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"?