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.