Thursday 20th December 2012 - University 'holidays'

Here are some typical questions from non-university friends over the last few days: "When did you break up for Christmas?", "Is there anybody in at the University now?", "Is it in the middle of January that you start again?", "You get a much longer break than schools, don't you?"

It's the same (or in some ways worse), in the summer - "Do you have to go in at all during the next three months?" (said in the middle of June).

I suppose this is all part of the general perception that a university is only there for UK undergraduate students - probably allied to a belief that all 'terms' are 8 weeks (as in Oxford and Cambridge) so that the university is only working for 24 weeks a year.  There is no recognition that even if most of the UK undergraduates 'go home' outside the teaching period there are several thousand overseas undergraduates who don't.  Add on the postgraduate research students who are here all the year round, as well as those many taught students - undergraduate and postgraduate - who stay here to work on projects and dissertations or just to get on with reading. And then there's the whole raft of research activities that never stop: the university doesn't close up its research laboratories working on motor neurone disease or crop response to climatic change just because lectures to undergraduates have stopped for a while.  And this is the time of the year when busy lecturers in all faculties find the time (as I did yesterday) to catch up with some of the latest journal articles that have been sitting in a pile awaiting a slightly calmer moment for reflection.  Administration goes on all year round.  And then there are the meetings and engagements with outside bodies: if the assumption amongst many people is that the rest of the world keeps working when universities don't then how do they explain the fact that university staff are still turning up for meetings with the city council, with businesses, with government departments and the like at a time when the university is assumed to be 'closed'?

Something that would help the public perception of universities would be for us to encourage the recognition of the breadth of the portfolio of activities that we are involved in, and that teaching undergraduate students is only one part of the business.

Perhaps we should adapt the seasonal slogan "A dog is for life, not just for Christmas."  How about "A University is here all year, not just in term time"?

Monday 17th December 2012 - Refereeing for promotion

This year's process for the consideration of promotion cases to the rank of Reader and Chair is now almost over.  We await references on a small number of individuals, but the main bulk of candidates now know the outcomes for them.

Research activity in universities can sometimes be characterised as inherently competitive and selfish. We compete with each other for research grants and contracts (although increasingly, for bigger grants, collaboration is required).  We decide on our own research niches and sometimes act to protect our own patch to keep others off.

Yet one of the most impressive things about the process for the award of readerships and personal chairs is the exceptional length that many referees go to in order to provide a full assessment of the indiviiduals on whom they have been asked to comment.  That applies whether the consideration is of the research record of the candidate or of their teaching impact (shown this year, in some cases, by the submission of a portfolio of evidence).  This year I have read referees' reports that come to three or more sides of close typescript.  They have contained phrases such as "I had not kept fully up to date with the work of Dr X so I have read all her recent papers that might be considered for inclusion in her REF return."  Extremely busy research leaders elsewhere, in several instances holders of FRS or FBA awards - and in one case a Nobel prizewinner - have clearly spent several hours providing illuminating comments on cases put before them.  There is a general generosity of spirit on display, and even where the judgement is ultimately negative it is generally couched in terms of "not yet but soon ... once the book is in print and has been reviewed  ... or if that research grant application is successful." 

Of course, such attention to detailed cases leads to voluminous papers - nearly 850 pages of documentation had to be read before the meeting of the Readerships and Personal Chairs Committee, plus the separate CVs of the candidates for reference.

The evaluations we pay most attention to are those from senior figures in universities rather like Sheffield - in other words research-intensive universities with research-led learning as the basis of teaching.  If a referee from Cambridge, Bristol. or UCL says 'this person would have a chair in my university' then we take serious note.  But we also look for references from outside the UK for most individuals (with the exception of those coming through the teaching route) in order to determine something of the international standing of the colleagies under scrutiny.  This need for international validation has not changed over the years.  I found out later that when I was awarded my chair in 1997 it was in large part as a result of references from Germany, France and the Netherlands - my reputation was greater on the European mainland than in the UK.  At the time I was probably a little unusual in the strength of my connections across the channel.  But this year many of our candidates had a track record of European research grants or of collaboration with European mainland partners.  And references from mainland colleagues tend to accord more with those from the UK.  Interestingly, at least in terms of my reflection on reading innumerable evaluations of colleageus up for promotion, American referees seem generally to have lower expectations and standards for what the top-most position in an acacdemic's career should involve.

Overall the whole process of promotion consideration is one that is (rightly) taken incredibly seriously by all concerned.  And in the competitive academic world of today it is a process where the notion of a 'community of scholars' and support for colleagues still comes to the fore.

Monday 3rd December 2012 - Information for candidates: a Guardian roundtable

This morning I participated in a round table discussion at the Guardian newspaper headquarters on applicants' decision-maing in relation to university choices.  There were about 16 of us around the table including people from the 'Which?' and 'Push' guides to universities as well as representatives from the NUS, university consultancies, sixth form colleges, Guild HE institutions, and the Higher Education Acdemy.  I was actually one of only four university representatives there - the others being from the Open University and from Birkbeck (there were two of us from Sheffield).  The plan is that the report of our discussions will feature in the Guardian on 11 December.

Much of our discsusion was about the provision of information to prospective students.  We all recognise that there is more and more information available to them, but also that navigating such information is extremely difficult for a 17 year old.  Thus the efforts of David Willetts and others to increase the information for candidates in the belief that this will lead to better decision making is questionable: it may instead lead to data overload and recourse to decision-making based on prejudices and pre-conceptions.

Most of the information that candidates have available to them is based on 'Web 1' ideas.  We decide what to put out and we largely control the messages.  OK - we may occasionally do market research to find out what information candidates say they want (as was done before the identification of the elements for inclusion in the KIS): but once we have the list we present the data as a one-way exercise with little possibility of dialogue or continued interchange.

Candidates today live in a 'Web 2' world in which their norm is information created by 'consumers' in a general sense (I don't llike the word in the context of HE relationships).  Various such sources now exist for candidates - the text entries in the Which? university materials, postings in the 'Student Room', Facebook sites. There are obviously questions to be posed about the reliability of such materials, but they speak the 'language' of many candidates, and often (at least in some posts in the Student Room) provide the opportunity for interaction, discussion and 'chat'.

In a break in our round table discussion this morning (we started at 0830, so we deserved a break half way through) I had a chat with a fellow participant about what a 'Web 3' information set would look like in this field.  The Web 3 concept already operates in areas such as Amazon ('If you've enjoyed this book you may also enjoy this one'): it involves information being 'pushed' to us on the basis of our own known activities and preferences as individuals.  So a 17 year old might open their computer account one morning to find a message saying 'We know from data held on you that you have the ability to go to university, and we know your interest in Physics as a result of tracking we have done of your internet usage.  We think you ought to look at the following universities' offerings in Physics, and we would particularly recommend Sheffield to you.'  It might seem fanciful ... but remember that we are all tracked through our internet usage in a variety of ways, and Web 3 marketing is already present in our lives.

But the big drawback of Web 3 in supplying information to candidates is that one of the crucial tasks for them is to broaden their recognition of the possibilities that exist, and not to reduce their information searching to topics they already know.  Choosing a route into Higher Education should be about exploring new things to do and new avenues to follow, and not just sticking within an existing pathway.  But in seeking such breadth of consideration we are going back to the information overload that I started with at the bginning of this post.

So the outcome of this morning's round table discsusion was that we all agreed upon the importance of 'Guidance' as the crucial element in this whole area.  Information provision without guidance tailored to the individual as to how to use it is of little use in enabling potential students to comprehend what might be possible and satisfying for them.

Thursday 29th November 2012 - Closing down opportunities for the average child

This evening I was at a committee meeting at the sixth form college where I am a governor.  The Principal and Vice-Principal were reporting that this year it is very difficult to motivate students to complete UCAS forms for university entry.  There is a total lack of motivation, particularly amongst working class boys: the students don't know what they want to do, seeing university as too risky and not for the likes of them. 

Yesterday evening I took part in a panel discussion, set up by our Students' Union, about the future of the NUS campaign for higher education.  During the course of the discussion I came to the conclusion that the country is currently in danger of throwing away many of the improvements in opportunity that have occurred across the whole education sector over the last 70 years.  The chronology goes like this:

1944 The Butler Education Act paving the way for secondary education for everyone.  This gave the chance for young people to stay at school longer and to receive genuinely secondary and not just elementary education.

1963 The Robbins Report which led to the expansion of higher education through the creation of a whole raft of new universities - Warwick, Essex, York, Sussex, Kent, Lancaster.  This significantly increased the opportunity to go to higher education.

1970s The move to create an integrated comprehensive school system in many parts of England.  This got rid of the old secondary modern schools and created the opportunity for young people to remain longer in an education system that could eventually lead to university or a variety of other career destinations.  This, of course, was an imperfect change since it was not implemented in many areas, and anyway the independent schools were untouched. Indeed, many former 'direct grant' schools educating bright but less well off pupils moved into the independent sector (as my old school did).

1992 The ending of the 'binary divide' between Polytechnics and Universities so that the vast majority of higher education students could rightly claim they had a university education - and with a degree that was awarded with pride by their new institutions once they gained degree awarding powers.

These minor revolutions all opened up opportunity for young people from backgrounds where, before the Butler Act, the norm would have been to leave elementary school at 14or 15 and go straight into employment with no higher level training.

What is happening today?

• The introduction of the English baccalaureate with a subject mix that many schools will find they are unable to deliver (where are they to get the languages teachers from, for example?) so that their students are disadvantaged in seeking to go further.
• The removal of schools from local authority control through conversions to academies (and the creation of free schools) which will result in parents with the best resources gettng choice for their children and the rest being left behind.
• 'A level' reform which seems likely to restrict  the numbers getting the best grades, therefore again limiting the 'middling' performers to lesser opportunities.
• The elimination of educational maintenance allowance reducing the likelihood of those from the poorest backgrounds staying on at school or college
• The new university fees structure, generally perceived as resulting in a massive 'debt' on graduation and thus reducing the likelihood of the risk averse from engaging at all.
• The entry into the higher education sector of unregulated new private providers who are already cherry-picking the cheapest and most vocational of course offerings and thus reducing the possibility of cross-subsidy between low and high cost provision in existing universities
• A fee repayment regime that can be altered by the stroke of a pen of a minister, without any recourse to parliament, such that the repayment terms could instantly be made less favourable
• An absence of any real plans for funding postgraduate education - so that even if a student from a poor background can get past all the new obstacles I've just listed they are likely to be held back from entering a chosen profession by the lack of a higher level qualification.

It seems as if many of the advances in school and university education over recent decades are today being undone. No wonder the young people at my sixth form college are disillusioned and reluctant to fill in UCAS forms. 

Thursday 22nd November 2012 - Convening an HEA network

Today I have come to the end of three and a half years as the co-convenor of the Higher Education Academy's network of Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching.  Some of these tasks seem to have very long names!  It has not been a very onerous responsibility, but it has been an interesting one.  Members of the network gather twice a year for an overnight meeting, generally in London. On the first evening there is a dinner with a speaker, and on the following day there are a series of discussions, presentations and workshops.  Sometimes special interest groups hold sessions and plan activities.

Because we normally get 50 or so participants we have been able to attract excellent after dinner speakers - Sir Alan Langlands (head of HEFCE), David Eastwood (VC of Birmingham who came to talk to us - along with civil service minders - while he was a member of the Browne Review), yesterday evening Les Ebdon, the new head of OFFA.  We have also organsied very interesting discussions.  My first meeting as co-chair had Phil Willis (chair of the parliamentary select committee that was making accusations about dumbing down), Colin Riordan (chair of a HEFCE sub-group looking into these accusations), and Anthony McLaran (the new head of the Quality Assurance Agency) all sharing a platform.

What has been my role?  Along with my co-convenor and colleageus from the Higher Education Academy, I have been involved in planning our meetings, identiofying speakers and themes, and then in chairing the actual events.  Convenor pairs have eben deliberately chosen from different parts of the sector.  Hence I have worked with PVC colleageus from Salford, Aston (a brief pairing because she went on to another job) and Sunderland.  At today's meeting my successor, from Bath, took over fully from me.  Notably, all these pairings have involved me and a female colleague. As I have noted before, among senior university posts it is the PVC L/T one that seems nationwide to be most gender-blind in appointment. 

Some  senior people here may wonder why I find it useful to attend meetings with colleagues from a wide diversity of universities - what do they share with the concerns of the Russell Group?  Aren't we very different, and isn't it enough just to talk to universities like us?  No.  And that's not just a 'no' from me: at today's meeting were colleagues from a number of Ruseell Group universities - UCL, Cardiff, Durham, Manchetser, Glasgow, Edinburgh.  In the past Bristol, Warwick and Kings College London have often been there.  Innovation and good practice in delivering excellent education to our students can come from many different sources.  I came away from today's meeting with good ideas and food for thought gleaned from Winchester, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield - as well as from Glasgow.  However divided into mission groups we may be (and that will, I am sure, be problematic for us all in the next comprehensive spending review), we have much more in common in teaching than some care to admit.

I have enjoyed my stint as co-convenor of the HEA network, and I will continue to try to go to its meetings even now that my term of office is over.

(Oh, and I should add that one of the provileges of office has been the chance to determine the invitees.  One of the stars of today's meeting was Tom Arnold - last year's Student Union President at Sheffield - talking about the role of the Students Union in strategic leadership of change in learning and teaching.)

Friday 16th November 2012 - Students' general knowledge

It is some years now since I had a set of personal tutees or took some of the general first or second year tutorials in my department (Geography).  In the days when I did so I used to find one of the most salutary things to do at the start of the year was to ask students what their earliest memory of a political or world event was.  The first observation from their answers was that I had generally forgotten when they were born, and assumed they were older than was in the fact the case,  The second observation was that it was surprising how recent many of their first political memories were - a remarkable number of students had no recollection of anything outside their own immediate experience until they were teenagers.  This always amazed me.  Perhaps I was brought up in a politicised household, but I have remember world events from before I was 10 (in a slightly garbled fashion, in some cases).  But the students I deal with are social scientists, and I would have expected them to have taken an early interest in the wider world.

For 13 years I took final year students to Berlin on a field class, starting in 1996.  At the start of that period almost all the students could remember the events of November 1989, but steadily that personal connection to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism diminished.  Today probably all my final year students were born in 1990 or 1991 - in other words when Germany was on the way to, or had already achieved, reunification.

Teaching 'contemporary' issues in Europe - which is what I do - it is tricky to identify what is 'contemporary' to my students.  I have been marking projects they have submitted which have required them, in the case of one of the questions they can choose, to compare two ex-communist countries in terms of the ways in which national identity has been (re)affirmed since democratisation.  Students can choose their own pairs of countries, and I have read some excellent discussions of the new geopolitical alignment of Estonia as opposed to Ukraine, or the fate of minority groups in the assertion of national identity in Romania as opposed to Bulgaria.  But I am often surprised at the mis-conceptions students hold about recent history.  A remarkable number seem to believe that all of Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and so on) was actually part of the Soviet Union.  Some seem to believe that the Czech Republic and Slovakia have always been separate states.  

In another one of the possible topics (on citizenship and racism) there is a different problem.  Despite my encouragement to get into internet sources, and a class exercise on major newspapers across the continent, many students stick with the academic literature. The result is that they neglect major recent speeches and events - such as Chancellor Angela Merkel's comments less than two years ago that in Germany multiculturalism has totally failed, or the deportation of gypsies from France to Romania.  These things are not yet reflected in journal articles.

So I have two related problems.  One is that many students are not aware of major past events within their own lifetimes.  The second is that they don't read the news media to keep up to date with issues - or if they do they don't see them as relevant to academic tasks.   Perhaps I need to do three things before I can successfully deliver my course on 'The Social Geography of Europe.'  Firstly I need to remind myself of the age of the students and what they might remember and know.   Secondly I need to find ways of filling in the gaps - which might lead to me teaching them contemporary history rather than contemporary geography.  And thirdly I need to get them to follow political and social events, and to take them on board in their understanding.  Context is everything in the social sciences, and without an appreciation of context we are lost.

Tuesday 6th November 2012 - Planning student seminars

This year I have 38 students taking my third year option module (entitled 'The Social Geography of Europe').  Earlier on in the semester there were a series of enquiry-based learning activities around a number of European data sets (the European Values Survey and some of the Eurostat databases), as well as analysis of newspaper coverage of various issues (we picked racism this year) from around the continent as whole. I also gave various short introductions to topics that students would work up for their projects (which are due in tomorrow), and to the seminars.

There are six seminars in the course and these take place in the second half of the semester.  At one time I would have baulked at running a seminar-based programme with 38 students, but I have found ways of doing so which enable all students to be fully engaged - principally by dividing the total student body into between 6 and 8 groups for each seminar, each with a separate task.  The groups are differently composed week by week, so that students get used to working with people they may not know well.  And at the start of the whole course I asked the students to undertake a brief psychological profile questionnaire so that I have some basis on which to identify who are the ideas people, who have technical expertise, who are likely to be the glue in a group, and who are the finishers.

I am ovbiously keen for the students to develop an understanding of major social issues across Europe today.  But I am also very keen for them to develop graduate skills.  Hence my desire to operate each of the six seminars in a different way. It is seminar 4 that is giving me pause for thought at the moment.

Seminar 1 was on the changes that have occurred in Central and Eastern European cities since the ending of communism.  This was a conventional session in which each of the 8 groups I had divided the students into made a 5 minute powerpoint presentation of their response to a particular question.  In class they then undertook a morphological analysis of the built environment in a selection of cities, using maps and photographs as well as new-found knowledge of the operation of processes such as privatisation of the housing market.  All the material they created has been 'sewn' together into one document that is now on the MOLE2 page for the module.

Seminar 2, this Friday, will be on the indigenous minority languages of Europe and their possible viability into the future.  Student groups each have a minority language situation to cover, acting as the 'inspectors' that periodically prepare reports for the Council of Europe on countries that have signed the Convention on the Protection of Indigenous Minorities.  (I was once involved in such an inspection myself, when I went to Russia as co-raporteur for an evaluation of Russia's policies to such minorities. It was at the time of the Chechen uprising, and my co-raporteur was the Hungarian deputy minister for gypsies. I can dine out on some of the stories of that meeting, if people ask me!)  The students have to use powerpoint, but as 'slide packs' rather than as slides which will ever be shown on screen.  Slide packs are now the commonest way for civil servants to prepare briefings for ministers (at least in the UK): they consist of a mixture of text and diagrams and do not need reading as continuous narrative.  The students will discuss their reports in groups in class and then suggest possible alterations to the European Convention, as well as action points for governments and for minority groups themselves.

Seminar 3 will be next week and is on the break-up of former Yugoslavia and the remaining unsettled issues.  The students are divided up into groups to role play the various factions involved - all the constituent groups of former Yugoslavia, plus some crucial external countries such as Greece and Bulgaria.  All the reading suggested before the seminar is of polemical and nationalistic web sites, and the seminar requires each national group to explain their viewpoint to an outside figure - this year the scenario is a presentation to newly-elected President Romney (although I do hope I'm wr...!).  Each group will be given 'their' flag and encouraged to play their role fully, down to heckling other speakers.  A colleague stands in as the President while I make notes on what they are saying and then comment on their performance and the key points at the end, using a presentation that I write as they speak.  Only after the session are they given an academic reading list on the topic.

That's all planned and in the bag.  But seminar 4 is giving me pause for thought. It's on the various national policies seeking social cohesion in European countries. Two years ago I got an alumna who worked for an urban planning consultancy to come along and told the students that they had to make a policy pitch to her. I also told them they had to act professionally and come dressed suitably for such an occasion.  It was the dress code and presenting to a real official that worried them - so much so that one poor student started her pitch and then rushed out to throw up.  I've not tried that approach since.  I've got until this Friday to decide how I want this year's seminar to run. I'd better go and get on with thinking about it. At least I've got seminars 5 and 6 already pretty well sorted out in my mind.

Thursday 25th October 2012 - The pleasures of an urban geographer

Although most of my days are spent in university administration and other related roles, I am an urban geographer at heart.  This trait comes out most clearly when I find myself in London or some other major city (other than Sheffield - although the way that Sheffield works also interest me).  I yearn to understand how people live their lives in the city: what degrees of choice they have; how they are constrained by, for example, the housing market or the transport system.  And I am interested in how all the different ways of life of ordinary citizens add up to the vibrancy of city life - the daily and weekly rhythms of activity.

Whenever I have meetings or other events to attend in London I try to get a train that will give me a little time to get the feel of the streets - either by walking to my destination or my getting the bus.  Yesterday afternoon I arrived at St Pancras at 1730 for an event in St James's at 1830 and I took the bus as far as the Strand.  It did the journey in 15 minutes.  The traffic was light and there were relatively few passengers.   A 1730 bus journey in Sheffield would be a very different story - London and Sheffield work on different daily diaries, with many of those working in London being at their desks until well after Sheffielders have gone home.  And when I took the tube much later that evening to sleep on my daughter's sofa-bed in her north London flat I was in the midst of others who were just going home from work.  But unlike many in Sheffield who go home first and then go out for the evening, those surrounding me had been out for a drink or a meal on their way home.  London works in a different way from most other UK cities.  Some years ago I found that there were similar differences between the daily rhythms of Paris and of its suburbs.  I was writing a book on Paris and came across an unpublished government report that enabled me to represent diagrammatically the life of the whole metropolitan area throughout a 24 hour cycle.

People sometimes ask me which is my favourite European city.  London is in some ways the one I know best, having been partly brought up there.  But there are vast swathes of London that I hardly know (except from maps - and I prefer to get the feel of a city through the soles of my feet).  I do still get a buzz in observing the changing scene in London - revisiting neighbourhoods after a gap of a year or two and seeing how things have changed.  Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury in the city centre; Richmond and Camden in the outer and inner suburbs - these are areas that I enjoy being in.

But for places that really excite me with their atmosphere, and the challenge of trying to understand urban life in a different cultural context, some of the best for me are the following:
- Sitting in the Hackescher Hof at the centre of the former East Berlin, or in a cafe in Prenzlauer Berg, and reflecting on the changes in ways of life in the city since the fall of the wall;
- Shopping in the so-called 'Turkish Market' along the Landwehrkanal in Berlin on a Tuesday afternoon, and watching the interchange of ethnicities and the breaking down of many potential inter-community barriers;
- Sitting outside the Brasileira cafe in Lisbon or walking up the nearby side streets to the Carmo and looking at the relics of old Lisbon in a neighbourhood that has yet to feel the full force of gentrification;
- Returning from time to time to the estate known as the Quinta do Mocho ('Owl Farm') near the airport in Lisbon and watching the 'normalisation' of life in what was once probably the most ghetto-like ethnic minority neighbourhood in the whole of Europe (I can explain why if asked!);
- Strolling the avenues in le Vesinet in the western outer suburbs of Paris, and seeing how some of the traditions of French rural life permeate the French capital.

These are the experiences that have driven my academic curiosity.  I look forward to my next visit to London - in less than two weeks time.  

Thursday 18th October 2012 - Social mobility and widening participation

The publication of the latest Milburn Report on social mobility led to me being interviewed on Radio Sheffield once again today.  The Report seems to me to have two foci - one around the encouragement of young people from widening participation backgrounds to stay in education beyond the age of 16 and then to aspire to go to university, and the second around the difficulties for students from such backgrounds going on beyond their undergraduate studies to take postgraduate qualifications.  It was the former that the Radio Sheffield interviewer wanted to highlight, although it was the latter that I would have preferred to deal with on air.  I have become a cracked record in various places over a number of years with my view that we are doing few favours to students from impoversiehd backgrounds who arrive here with career goals that will inevitably involve a postgraduate qualification, and who then find that there is no support for them undertaking that - despite a relatively generous support package at undergraduate level.  That is not something that universities can fix: bursaries and other support for postgraduates are not 'countable' as part of our commitment to the Office for Fair Access.  I know that because we have tried it: four years ago when Martin Harris was the Director of OFFA, and again only a couple of weeks ago when the new Director, Les Ebdon, visited us.  The Vice-Chancellor recently was told, at an external event,  about the extent of this glass ceiling problem for widening participation students in one area: any such student wishing to become a barrister after taking a qualifying law degere will find that there are only 6 scholarships available nationally to do so.

The focus of today's interview was, as I have indicated, on support for 16 year olds.  Milburn has suggested that universities should pay bursaries to young people from low-participation neighbourhoods to enable them to stay in education until 18, and should work with them to improve attainment and aspiration.  I will leave on one side the fact that we do the latter already.  The former suggestion is nothing new.  Until this year the government paid Educational Maintenance Allowance to relevant young people: it has now withdrawn that and replaced it by a much less generous bursary scheme, distributed to schools to administer (at great cost to themselves), and in such a way that many schools have allocations that are greater than they can spend whilst schools in real areas of hardship have seen a massive cut in the funds available to their students.

We had a governors meeting last night at the sixth form college where I am a governor.  The principal of the college reported that she had been at meetings with other sixth form college heads where they had indicated that because they didn't have enough call on their bursary allocation they were using it to give merit awards to students with full attendance records, whilst in our college - with one of the most deprived catchment areas in England - potential claims from eligible students add up to over three times the available funds.

The withdrawal of EMA is a disastrous policy, but for the Milburn Report to suggest that the cost of replacing it should be borne by universities would be to try to paper over a crack in education policy that is widening by the month.  Actually, to speak about 'education policy' in relation to widening participation is probably a misnomer.  The withdrawal of EMA, the ending of the AimHigher project where universities, schools and colleges worked together to seek to raise aspiration and attainment, the ending of support for the 'Excellence Hubs' for gifted and talented children from widening participation backgrounds - all of these things suggest that there is now no real political drive to raise higher education participation for those who might, by some in power, be possibly labelled as 'plebs.'

Friday 12th October 2012 - Respect comes from more than titles

Last week one of the students on my final year option addressed me as 'sir'.  It was not in front of the class.  But I gently told him that I much prefer to be known as 'Paul'.  I've said that to many people around the University. It's now generally only the porters who call me something else - usually 'Prof' (which I confess I'm not keen on).  When I asked one of them why they wouldn't call me Paul he said that his supervisor had told him not to, as a mark of respect.

Some people feel that they can gain respect through the use of their title. My own feeling is that one should earn respect via what one does and how one does it rather than assuming it through the use of particular forms of address. I suppose it goes back to a protestant ethic of justification through works rather than through formulae.

Today I was reminded of that student last week because I had an e-mail exchange with a long-standing research colleague in Portugal.  I have known her for over 12 years, since she was a PhD student.  She is now a full lecturer.  We have worked on research projects together, attended conferences, edited materials for publication. Yet she wrote to me today as Dear Professor White.  I responded instantly by replying Dear Dra ..., using her formal title - and told her that she really ought to be addressing me as Paul.  Her response was 'It seems cheeky', but she did at least address the email Dear Paul.

A few years ago I was involved in a joint research project with a German professor.  We both had relatively junior colleagues working with us and supporting us.  Mine always referred to me as Paul: the junior German colleague gave her professor his full title. (Well, not quite: I've known German colleagues who have insisted on being introduced as Herr Doktor Professor ...)  When the two German colleagues visited Sheffield the German assistant confessed to my junior colleague that her professor had told her that she could address him by his first name here in the UK (because my assistant was on those terms with me) but she must never do so when they were back in Germany.

But perhaps in asking my Portuguese colleague to call me by my first name I am being culturally imperialist.  Perhaps I should accept how things are done in Portugal, and not expect her to adopt the 'English way'.  But when I go to visit my colleagues in Portugal I know that I could easily get the cultural niceties wrong.  Every meeting starts with a handshake for all the male participants and kisses on both cheeks for all the females.  Not to participate would seem stand-offish.  Perhaps we in England are more comfortable with establishing relationships via naming rather than by actual physical contact.

Friday 28th September 2012 - Interviews as examinations

I have been interviewed three times in the last few days.  All the occasions were somewhat more straightforward than the experience I recounted in my second most recent blog dealing with an interview in Romania.  The first interview was broadcast live on Radio Sheffield and involved me and Cliff Allan (Deputy VC at Sheffield Hallam) answering questions from Rony Robinson, including at least one that he described as a 'googly', intended to put me on the spot.  The second was a telephone interview with a market researcher seeking to gain my views on another university - a 40 minute long discussion.  The third, of about an hour, was a face to face interview with a researcher seeking to evaluate a particular project that the University has been involved with for some time.

Interviews, particularly when live, are a little like exams.  There's little time to think.  It's important to structure the answer very quickly, to be coherent, and to retain the bigger picture and not get bogged down in anecdotal detail.  Some people find being interviewed an ordeal: fortunately I don't.  In fact I find them very productive sessions that often result in me rationalising a particular position or point in a way that I ultimately feel has been convincing where I have not produced such an articulation before.  The questions from a good interviewer also point in directions that one may not have thought of and prompt new thinking.

Teaching is also like that.  It challenges me to find ways of expressing complex ideas to students. But what often takes my thinking further is actually the questions they then raise - on issues that I haven't got fully covered, and from viewpoints I haven't taken into account.  I used to run the training sessions on conference presentations and 'getting published' for new research students in the Faculty of Social Sciences.  One of the pieces of advice I always gave students before their first conference presentation was that the question session would be more valuable to them than the giving of the paper. It would challenge their thinking and put them on the spot on key issues - they should look forward to it as the bit that would add greatest value to their whole research agenda.

So I believe that being questioned about one's work and ideas is inherently a good thing.  And the better the questioning the richer the value of the session.  On Tuesday of next week I am lecturing in London to a group of senior executives from around the world with the expectation that I will sum up the major issues in contemporary international migration in 45 minutes. The audience will probably number about 70, from around 50 different countries.  I am sure the question and answer session after the lecture will be adrenalin-producing, but also very stimulating. 

Wednesday 19th September 2012 - My father's education and what it means to me

Like many of my generation, I was the first in my family to go to university.  Neither my parents, not my grandparents, nor any of my older cousins had so much as applied to enter a university - most had not stayed in education beyond the standard school leaving age (13, 14 or 15 at that time).

My father had actually passed the entrance exam for his local grammar school, and had been successful in obtaining his School Certificate in 1937 - involving passing English, Maths, Science, Geography and German to get what will soon (it seems) be re-created as the English Bacc.  A tiny proportion of 16 year olds in his day achieved such a qualification.  There was some consideration that my father might go on to study for the Higher School Certificate (the equivalent of A levels).  But the Head Teacher asked to see my grandfather - a printer's machine minder who spent his life on night shifts - and told him that there was little point in my father continuing at school since my grandfather had no business or profession to hand on to his son and more education in the small town they lived in would be a waste of time: better to get my father into a job as soon as possible.  My father started off as a general trainee in the post office, followed his own father into printing and then publishing, and ended his career as a personnel officer in the BBC.

My father was a very intelligent and able man whose potential was partly unfulfilled as a result of that decision about his future when he was 16 - an observation I made when I gave the eulogy at his funeral in 1998. He was keen on poetry, could complete the Guardian crossword each day during his 25 minute train journey to work in central London, loved using logarithms to solve 'big sums', and in his 70s researched a dissertation on the history of the local almshouses in order to 'pass' a test to become a local heritage guide.  Yet somehow he always lacked the confidence that could have been his had he had the chance to pursue his education further - to the age of 18 or (as I believe he could have done) beyond.

This week we have been welcoming our new undergraduate students.  Their opportunities are so much greater now than they were in my father's day, or even than they were in the early post-Robbins expansion period when I was singled out by my school as someone with the potential to go further (the reverse of what happened to my father).  But I know that there are still some young people whose potential remains unexplored and who are not encouraged to think of university as a reasonable goal, or as a path to a wider and more fulfilling life.  Many of my generation have, or had, fathers or mothers whose lives could have been different if they had not been blocked by the discouraging of educational ambition.  And we as a university must do everything we can to prevent that happening for today's school leavers.

Every year during Intro Week I wear one of my father's favourite ties.  It's a small gesture, but something of him finally gets into a university by my doing so.

Friday 14th September 2012 - The most challenging interview of my life - in Romanian

Things sometimes go wrong, and we have to deal with them on the spur of the moment. 

I have been through two sessions of 'media training' and have accumulated quite a bit of experience of newspaper, television and radio interviews.  But the scenario I faced yesterday was one I had not been trained for.   I was reminded of two recent events involving others - one when John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister in the Labour government of the time, asked for the tape to be stopped during an interview so he could start his answer again, only to be remined  that the interview was live.  The other event I recall was when BBC Television Centre took a man who was there for an interview for a low grade post and whisked him into the studio for a live discussion of a technical aspect of IT. 

I was in Bucharest, Romania, for the launch of a joint Masters programme being offered by the University of Sheffield (via our International Faculty) and a Romanian partner university.  The launch had been at the British Embassy, and we had been given a very privileged send off by the Ambassador and his senior team.  Part of the publicity that had been lined up was a live panel interview on one of the main Romanian TV News channels at prime time - 1800 hours in the evening.

Media training says that one should always ask the interviewer before the start as to the line of questioning he or she is likely to develop. There was no chance for that, since the programme was already running when we arrived at the studio so we only met the host of the programme when we were shown onto the set while footage of the morning's launch at the British Embassy was being shown.

I was told that any questions to me would be given in English and that my answers would be simultaneously translated behind the scenes to be broadcast in Romanian as a voiceover.  I was also provided with an earpiece into which an English translation of the discussion with my two fellow interviewees, both Romanian, would be piped.  In that way I could follow the course of the discussion.

Our glamorous interviewer (the host and lead personality on her own daily news show) asked me a first question in English and I replied.  So far so good.  She then turned to my fellow interviewees and switched to Romanian.  I waited for the English translation through my earpiece - but simply heard an amplified version of the Romanian discussion.  I quickly realised that I was not going to get an English version at all.

Media training also says that in group interviews one should look interested when colleagues are speaking, and try to reinforce their message through body language.  So I turned my attention to that and sought to look engaged.

The second question to me, again in English, was a 'stand alone' question that I was able to deal with.  But I then realised that the discussion with my colleagues was moving into a phase where they were being expected to comment on each other's answers and add further material.  The inevitable happened: turning to me the interviewer said in English: "could you give me two sentences to add to what your colleageus have said."

Fortunately I do have a passable knowledge of Italian, as well as reasonable French, and although this was my first visit to Romania I had found that it was possible to at least understand what was being said, if not the detail.  Romanian is closest to Italian within the family of Romance languages.  By concentrating hard I had grasped the nature of the responses of my two colleagues, and was able quickly to think of two international dimensions that they had (I believed) not covered, so I gave my answer using those two points. 

That was it and we were quickly ushered out of the studio ready for the next item.  One of my Romanian colleagues immediately said that the simultaneous translation for me must have been incredibly quick since I was able to answer the final question without waiting for the full tenor of the previous answers to be provided for me. It was only then that I was able to let the others know that there had been no simultaneous translation at all piped into my earpiece.

I will probably never know how effective the interview as a whole was.  But sometime next week the TV programme should be published on the web and I will look keenly at it to see what expression crossed my face when it dawned on me what was happening.

Friday 17th August 2012 - Timing a cigarette break

This will be a very short post - but possibly a controversial one. 

Every morning I notice a couple of University staff who I know are on timed contracts (in other words, they are paid for a certain number of hours per week, rather than having contracts relating to the overall fulfilment of duties with no set hours of work) having a cigarette break.  I also notice that sometimes such breaks seem to last rather a long time.  I see this on other occasions walking round the university - colleagues who are often to be seen standing outside their buildings with a cigarette in hand, and who I then sometimes see again later in
'normal' coffee settings having a break.

Are smokers allowed to work fewer hours per day than non-smokers?  Or are they expected to make up the extra time they have spent on cigarette breaks by staying at work longer?  Or is the cigarette so refreshing that when they've had a break they make up the time they've lost through increased productivity?   Or is the reduced life expectancy of smokers such that allowing them time off to smoke actually increases the overall pension benefits of non-smokers who will, on average, live longer?  Is there an equality of treatment issue here?

Monday 6th August 2012 - Reading e-mails whenever and wherever

When I go on leave I try to restrain myself from reading e-mails until a day or two before the end of my holiday.  I then check to see if there is anything that needs dealing with before I get back into work, or anything that has changed the schedule of my diary for the first few days back.  A number of people in the university have my mobile phone number and if anything really eneds my attention they know they can ring me.  Generally no one does, although I remember one occasion when a colleague and I had a long phonecall about an urgent matter at the end of which she said "Could we meet up for a coffee later today to talk this over" only for me to inform her that I was standing just outside a department store in Regensburg, Bavaria.

The Vice-Chancellor went off on holiday at the weekend, and before he went and told him not to read his e-mails - and he promised to try not to. I am standing in for him.  Indeed, today I have no sign that he has opened his inbox, but I suspect that within a few days it will become clear that he has done so when osther people tell me about his views on various new matters - showing that he has been in touch.  

The problem is that it is so easy to get into e-mails - while waiting for a train, sitting in a bar waiting for the drinks to arrive, or surreptitiously behind a newspapers.  Today I have had four e-mails from people who I know are said to be on holiday.  None was urgent - all of them could have waited.  Two of them came from 'behind' bounceback messages. In other words the individuals concerned had put up a vacation message to say they were away and would not be responding to anything until a given future date - but they had then gone on reading their mail, and answering at least some of it.

Perhaps I'm very old-fashioned, but I think a holiday is a holiday.  Work and non-work time get intermingled during the rest of the year, but they shouldn't do so during a holiday.  I'm taking a week off at the beginning of September.  If anybody catches me reading and sending e-mails before late on the Thursday of that week I will have broken my resolution and failed to take my own advice!

Wednesday 1st August 2012 - What sport, music and education have in common

I will start with what to many people is a terrible confession - that I am not really interested in sport.  I have never attended a professional football match in my life, nor (as far as I can remember) watched a whole game on television.  As a teenager I was a keen supporter of a county cricket team (but not the county I lived in - it was just that it was easier to get to a neighbouring county's ground) but I have lost touch with the game.  I think the last time I paid to attend a sporting function was in 1991 when the World Student Games were in Sheffield and I went along to both the diving and the athletics.  But I watched the Olympic opening ceremony and have seen flashes of particular events in news broadcasts over the last few days.

I am not by instinct a competitive person, and I take no delight in what I perceive as nationalistic commentaries that focus only on British copmpetitors to the exclusion of comment on any other. (I find BBC's Look North, with its emphasis on what Yorkshire athletes are doing, particularly odd: it seems as if they regard Yorkshire as another competing country.)

But I am an internationalist, and one of the great elements of the games is that they bring together people from around the world.  Press shots of athletes from different countries enjoying each others' company; television clips of competitors at the end of a race embracing and congratulating each other (apparently sincerely); pictures of supporters waving different flags but engaged in good-hearted banter - these are things that I find particularly moving.

Higher education, at its best, is another way in which people from very different countries and cultures can be brought together - and in a predominantly non-competitive spirit.  I have blogged before about how moved I am on my visits to our International Faculty in Thessaloniki to see how students from recently-warring parts of the Balkans are brought together to study for their degrees, and how they then form friendships and get to understand different points of view.

So in some ways the Olympics and universities are rather similar.  And there's been another example of that 'coming together' over the last couple of weeks - the performance at the Prom Concerts in London of the complete Beethoven symphony cycle by the East-West Divan Orchestra, created by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said.  That orchestra consists of Israeli musicians playing alongside Arab colleagues from various parts of the Middle East.  Sport, education, music - three ways in which the world can seem smaller by bringing people from different backgrounds together.  Except that there is less nationalistic competition in education and in music - and possibly less suspicion of doping too. 

Thursday 19th July 2012 - Staff attendance at degree ceremonies

It's my favourite week of the year - graduation week.  I am presiding at 3 ceremonies (which I really enjoy doing), orating at 1, and attending 6 others - I go to all those where a Senate Award winner is being presented, since I chair the award board and want to see the process through to its conclusion.

But after attending several ceremonies I am led to thinking about the level of academic staff attendance.  Without mentioning any specific names, attendance has varied very significantly from department to department.  In one ceremony we had difficulty in getting all the staff on the stage - in another we had to space them out so widely that they could scarcely speak to each other, there were so few of them.  I haven't done an exact survey, but my guess is that staff attendance varies from perhaps 10% at minimum to over 70% at most.  Perhaps next year I will actually do some analysis, because another observation that leads me towards a hypothesis is that departments where there is a very low level of staff attendance tend to be those with low levels of student satisfaction in the NSS.  That could be tested!  The ceremony where we had problems accommodating all the staff was for a department with 100% satisfaction in the NSS.  Obviously I'm not saying that there is a causal relationship between staff attendance and student satisfaction, but both indicate something about the culture in departments.

I know there are very good reasons why academic staff cannot attend and process in many cases.  In my own department (Geography) a number of my colleagues spend the summer on fieldwork in distant parts of the world - the Arctic, Africa, India and so on - and the same is true of other departments.  Yet Geography produced a very creditable turnout of staff for their ceremony earlier this week (and has high NSS scores).  I have heard some colleagues around the university saying 'I didn't go to my own ceremony and put on fancy dress and I'm not starting to do it now.'  Most of such staff graduated in the 1970s or early 1980s, and it is true that student attendance at degree ceremonies at that time was low.  But when I last checked, student attendance at graduation ceremonies is now well over 90%, so stduents today clearly feel rather differently (or are under stronger parental pressures?!).  However. the attitudes of the 1970s and 1980s linger on in some colleagues.

Sitting where I do on the platform, I can see how much it means to students to see their personal tutor or dissertation supervisor there.  As they wait at the top of the steps for their name to be read out, many of them flick a smile or wave at someone in the staff group at the back of the stage - someone who the student will obviously remember as having made a difference to their time here.  Some non-UK students bow to their supervisor or tutor.  The presence of academic staff on the platform shows that they care about their students as they pass out into the world as graduates. 

Perhaps next year I WILL do that analysis of NSS scores against staff attendance at degree ceremonies, just to test my hypothesis.

Thursday 12th July 2012 - The complexity of student numbers controls

The implications of many of the recent changes to the fees regime and to the control of the numbers of home students admitted to each university have become something of a 'Trivial Pursuit' question.  Few people really understand the bigger picture or the potential implications that flow from it. I have been involved in two recent presentations to schoolteachers who have watched aghast as I try to explain what is happening and what might happen.  I have also done a presentation to Senate at which the body language of many present indicated that they had not appreciated the significance of the new system.

We are moving (or being moved) into a very uncomfortable position somewhere between a fully free market system and a fully controlled one.  If the rhetoric of governmant ministers and others is to be believed, we will in future see a system where student choice is dominant ('Students at the Heart of the System' was the title of last year's White Paper).  Yet this autumn there is a danger that many universities that students choose to go to by preference will be fined for exceeding a number control that has been handed down to them.  The President of the NUS summed it up at a HEFCE conference when he queried why places were being taken away from popular universities and given to institutions "where there isn't exactly a queue out the door".  Sheffield has not had very many places withdrawn to give to institutions that have lower fees (and which, as Liam points out, are not amongst the most popular).  But even so we could well find that we accidentally exceed our recruitment limits for students with A level grades of less than AAB next month, and the 'fine' for doing so could be as much as £15,000 per student for each year of those students' courses.  So much for real student choice in a free market.

On Monday of this week UCAS published an analysis of the behaviour of candidates in this, the first year of the new fee regime.  In complete contradiction to the government's expectations, instead of universities with lower stated levels of fees seeing an increase in applications, the reverse has happened.  The proportion of applications to the highest fee universities has risen, putting them under pressure in relation to the capped numbers we have been given for below AAB students.  Candidates are not stupid - they recognise that they are unlikely to get the same quality of education from an institution charging £6500 as from one charging £9000 and are opting for the latter group.  We have hypothesised that there would be this 'flight to quality'and now we have national evidence that it is indeed occurring.

But the complexity of the arrangements now in place is such that I am sure there will be a number of outcomes, both this year and in 2013, that are far from predictable.  There will be apparent injustices done to individual students who fall on borders between different parts of the system.  I have been warning HEFCE about this for some months.  It should be a field day for the media to pick up 'hard-done-by' stories and make a big splash of them.  The saving grace of the system is that the media don't understand it, and in that they are in the same boat as most teachers, most parents, and many of our own staff.  This afternoon I have spent time with colleagues from Admissions, Finance, and Planning and Governance Services working on how we are going to handle the issues that arise during the week A level results are declared. It should be a interesting week!   

Friday 6th July 2012 - Earphones and our personal worlds

A couple  of days ago I was walking across the concourse when I noticed a colleague I hadn't seen for some months.  Our paths were not going to cross exactly so when we were at the mimum distance apart I hailed him in a friendly fashion.  He kept on walking, didn't turn to acknowledge me, and that was that.  Wondering what I had done to offend him, I then noticed the earpiece and the wire leading from it and realised that he was listening to an iPod or other MP3 player. 

It has happened before with others.  Another pattern is that I approach someone out and about around the university for a chat and before we can start they have to take their earpieces out and fiddle with their player to turn it off so that they don't miss a beat of the music they were listening to before turning, perhaps less willingly, to a conversation with me.  The other pattern is to approach a lone person for a few words of greeting only to realise that they are already talking  to someone else via a headset and microphone.

From a social science perspective what is happening in all these cases is a re-definition of the boundary between private spaces and public spaces.  Indeed, in many ways what we are witnessing is the privatisation of public space through the use of personal sound fields to cut out wider public interaction.  Individuals can now retain their own private world and shut out others, whilst physically moving through public worlds.  The longer-term outcome could be a weakening of those little elements of civilty ('hello, how are you today?' and the like) that bind people into communities. It also means that individuals have greater control over who to interact with.  As someone who seems to spend quite a lot of time walking between university buildings, and greeting people on the way, I regret that.

But I will also confess that I put the earphones in and resort to my own iPod from time to time - most notably today when I was on the train to London and the only way I could cut out the distracting noise from the earphones of the person sitting opposite me was to turn on and tune in to my own choice of music, something which didn't have the rhythmic drum beat coming from the opposite side of the train table.  Perhaps there were others on the train who said 'hello' to me and I didn't hear them.

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 - Learning students' names

I was at a celebration event in a university department earlier today.  One of those present was a woman I taught in my final year option class a few years ago who is now on the staff.  Something which she explained to her colleagues about me was that she remembered how, by the second week of the class, I had learned everyone's names. I think there were probably about 25 in the class in her year.  She implied that others who had taught her had not placed a name against her.  This set me thinking about the learning of students' names.

At the Students' Union academic awards last month I was a little taken aback by the citation for one short-listed tutor where his main claim to fame seemed to be that he had learned the names of his personal tutees.  I would have thought that would be the norm rather than the exception.

I don't find learning names that easy, but it seems to me that it's a very important part of recognising students' (and colleagues') individual identities.  For the first week or two of my third year classes I pour over the photo mugshots of the students (unfortunately by then over two years old and therefore in some cases unrecognisable). I generally print them out from the student record specifically for my group and in the first week or two it can be a bit of a game for us all with me going round the class trying to match today's face and name with the face of the 18 year old on the sheet.  My final year option normally has between 25 and 35 in it and by the third week I'm generally pretty sure I've got them all worked out - five years ago when over 70 students opted for my class it wasn't until after half-way through the semester that I had confidence in addressing students by name.

Two tips given me some time ago always stand me in good stead.  Try to remember not just the name but also something about the individual. Perhaps it's because I'm a geographer that I normally attach the place a student is from to the name and face. The second tip was given me by our previous Vice-Chancellor: when you are meeting someone for the first time and are told their name, repeat it back to them - "I'm Trisha", "Hello Trisha".  It's simple, but it does help.

But then perhaps I'm being very old-fashioned in my belief that academic staff ought to know the names of the students they interact with in seminars (I'd exclude the big lecture classes from this!). On the other hand, I was brought up short recently by an ex-student (from another department and faculty) who, when introduced to me, said "Don't you remember me?"  It transpired that I had conferred her degree (in a ceremony with about 300 others crossing the stage) and because I had welcomed her by name (secret - there is script in the presiding officer's lap!) she thought I might still know it.  

But we can all make mistakes.  I was mortified one evening last week when I said good-bye to a colleague at the end of a formal dinner and gave her the name of her head of department instead of her own.

Friday 29th June 2012 - Recent changes in the university

From time to time the Quality Assurance Agency 'inspects' the university.  We had a visit from them in 2003 and another in 2007.  We will be undergoing an inspection in the autumn of this year.  The 2003 audit was generally positive but criticised the university for having multiple means of determining degree classifications, and was exercised about the ways in which students with similar sets of marks and performance could end in different degree classes depending on which department (or faculty) they were in.  We spent some time over the next couple of years creating the complex but comprehensive process for degree classification that we now have in place.

The 2007 audit was very complimentary about us, with only a couple of suggestions for action matched against four times as many points of commendation.  That was a very agreeable outcome for us.  We had a new Vice-Chancellor, Keith Burnett, arriving at the time of the audit, and we had chosen to write our self-evaluation document in the style of an explanation to him of how we maintain standards and quality across all our degree programmes.

We have less choice on how to write our self-evaluation document this time. The QAA has said that it doesn't want a narrative, but instead is looking for an evidence-based approach largely referring to existing documents and materials.  That said, they nevertheless ask for a two page account of the main changes since the last audit.  I have been working on those pages today and will be doing so over the weekend as well. It is actually quite difficult to reduce a discussion of changes between 2007 and 2012 down to a few words.  There have just been so many major developments.

These are the ones I have chosen to highlight - I'd be interested to see if anyone has other suggestions as to what I should add (or subtract):

1.     The new Faculty structure giving full resourcing powers to Faculties and increasing their levels of autonomy to act in ways that are more appropriate for their particular portfolios of activities.  With that have come new roles such as Faculty Pro-Vice-Chancellors, FDLTs and FDRIs in place of Deans.  It has also strendthened the links between the acacdemic management of programmes and the allocation of resources to them.  If anyone sees any down-sides please let me know.

2.     Changes in the management of the postgraduate research student experience.  In particular the old Graduate Research Office has gone, to be replaced by closer integration of pgr activities into Research and Innovation as a whole and the new emphasis on Doctoral Researcher Development.  That has come alongside the evolution from the old RTP to the new DDP (Doctroal Development Programme) and the creation of new Doctoral Training  Centres.

3.     The end of the validation activities that the University used to carry out for colleges.  City College, our most important partner, has become a Faculty of the University, with full integration in the academic governance of programmes.  We are involved with more collabroations world-wide, but on a basis of equal partnership arrangements, handled through new structures.

4.     Changes in our stduent enhancement regimes, with the ending of funding for our two CETLs and the evolution of new ways of bringing students into enhancement and engagement activities through schemes such as SURE (Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience) and the SALTs (Student Amdbassadors for Learning and Teaching).

5.     Changes in the student composition.  In particular, the nearly doubling of overseas students and the consequent changes in the need for student support activities - particularly (but not exclusively) in the English Language Teaching Centre.  Reductions in the numbers of undergraduate part-time students and the upcoming reorganisation of The Institute for Lifelong Learning (TILL).

Those are my top five.  What are yours?

Tuesday 19th June 2012 - London

I have a lot of meetings in London - sometimes two a week.  Most are not sessions where I am representing the University of Sheffield, although some are: most are in connection with various national groups of which I am a member - particularly for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) or the Higher Education Academy (HEA), but also some of the working groups of the Russell Group.  Today I had two London meetings - one at 0900 and the other at 1800. Rather than getting up at the crack of dawn and catching the first train, I travelled down after work yesterday and stayed in a hotel.

Three points have occurred to me during the day.

The first is about graduate destinations.  Both yesterday evening as I went in search of a meal, and this morning as I walked from my hotel to the location of my 0900 meeting I observed many people in their 20s and early 30s who I strongly suspect were graduates.  They were in (and outside) the pubs - it was a lovely evening yesterday; they were in small groups in the restaurants, often with a folder to hand suggesting they were on their way home from work; this morning they were hurrying through the streets of Covent Garden and Leicester Square and disappearing into offices, coffee and croissant in hand.  A disciplinary colleague of mine has described London as an 'escalator region' for graduates. Whilst other regions have career stairways that graduates can climb one by one, London provides opportunities for much more rapid advance - an escalator rather than a staircase - but one where the individual can decide at what point they want to get off and move elsewhere.  Every year I regret the negative attitudes that many of my students have to starting their careers in London - the attitude of 'anywhere but London' is rife and I think results in some of our graduates taking longer to fulfil their potential than they might.  Perhaps introcuing our students to possible role models who have taken the plunge and moved to London might help.

My second point relates to the timing of my day's meetings.  0900 is not a good time for those from outside London to assemble (it's not good for many from the outer suburbs of London either - London generally works on a later daily schedule than other British cities).  Many meetings convened by those who live and work in London do not take account of the travel arrangements of others.  Colleagues at my 0900 meeting had travelled from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - all, like me, had arrived the previous evening.   .And when London meetings are scheduled with good start times (1100 is suitable for people from most parts of the UK, either by train or plane) the pleasure taken by Londoners if the meeting finishes early is not shared by those who have come some distance.  If the timing for a meeting is indicated in the agenda as 1100 to 1500 then those of us from outside London, in order to cut costs, buy advance purchase rail tickets tying us to a specific return train.  A meeting that finishes an hour early results in us kicking our heels waiting for the clock to reach the original schedule.

But my third point is very personal.  I am an urban geographer. I love the buzz of big European cities.  I love the heterogeneity of the people, the variety of the buildings, the quirks of backstreets.   Central London last night and early this morning was an absolute joy (to me at least).  I don't really have any regrets about having to be there for an 0900 meeting today.   

Monday 21st May 2012 - PowerPoint here, PowerPoint there, PowerPoint everywhere

I started using Powerpoint about 10 years ago.  I wasn't an early adopter, but as I found out quite soon I was by no means late.  Many others in my department thought I was innovative.  My first major use was in a series of presentations I made in connection with a major Anglo-Portuguese research project on social deprivation in Portugal, funded by an international charity.  Looking back at those first presentations now, I find that they weren't actually too bad: in some ways Powerpoint has the advantage of being very easy indeed to use - which is also a problem with it since it is often used without real thought.

During my period as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor - which now extends to just over 8 years - I have made countless presentations with Powerpoint.  I've still not been on any formal training course, but I've observed many presentations by others and tried to learn what works and what doesn't.  Too many people use a lot of words to try to convey information, when the technique is best used for conveying ideas.  An unrelieved series of sldies completely of words becoimes very boring - yet pictures can be too gimicky.  In the early days of Powerpoint people often used too many fly-ins and builds, which became distracting.  Most people today use these things sparingly.  Yet we have probably all been exposed to 'death by Powerpoint' sessions at various conferences and awaydays.

I have recently started to give substantial presentations without the use of Powerpoint, starting with two talks to leadership programmes.  I actually found this rather liberating.  I don't normally prepare much in the way of texts for talks, and without the need to keep to the script already determined by my Powerpoint materials I think I have been able to respomnd more to the body language of my audience.  

Later this evening I will be setting off for the International Faculty in Thessaloniki where I will be talking to the staff.  Within the next month I will also be talking to University Council about our new Learning and Teaching Strategy, and a couple of days later I will be talking at a schools conference in the North-East of England about the interface between schools and universities.  But .... I will be doing each of these talks with Powerpoint! Why?

One of these will be to an audience where not everyone is a native English speaker, and I believe that in these situations it is useful for listeners to have some visual prompts as well as a voice to listen to.  Certainly, when I attend conferences and listen to presentations in languages other than English I like to have something to help visually.  I also always use a lot of visuals when I lecture or give presentations in languages other than English. 

For one of these future presentations there is also the possibility of printing out a 'takeaway' for the audience. So Powerpoint still has an important place - but perhaps we shouldn't overuse it.

Thursday 17th May 2012 - Professionalising university teaching

Every ten years I have a reminder about the value of a PhD.  When my wife and I fill in the decennial census form her qualifications count higher than mine.  We both have bachelors degrees, and I also have a doctorate - but she trumps me by having a Certificate in Education (now renamed the Postgraduate Cerificate in Education or PGCE) which gives her a registered teacher number and professional status.  In the list of qualifications on the census form her professional qualification lifts her to a higher box than my doctorate.

As David Willetts has pointed out, university lecturing is possibly the only 'profession' for which there is no formal requirement to undertake professional training.  An individual can go straight from being a doctoral student to a lecturer overnight (indeed, that's what I did at the start of my career).  But doing research and teaching are different things.  Certainly today we do have training programmes of various kinds for those embarking on an academic career, and in Sheffield we have made the completion of a 'Certificate in Learning and Teaching' (CiLT) compulsory before a new lecturer can complete their period on probation. But the programme for the certificate is not onerous, and there are many new teaching staff who do not have to take it at present.

Then there is the element of continuous professional development (CPD).  In most other professions individuals are required to keep updated through attendance at various training sessions throughout their careers.  That is not the case for university lecturers. Attendance at research conferences could legitimately be argued to constitute a form of CPD for the research side of career development; but how many academics attend sessions to update their teaching skills, to consider alternative ways of developing learning, or to consider the potential of new learning technologies?  A few years ago when teaching evaluations still involved sitting in on classes given by colleagues in other departments I was astonished at how antediluvian the teaching methods employed sometimes were, with my suggestions on alternative approaches being greeted by "I've always done it like that".  Developments in learning technologies in particular should encourage everyone to try to keep reasonably up to date if only to understand the mindset of 'digital native' students (who have grown up with modern IT) in comparison to digital immigrant staff who started out in a different world.

Today at Learning and Teaching Committee we took some steps towards the professionalisation of teaching at Sheffield University, with the proposal that everyone who appears in front of a class of students should undertake some form of training, and with consideration of a CPD framework for established staff. But I know these things will prove controversial amongst those who think that 'learning on the job' is the best way forward.  It is ironic to note that while David Willetts would like to see more formal training for university teachers, his colleague Michael Gove seems to be putting more emphasis on learning on the job for school-teachers (as I noted in a recent blog) .  But consistency is an attribute of butter and not of governments.  

Saturday 5th May 2012 - The International Cultural Evening

As a rule I try not to think about the university on a Saturday.  But this week was different.  I drove in at 7 p.m. and drove home again shortly before midnight, after one of the best evenings of the year.  During the evening I spoke to people from Brunei, Bulgaria, China, Germany, Jordan, Pakistan, Somalia, South Africa and many other places.  I watched performers from Mexico, the Caribbean, East Africa, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Malaysia, Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Sriu Lanka and India, among others.  At one point during the evening an academic colleague enthused to me that this was the first time he had ever been to the event, and that it ought to be a 'must attend' for everyone.

In fact the International Students' Cultural Evening is one of the hidden gems of the university calendar.  This was perhaps my sixth attendance but in that time I have not seen more than a handful of colleagues from academic departments present, a slightly larger number from professional services (principally Student Services) and only a couple of other colleageus from UEB (the Vice-Chancellor goes when he can, but he is currently in China).  I strongly recommend the evening for those who have never been.

What it consist of is a series of performances by various national societies from around the university - performances mostly of dance but with some short plays, a little singing, and a great deal of exuberance.  There is a competitive element in that there are judges (I did not stay for the announcement, which usually doesn't happen until well after midnight).  Most of the societies are principally composed of students from the relevant countries, but there are a good number of others involved - indeed the Japanese Society, in perfoming a Japanese fishermen's dance, appeared to be almost entirely composed of Europeans.

I believe very strongly in the power of shared education to bring people from diverse backgrounds together, and one of the great privileges of working in a university is watching this happen - and in some ways facilitating it.  I can think of no other job where I could get to shake the hands of people from every continent in the course of an hour - as I do when presiding at some of our degree ceremonies.  Tonight I watched 16 teams of student performers from all round the world demonstrating something of their traditional culture - generally with adaptations to bring it up to date (hip hop music now seems to permeate everywhere to some extent).  The poise, the self-confidence, the attitude and the skill of many of the hundreds of performers must surely be valuable attributes for them for their futures.  But tonight was fun, enlivening, and uplifting. How some of the students bring their costumes from home beats me - the dresses of the Kazakh and Mexican dancers must each fill a suitcase for example.

As a social scientist I have touched on issues of identity in my research.  One reflection on the evening is to wonder what a group of English students, called on to contribute a similar cultural experience in a foreign university, would choose to do.  Morris dancing?  We in England (I'm using that term very deliberately) have a very confused idea of our identity. I remember attending a conference in Vienna in the 1980s shortly before the end of communism in Eastern Europe (and because Austria's neutrality was guaranteed by the four powers colleagues from behind the Iron Curtain were allowed to join the meeting). We were taken one evening for a meal and social in a Gasthaus in Heiligenstadt and our Austrian hosts called on those from each country present to sing a song.  It all went smoothly (and at high quality) until it came to the English.  There was no song that we all knew the words for more than one verse - we considered the Blaydon Races, On Ilkely Moor Bar't Hat, John Peel and a host of others and ended up singin the Beatles' 'Yesterday' (which is a bit of a dirge sung in unison and unaccompanied. 

There was no shortage of national identity on display at the International Cultural Evening, but within a very inclusive internationalist ambience.  And I think we should rejoice in one difference between this year's event and that of 40 years ago is that the world has become geopolitically so much smaller.  Forty years ago there would have been no Chinese, Kazakhs, Bulgarians, Romanians or many others present.  And one role of higher education must be to foster international friendships, such as those on display tonight, but enabling individuals to retain and celebrate their own local identities as well.

Monday 30th April 2012 - Eight years on the Executive

I have just reached a particular milestone.  I have just completed eight years as a PVC.  It was on 1 May 2004 that I first attended a meeting of the Senior Management Group (as it then was) and took over most of the functions of the PVC Learning and Teaching. I had been scheduled to take up the role on 1 August, but my predecessor (Phil Jones, now VC at Hallam) had just been appointed to the Deputy VC role at Durham and the then Vice-Chancellor (Bob Boucher) did not feel it was a good idea to retain him on the executive group, or in major decision-making roles.  I was therefore thrust into office three months early.  Phil took me out to lunch to talk through diary commitments, and the Vice-Chancellor took a few minutes to give me the flavour of how he ran SMG - and that was it.  I received no further training for the role, and it wasn't until a year later when I went on a week's course run by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education that I really got the feel of the potential for taking a leader role and how one might go about it.

This reflection is of relevance because later this week I will be going along to share my views on leadership and leadership challenges with a group of senior colleagues from across the university, from professional services as well as from academic departments, who are taking part in the Sheffield Leader 4 scheme - specifically designed to start the development of the skills to take up head of department or other leadership roles in the future.  From work with previous cohorts on this programme, I recognise that they will be better placed for the sort of new role I took on in May 2004 than I was at the time.

Over the last day or two I have mentioned my anniversary to a number of people.  Their reactions have varied: 'you must have been very naughty to get such a life sentence', 'is it really that long ago: it seems like only yesterday,' 'when are you stopping?'  Many of these comments have been tinged with a certain surprise that anyone should want to do the job so long. (It may also. of course, be that various people want to hint that I've been doing it too long and OUGHT to go!)  The job is seen as burdensome and trying.  Despite this blog I've been writing for over two years now I guess many people still don't fully comprehend all the activities involved in the role - but more especially all the exciting, moving, humbling and satisfying experiences it brings.  I have done things, met people, been to places over the last 8 years that I would never have dreamed of before I became a PVC. 

And there are occasions when I feel that some of the things I have tried to push forward have actually made a beneficial difference.  And in many ways that's what the payoff for taking on a leadership role should be, at least in my opinion.