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.
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