Over the years that I have been a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, the University has been incredibly well served by a succession of outstanding officers of the Students' Union.   Almost all those that I have worked with have been genuinely concerned with the interests of the broad constituency of students rather than pushing sectional interests, and they have been altruistic in working for the future of the university as a whole rather than seeking short-term payoffs for long-term issues.  In most years I set up regular meetings with several of the Union Officers, and today I saw two of them for an hour each to talk through a variety of issues relating to their particular portfolios.

I feel a little sorry for the officers in one key respect.  They have been elected on a particular platform and over the summer (they take office at the start of July) they develop agendas and set objectives for their term of office.  But implementation of many of the changes they want to bring in is dependent on the annual university calendar.  Consequently even the most successful officers rarely see the outcomes of the things they work on during their year of office.  They start the ball rolling, and take ideas through work groups, to committees, to Union Council and so on - but it will be the following year's officers who witness the fulfillment of the ambitions of their predecessors.  Indeed, many good ideas that are brought forward in the first semester take longer to get agreed - particularly if there is further research needed, or if significant resources will be required - so that it may be the officers two years down the line who are at the launch events.

The term of office of our Union Officers is an unusually short one.  Many Students' Unions elect their sabbatical officers for two year terms, rather than for our one year. It could be made to work in Sheffield, and would provide for some continuity between years as well as providing the opportunity for Offciers to see their projects to fruition.  With 8 sabbatical officers, half the positions could be up for election each year.  All students would have the opportunity to run for all the posts - because the electorate has been prepared to elect second year as well as third year students to the various roles - and even, last year, a postgraduate research student as President.

But one argument against this would be that many of our Student Union officers are exhausted by the end of their single term of office, and the thought of going on for a second year is something that many of them wouldn't want to contemplate.  But again, perhaps that is a function of the fact that they only serve for a year and thus put an incredible amount of energy into achieving as much as they can during that limited period.   And perhaps it is that high level of concentrated energy that makes our officers as successful as they are as student leaders. I genuinely don't know whether the Union could improve the system or not.  But clearly it is not for me to say - the Students' Union is self-governing and needs no interference from a member of the University Executive.  Except that I have a feeling that I may be a life member of the Sheffield Students' Union as a result of being a life member of the union where I was at university ...

The next set of blogs will be on 1st, 6th, 8th, 16th and 26th September.

Well, I did restrain myself for almost all my holiday - and only looked at e-mails in the last couple of days when my thoughts turned to any briefings I might need to pick up the reins on my return.  And in the meantime my stand-in PA, Zara Smith, had done an excellent job of filtering messages so that there were not too many absolutely urgent tasks awaiting me on my return today.

As a geographer with particular interests in the ways people live their lives in specific environments, I always find holidays stimulating to academic thinking.  Indeed any travel to a different place has the same effect.  This year my holiday was in central Italy, in many cases revisiting places I had first visited 20, 30 or even more years ago. I first visited the area when I was an undergraduate student, hitch-hiking from place to place and staying in youth hostels (or occasionally in fields or on the floors of hotel outhouses).  I wish now that I had been more observant then.  Had I rigourously collected data then on commercial outlets, the times of day when people did things, the numbers and types of people around, I would have the possibility now of some fascinating longitudinal comparisons. 

In the early 1970s I chose a southern Italian region as one of two case studies for my doctorate thesis - on how small rural communities adapt to the arrival of tourism. I have never actually returned to area (the Cilento region of southern Campania, 140km beyond Naples) since I completed my fieldwork.  But I was minded to do so sometime as a result of what I saw on my holiday this year. Last week I visited a village in Tuscany that I first went to nearly 40 years ago.  Then I slept in a tiny tent in a rudimentary campsite in an olive grove.  There was only one hotel in the village, and a couple of restaurants, and at some times of the day it was possible to be alone in the main street, even in August.

Today I stayed in a hotel converted from a priory on the edge of the village, having chosen from the 20 or so hotels now available.  It was very difficult to secure a table for an evening meal at one of the 25 restaurants, but that was nothing compared with the difficulty in securing a car parking space - 8 Euros for 4 hours in the evening, although on the day we left the village to drive to our next destination all the car parks were full and there were backlog queues of up to a kilometre on the entry roads.  A long conversation with the waiter in our hotel turned on the subject of the unsustainability of ordinary life in the place now - 3 months of tourist-induced hell in the summer followed by 9 months of dormancy when the place effectively shuts up and goes back to how it was when I first went all those years ago.

I turned away from researching tourism because at the time I could find little of theoretical interest to sustain me.  Sometimes, as over the last week or two, I see that there were and are interesting questions to be answered about the growth of the activity.  Perhaps I'll come back to some of them when I retire!