the university.  Most postings are read by around 30-40 people, with the least popular picking up around 15-25.  Interestingly, there does seem to be an element of discrimination at work because the list of the top 10 (below) quite closely picks out the postings that I would see as baing among the most significant from my own perspective.

Here it is:

1.  26 March.  In this posting I lamented the all-too common cases of students who don't notify us of health issues or other difficulties and then appeal their degree classification. (247 hits)  This has been cited internationally. If it is being used as a cautionary tale I am delighted.

2.  24 March.  This was about the lack of women on the University's Executive Board, with reflections on why women in our university may not be progressing to the top positions.  The context was the senior acacdemic women's mentoring programme in which I am involved. (226 hits)  This has also been cited outside Sheffield.

3.  22 January.  This was an end-of-the-first-week-of-blogging reflection on the process and my feelings about undertaking it. (221 hits)

4.  20 July.  A piece celebrating the work the university has done to welcome care leavers to study here.  (86 hits)  I am particularly pleased that this entry has been well read.

5.  25 August.  A lament about the lack of interest among UK students in preparing themselves to enter the international labour market.  (82 hits)

6.  23 February.  A consideration of the potential use of contextual data (on school and family background) in the admissions process to justify different offer-making for certain candidates. (75 hits)  This is something on which we are now starting to do some research.

7.  18 September.  A piece about the idea of a university, contrasting the views of John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt.  (71 hits)  This is quite a recent piece so it could yet rise higher in the charts.

8.  19 July.  A reflection on the marketing of the university, in the light of the temporary opening for graduation week of the new Students' Union entrance. (68 hits)

9.  22 July.  Ruminations on the lack of ethnic minority students inc ertain departments and degree programmes, occasioned by observations during graduation ceremonies. (67 hits)

10 = 23 July.  An expression of my pleasure at working in a university in contact with bright ambitious students who wish to give to their community. (59 hits)

10=  23 July.  Some views on widening participation and at the under-representation (according to some benchmarks) of students from independent schools within the unviersity. (59 hits)  This is an issue that has risen to the fore again in recent weeks, being driven up by the current Union of Students officer team.

I will return to this 'league table' at the end of the year when I sign off.

Readers may be expecting me to comment on the Comprehensive Spending Review today, but it's really too early to do so as we don't have sufficient detail.

This evening I attended the lecture by Lord John Krebs on climate change. It was an excellent lecture - well delivered, covering a broad range of material in a very accessible fashion, and very well and clearly illustrated.  The topic and the broad sweep of the discussion took me back to my first head of department when I arrived as ayoung lecturer in geography in  Sheffield in the 1970s.

He was a man who avidly read Nature and Science and who then immediately transferred the fruits of his reading into his inspirational first year lectures.  When I had done Geology in my first year at Oxford my notes on the final lecture contain the words 'there is also a theory of continental drift but nobodoy yet believes it'.  Within a very few years first year students at Sheffield were being taken right to the edge of scientific thinking on that topic by the head of department.  He brought in consideration of acid rain and its effects before it was accepted science.  He even touched on climate change as an interesting hypothesis.  These things were far removed from my own expertise in population and social geography, but I found it exciting keeping up with the new thinking in order to support discussions in tutorials which were carried out by all staff across the whole range of departmental teaching.

In recent years many ex-students have commented on those lectures by the head of department - how they realise that they were cutting-edge, that they inspired students, and that they encouraged many to take a new interest in aspects of their discipline or even to change their longer-term career intentions.

That head of department - his name was Ron Waters - was deeply respected not just by his students but also within his discipline.  He gave advice on the setting up of departments in new universities both in the UK and in the wider Commonwealth.  He managed the rapid growth in the size of his own department.  He served as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University.  He took a leading role in developing and teaching a highly successful Masters course, supported by UNESCO for students from 'developing countries', at a time when both overseas students and pgt programmes were a rarity.  In the wider world he was involved in the organisation of major expeditions, including one to the Karakoram mountains that provided some of the jigsaw pieces to prove the continental drift hypothesis.  He was elected President of the Institute of British Geographers - the premier disciplinary body for geography in higher education (which later merged with the Royal Geographical Society).

Yet in his whole career Ron scarcely published more than half a dozen academic papers - perhaps even less than that - and no books.  Reputations were made very differently in the 1960s when he was appointed to a chair at Sheffield.  But I suspect that his legacy is still felt more sharply in many parts of his discipline, and in many of his ex-students, than does the legacy of many highly-published research stars of his day.  But Ron would never have been considered for a chair today, nor for many of the positions of distinction he held.  What a waste it would have been if today's criteria had applied to his career.

(I've just read through what I've written below and it seems perhaps a little over-reflective. Still, a blog is supposed to be spontaneous and it perhaps it reflects my mood this evening!)

It started in the VC's room yesterday evening. We had just done an interview for Forge Press about the Browne Review.  Keith got out his copy of a book by Cardinal Newman and set me the task of finding a single word to encompass everything that education and learning results in for the participant: a mixture of knowledge, understanding, personal growth, self-awareness and a number of other attributes.  After some thought the nearest I could come up with was a word that we more often associate with age rather than youth, but which seemed to me the best I could offer: 'wisdom'.  Keith was pleased with this because he went on to read from Newman's text which ruminated on the appropriateness of that specific word (although ultimately discarding it, saying that there is no English word to translate the word the ancient Greeks used).  

Then this morning we had one of our regular meetings when all the Heads of Department in the university (with other faculty officers) meet with the executive board to chew over current issues.  The issue today was inevitably the implications of the Browne Review.  During the discussions Tony Ryan offered a personal view that nearly had me applauding (although that would be without precedent at such meetings).  Tony's argument was that although the Browne Report takes a totally functionalist view of higher education and discards the idea of public support for a whole swathe of what we do (see my blog for Sunday 17 October), we should hold fast to our ideal of 'whole person education' to develop the wider attributes of our students so that they can develop as responsible citizens of the world, and not just as specialist fodder to the current needs of the labour market.  That word 'wisdom' came into my mind again.

This evening I had been invited to attend evensong at Sheffield Cathedral which was to revolve around the installation of the University's new Anglican chaplain.  The Bishop of Sheffield preached the sermon, starting with a discussion of the university's Vergilian motto 'to know the causes of things' and moving on to embrace a quotation from the Book of Job, Ch 28, v 12: "But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?"  And I cast my mind back to the service that was held five years ago, in the Cathedral, to celebrate the university's centenary.  That same quotation was used as the cornerstone to the whole service, colouring the reflections on what a university is and should be - a place for the development of knowledge, but also a place for personal development and growth.

That seems to me to be what we should be holding on to during the coming months of discussion around the future of the university in a time of system change and anxiety.  And the development of 'wisdom' in our students and graduates seems to me to be a reasonable target.

Would others agree?  Or can they think of a better all-encompassing word?

(A footnote for linguists: I have thought through possible answers to the VC's, and Newman's, question for other languages.  I can't think of an all-encompassing word in French or Italian.  But I wonder if those who have a better knowledge of German than me would like to comment on my suggestion that in that language Bildung is a reasonable attempt to bring the whole idea together - although it is not a word that I ever remember seeing in connection with university education in Germany.)

We have had an all-day awayday of the University Council today.  Council is probably one of the areas of the university's governance that is least visible to the majority of the university's members.   But then the same would be true in schools where the visibility of governing bodies is also very low.  But these bodies do play a significant role in organisations. In particular they create the opportunity for members of the university's executive (of which I am one) to be asked crucial questions about how the university will tackle key issues.  Lay members of Council bring their expertise from a variety of sources and ask what are at once both innocent and deeply experienced questions about what is going on in the university.  Current lay members of council include the ex-Finance Director of John Lewis Partnerships (and a chair of the funding council at the same time); a senior executive from the steel industry; the chair of a Strategic Health Authority; and a retired senior civil servant.  We benefit greatly from thei devotion to the university and from their role as 'critical friends' to the institution.  Some, but by no means the majority, are Sheffield graduates.

Discussion today roamed over the Browne Review, the state of the university's finances, proposals for revisions to the university's pension schemes, the detail of key performance indicators for monitoring our performance, and the role that Council should play in the next few challenging years for the institution.

There were understandably particular concerns over how the university will respond to the Browne Review (if it is implemented) and what this will mean for the stability of the institution and for its size and shape in the future.  Many inside the university will regard the events of this month as creating a crisis. It was reassuring to hear a senior industrialist, with many years of experience, advise us to bide our time before responding to changing events. There is a big task to be done of gathering evidence before we take decisions - but as a research-led university we should be prepared for such a sequence.

Inevitably the last month or so has been spent thinking about the possible implications of the Browne Review and of the Comprehensive Spending Review that will follow it this week.  Informed guesswork, based on discussions with various informed individuals, led to me having a shrewd idea of what the whole package would contain.  But the final publication of the Browne Report last Tuesday has nevertheless left a sour taste in my mouth.  This relates to two inter-connected issues. I will quote from the report:

Page 14, Section 1.1:
"Higher education matters.  It helps to create the knowledge, skills and values that underpin a civilised society.  Higher education institutions (HEIs) generate and diffuse ideas, safeguard knowledge, catalyse innovation, inspire creativity, enliven culture, stimulate regional economies and strengthen civil society.  They bridge the past and future, the local and global.
Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next.  Participating in highere ducation enables individuals from low income backgrounds and then their families to enter higher status jobs and increase their earnings.  Graduates enjoy substantial health benefits - a reduced likelihood of smoking, and lower incidence of obesity and depression. They are less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to be actively engaged with their childrens' education, and more likely to be active in their communities."

One of the things I teach my students is to identify ideaologies, discourses and arguments around the provision of 'public' and 'private' goods - and then to apply their understanding to the analysis of the different ways in which welfare regimes operate across Europe to infleucne the life chances of people.

These excellent two opening paragraphs of the Browne Review are eloquent in their justification of higher education as being both a public good (from which the whole of society benefits - first paragraph) and a private good (benefiting those who participate in its consumption - the second paragraph).  I would actually argue that certain of the features identified in the second paragraph (for example the lower crime rate or better health outcomes) are actually also a public benefit and should be seen as part of the 'public good' aspect of higher education.

By pages 20/21 the mood of the report has changed.  The scales have now been weighed, and the verdict now is that in terms of the provision of highere ducation "the public also receives a benefit but this is less than the private benefit."

By page 47 this new argument has led to the overturning of a key tenet of page 14 - that higher education is a public good with a range of benefits for the whole of society.  We now arrive at the point where only a very limited range of courses are seen as a public good - and should thus be publicly funded.  These are courses "that deliver significant social returns such as to provide skills and knowledge currently in shortage or predicted to be in the future ... Typically the courses that may fall into this category are courses in science and technology subjects, clinical medicine, nursing and other healthcare degrees, as well as strategically important language courses."

So everything else will be taken out of the realm of public funding (or "a hidden blanket subsidy" to repeat the dismissive language used in the report).  The first paragraph of the report has been completely forgotten.  Apparnetly there is no public good in:
- studying for a degree in Economics, with all the insight and knowledge that would bring to solving major world problems;
- becoming a commentator on social change, through Politics or Sociology. [Where is the analysis of the "civilised society" trailed at the start of the reprt?]
- becoming a lawyer or architect, a librarian or an educationalist
- becoming skilled in the science of management
- studying geography or town and regional planning with a view to "stimulat[ing] regional economies" (page 14)
- studying philosophy and getting to grips with the "values that underpin a civilised society" (page 14)
- studying literature or music in such a way as to comment on endeavours to "enliven culture" (page 14 again).

None of these should be seen as public goods: studying these subjects has no intrinsic value to society at large. I'm afraid I just do not accept that position.

And related to this is the view that anyone who wants to study such subjects must pay the full whack for doing so - something which goes against the complete tenor of European welfare thinking for the past 70 years or more.  In Europe every country has defined public goods in a relatively broad manner - accepting the benefits of public sector finance and involvement in areas such as health care, housing, pensions, and education at all levels.  With the Browne Review the UK is in danger of stepping outside that European mainstream and turning its back on decades of experience in producing social justice and the development of the common interest through public policy.

I squirm when I hear right-wing American commentators describe the NHS and other healthcare systems in Europe as "socialist, bordering on Marxism" (as I heard one Tea Party supporter say last week).  But the path from the Browne Review's espousal of claims that many social sciences and humanities disciplines should  not be funded could easily lead us in a few years to rather similar views about whole areas of university education.

It's not so long since Charles Clarke, a Labour minister of education, shared his belief that it was OK to have a few medieval historians around for ornamental purposes. Lord Browne and his team have not created their vision - they have borrowed from existing thinking.

But it is time for EVERYONE in higher education to support the public benefit argument for the sector as a whole, and for those parts of it that are now being regarded as of private benefit only and not worthy of public support.