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.