I have written several times before (most recently on 23 Fenruary 2011) about special lectures I have attended, and my desire to see our students broaden their horizons beyond the subject they are studying.  I make no apologies for returning to the topic.  I have just returned from an exceptional lecture, but apart from its own intrinsic merits it has also set me thinking about what makes a good special lecture in different areas of endeavour.

The evening's lecture took place in the Cathedral, as part of the events marking the 400th anniversary of the completion of the King James Bible. The speaker was Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester, and he was speaking about the language of the King James translation.  It was a lecture full of humour (particularly at the start when it transpired that the Vice-Chancellor, introducing the speaker, had walked off with the latter's lecture notes), well-paced, accessible to a wide audience, but erudite in its foundations.  And it did what a good lecture should - it left me (and others I spoke to) wanting more.  But I also came home and took down a copy of the King James translation and followed up on various of the points about its language that the speaker had introduced.  I got to bed late, which is why I am writing this blog the following morning.

Musing over what I learned from Professor Cambell's lecture, I am coming to a view on what makes a good talk to a general audience.  When I think of the best lectures I have been to in Enginnering, in Science or in the more physical aspects of Medicine, they have opened my mind to things I didn't know.  They have shown new possibilities for the extension of our understanding of the world around us. They have sometimes left me with a sense of wonder.

Good general lectures in the Arts, the Humanities and the Social Sciences - and I would include here many lectures on applied aspects of Medicine - have thrown new light on things I knew or thought I knew.  They have come at the familiar from a different perspective and led me to question my understanding.  They have in many cases challenged things I have 'taken for granted' and thus often showed situations, artefacts and structures to be more complicated than I had thought. 

So it was with Campbell's lecture last night.  Familiar biblical texts (and many familiar everyday phrases that most people would not realise come from the King James Bible) were examined for their linguistic structure and the political motivations behind the words chosen by the translators.  A familiar book was opened up to new insights, at least for me (and for others in the audience who I spoke to afterwards).

I would be interested if others wanted to add their comments on my distinction between a good general lecture in the sciences and engineering (opening us up to new knowledge) and in the arts and social sciences (challenging our understanding of things we take for granted.)

It is easy, in the university world, to forget that we are not the only part of education that is currently being severely shaken up.  In fact in some ways we are facing less change than other areas.  This evening I participated in a governors' meeting at a local college where I have been on the governing body for several years.  It is a hugely impressive college, doing fantastic things for the young people of a deprived area of the city. Its catchment is by some measures the third 'worst' in social deprivation terms of any sixth form college outside London, yet this year over 300 college stduents have put in university applications.

The college was founded with money from the Learning and Skills Council: that body has now gone.  It was set up to work in close partnership with a series of local partner 11-16 schools under local authority control.  Within a year it is quite likely that every one of those schools will have become an acacdemy and moved away from local authority co-ordination.  In some cases academy status is being thrust on schools by the Department for Education without any local consultation, with new executive heads also being parachuted in.  As schools become academies they are being encouraged to think of developing their own sixth form provision - something that the former partnership working saw as lying with the specialist sixth form college.  Budgets are, of course, being cut: and extra burdens are being thrust on to post-16 institutions via the requirement that they will administer the more limited funds that are promised to replace the much-lamented Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) that was administered centrally.

At the same time the government is starting to cite performance in terms of new indicators that are being applied retrospectively to situations where completely contrary guidance was previously being provided.  Thus the government is starting to cite the proportions of pupils achieving the 'English Baccalaurate' (consisting of GCSE grade C or above in Maths, English, double Science, a humanity, and a foreign language), yet dozens of schools took the earlier guidance that it was no longer compulsory for students to take a language or a humanity and dropped them from their curriculum in favour of what were seen as more 'practical' subjects.  They are now to be penalised for having done so, with the threat that low proportiosn achieving the E-Bacc will result in a poor OFSTED report and being put into special measures - whichwill almost certainly involve DfE 'intervention' resulting in a move to academy status.

It is reasonable that universities should compete against each other in many ways - for students, for research money, for staff.  Yet the delivery of pre-university education within the community environment of a single city requires co-ordination and co-operation between different providers (schools), all of them being too small individually to run their own back office functions efficiently.  Yet we are rapidly moving towards a completely fragmented local educational provision, to the possible detriment of all concerned.

The colleagues at our sixth form college seem to be approaching this chaotic situation with equanimity.  I admire them. In their keenness to do what is best for their pupils they are keeping a single priority in mind. But they are working in a landscape of such turmoil that the changes in the university world pale somewhat in comparison.

I’ve lost count of how many doctorates I have examined – either as an internal or external examiner.  I’ve travelled all over the UK in doing so, from Oxford to Dundee, and also served on PhD juries abroad – in Estonia and four times in France.  Today I have served as examiner for a thesis submitted at Kings College, London.   But my topic tonight is not that.  It’s the changes in the work we can do whilst travelling.  I am in London about once every ten days for one purpose or another.  Even before I was a PVC I spent a lot of time visiting London.  One of my earlier books was very largely based on research amongst the foreign census collections held by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys at St Catherine’s House.  The library there was open to the public only between 10 and 4, so I used to get an early train down and then work through without a break for lunch before setting off back to St Pancras for the slow journey home.  There was no public access to a photocopier in the library, so most of what I was involved in was copying down data on various European cities.  My activity on the journeys to and from London was spent marking student essays or, on the way home, doing calculations on my new data, using a pocket calculator.

But the train journey to London is now hugely changed.  It started some years ago with mobile phones and the possibility of ringing someone up in response to something in a paper one was reading.  Then came laptops and the chance to work the whole journey on a paper or even on a presentation one was scheduled to give on arrival.  More recently wifi has come to the train.  The train has become a mobile office. Today I spent an hour on my journey to London re-reading parts of the thesis for examination and also going through my fellow examiner’s preliminary comments once again.  But I also kept up to date with my e-mails as well as listening to some favourite music on my MP3 player.

On the journey home I have read the papers for the University Executive Board tomorrow.  I am traditional enough to have those in printed form, so this was a rather old-fashioned aspect of the journey that had similarities to actions of some years ago – others would have read the UEB papers on their iPads.  But I have also dealt with e-mails to and from colleagues in Greece, China, the USA, France, Germany and Italy and should end my journey in Sheffield at 2100 this evening pretty well up to date with the day’s correspondence.  I have also exchanged a series of text messages with a colleague who is on an earlier train north.  Finally, all being well, in a few minutes time I will upload this blog from a Word file into uSpace.

Advances in telecommunications enable us to keep in touch with each other and with what is going on in the wider world.  But the downside is that I am still at my keyboard at a time of the evening when I could be doing the crossword in one of the papers I’ve picked up during the day, or watching the Derbyshire landscape pass by.

I am writing this entry in the lounge at Thessaloniki-Macedonia Airport in Greece.  Rebecca Hughes, the new PVC International, and I have just been on a short visit to introduce Rebecca to Sheffield’s International Faculty – City College.  We have had an intensive programme, meeting with the academic staff of all the departments there, having discussions with a number of professional services support staff, and visiting the facilities – particularly in City’s relatively new premises modelled on the University’s Information Commons.  We have also been to the South-East European Research Centre and met staff there.  We have planned the visit to the College by the Vice-Chancellor and a senior group next month – to include the President and International Officer of the Students’ Union as well as colleagues from Sheffield’s Management School.

Part of the VC’s visit will involve the launch of the International Faculty’s Executive MBA programme in Istanbul.  I am old enough to remember a time when such a thing would have been unthinkable – when the idea of a Greek private college doing anything in Turkey would have been completely out of the question because of the tension between the two countries, with their armed gunboats from both sides patrolling the waters between some of the Greek islands and the Turkish mainland.  The launch of a Sheffield EMBA programme in Istanbul next month, delivered by City College, will therefore be of enormous significance. It will be a unique venture – but then there are many aspects about the City College operation that are very distinctive.

The aspect I want to pick on here is the role of education in bringing together previously antagonistic peoples.  That will be the case next month in Istanbul.  But I want to highlight the discussion Rebecca and I had yesterday afternoon with a group of 11 students of City – drawn from a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  Some had studied at City before, others had come from previous study elsewhere (including one MBA student who already had bachelors and masters degree from Sussex and a PhD from Imperial College).  But they also came from a variety of countries within the Balkan region and beyond – Greece itself, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia and Kosovo.   You don’t need to be anywhere as old as me to remember a time when Serbians and Kosovans were at war with each other. I noticed that the two students from those countries were sitting next to each other and supporting each other in their gestures.  I commented on this to one of them afterwards – a Serbian girl who is now destined for a Masters programme at Amsterdam.  She said that all that stuff belongs in the past for young people like her.  Education has brought people of her generation together.  Another student commented that he had come to the college with all the preconceptions of his background and place of origin, but that the college had taught him something new – and not just his academic subject.  It had taught him to see people from other origins and cultures in a much more positive light. “It helps you get your mind opened”, he said.  And another commented “A university is a racism killer.”  What a fantastic accolade for Sheffield and City for fostering such a view within the complex political and ethnic rivalries of the Balkans.  As Rebecca commented to me afterwards, the whole experience of meeting this group of students, who clearly formed an integrated and supportive community among themselves, was rather moving.  That’s not a word we reach for every day.

 

(I tried to upload this whilst changing planes in Munich Airport later on Friday, but uSpace was not being co-operative.  Apologies for the late deluvery of the blog.)