Thursday 17th December 2015 - Updating reading lists

Every year, a couple of months before I start teaching my final year course, I go right through the reading lists that I will issue to the students.  This is quite a big job, as the tasks I give students to undertake - both for an assessed essay and for individual seminars - are quite loose and give them latitude to choose to concentrate on the countries and situations that interest them most as illustrative of general processes operating across Europe.  (The course is called 'The Social Geography of Europe'.)

I look at the dates of everything on the list and then, remembering that this year most students will have been born in 1994 or 1995, I scrutinise closely anything published before then: only the most important works (generally of a theoretical nature) survive that cull.   I know that when I was a student I was dubious about reading material written before I was born.

I also look at the bibliographies in the essays submitted by last year's students.  These often contain interesting materials that I have not discovered for myself.  They always need checking, however, both for utility and for the accuracy of student referencing!

And then there is the major task of looking for the latest materials.  At one time this involved going along the shelves in the stacks of the library, picking the last year's journals off the shelf and scrutinising them.  Now, of course, it is simply a question of getting into the set of electronic journals that the library subscribes to.  At this stage I add some articles to my reading lists even though I haven't read them - but I have read the abstract and made a decision on that basis.

So what reflections do I arrive at contrasting this article search process of today with that of, say 20 or 30 years ago when there were no internet possibilities?

1. There has been an explosion in article publishing.  Journals which had 3 issues a year in the 1980s have now moved to 12 or even more issues.  And some run a long way ahead of themselves: in the first half of December at least two journals I have been perusing on line already have two complete issues for 2016 'published'.

2. Has the quality of articles risen alongside the number?  It doesn't appear so to me.  Internet searching enables one to identify many cases where authors are publishing effectively the same piece of work in more than one journal.  And with the habit of pre-publication  (articles being made available on the internet before they are formally published) some journals seem to have a remarkable number of cases of 'article withdrawn' or of corrigenda.  This smacks of poor refereeing and editing, but also of the 'rush to publish.'

3. In the areas I am looking for the massive growth in publication has been not been in studies of aggregate data sets and surveys but in qualitative pieces based on a small number of in-depth interviews - and these are often of unusual cases or circumstances.  It is a broad generalisation to make, but parts of social science have witnessed a reduction in the interest in taking a broad view of everyday phenomena and instead now concentrate on interesting one-off situations with fewer potential outcomes of policy relevance.

4. Searching of journals not put out by the big commercial publishers has become well-nigh impossible.  There are many excellent journals produced under the auspices of national geographical bodies, for example - and often they contain very good articles in English.  But subscriptions to these have disappeared as UK libraries have had to pay the ever-rising costs of the 'big bundles' from Elsevier, Wiley and so on.  And it is very time consuming to seek the web sites of such journals one by one, and pointless from the point of a student reading list since in many cases articles are not available on line.  English has become the dominant language of publication, along with the preponderance of international (mainly UK or US based) publishers, and I regret the loss of diversity this involves.

5. The opening up of China is very clear in the journals I am considering.  20 or 30 years ago there was scarcely any coverage of China at all - now it seems that almost every issue of every journal contains at least one piece on China.  And that is much to be welcomed.

I know I could be more systematic in my searches, but I have always revelled in the serendipitous finds from my own methods - even now when they don't involve hours in the bowels of the library.  I may be looking for materials for my final year course, but I am often distracted to fascinating articles on other topics.  And although I would argue that there is now too much being published of poor quality or utility, there are still some marvellously provocative and thoughtful studies out there.  I am sure my students will agree, andI hope they will be impressed when in early February I post up reading lists with a lot of 2015, or even 2016, works referred to.  

Saturday 14th November 2015 - Chinese universities in evolution

I am writing this whilst on the first leg of my return from speaking at a learning and teaching conference.  I am currently somewhere over the Timor Sea between Australia and Singapore.  It is a good moment to reflect.

The conference I have been at was the ‘China / Australia Summit on Teaching and Learning’ (CAUSTL for short).  A few years ago the top flight universities in China (the C9) and in Australia (the Group of 8) agreed to meet every year to discuss collaboration and innovation issues in undergraduate education.  Two meetings have now been held – the first at the Harbin Institute of Technology, and the second at the University of Adelaide.  The next two are already lined up – at Xi’an Jiao Tong and at the University of Queensland.  I had been invited to the Adelaide meeting as one of two external plenary speakers.

A first point of reflection is what a good idea this collaboration between two groups of universities is.  I should have thought of creating something like it while I was the chair of the Russell Group’s PVCs for Learning and Teaching – but I didn’t. 

But a second interesting issue to me is how much the leadership in Chinese universities (or at least in the leading ones) is thinking of educational reform.  This adds to the picture I gained from visits to Tongji (in Shanghai) and Nanjing last year.  The story seems to go like this:

Until recently China needed universities that could produce the technical specialists to drive the modernisation and economic development of the country.  It also needed strong application-based research to underpin such development.  Top universities put a lot of effort into research, and continued educating students by strongly didactic methods in programmes that were massively  disciplinary in focus.

In both Tongji and Nanjing last year I heard that they wanted to shift the emphasis to education.  At Nanjing in particular there was a strong interest in the internationalisation of student experience.  As part of the background preparation for my contribution in Adelaide I read the strategic planning statements relating to learning and teaching for each of the C9 universities (and the Australian Group of 8 as well!) and found that theme now to be general for all 17 institutions.  But the Chinese universities are also now very keen on bringing in student-centred learning, small group teaching,  project-based (rather than didactic) curricula, and moving towards inter-disciplinary and more general education.  These trends were very much confirmed throughout the Adelaide meeting by all the Chinese present who gave papers. 

The argument, as articulated by a couple of speakers and agreed by others, is that China’s development is now at a point where it needs to produce more generalists to add to the specialists – and that as the country looks increasingly outward it needs graduates who can operate in international arenas.  One of the most fascinating interventions was from a Vice-President of a research-intensive university who told how performance evaluation in his university had been changed from 1:1 research and teaching to a ratio of 5:3 in favour of teaching.

Interestingly, a Chinese colleague indicated that one reason for driving Chinese universities more towards producing students with general transferable skills is because such attributes are inadequately developed in a generation that come from one-child families where they have never learnt teamwork or the art of compromise with peers.

There are clearly going to be problems in changing educational emphases in these ways – not least because university teachers often have a vested interest in the continuation of the system in which they rose to their current positions.  So change will take time.  But some of the Chinese universities represented at the Adelaide meeting are putting considerable resources into staff training and development to deliver the new ways.  Administrative structures also need reform.  As one Vice-President said, “in relation to these reforms, we have first class students, but only second class teachers, and third class administration.”

The changes in Chinese undergraduate education being actively talked about – and already being implemented in many cases – are exciting.  We in the west have got so used to stereotyping Chinese education as being about rote learning and an emphasis on the words of the professor.  We need to revise those views and think about how we can interact with Chinese universities – and with Chinese students – in ways that are already being explored in Australia.  And, as always, China is a place to watch for significant new developments.     

Thursday 1st October 2015 - Student initiation to university life

How should we view the moment of entry into a new status?  Such moments are marked by rituals and ceremonies in almost all societies - taking place at puberty, at marriage, at the completion of apprenticeships, at the end of military training, at being accepted into a club or society, or at the point of being accepted into the citizenship of a country not of one's birth.

In the university world we have a particular ceremony to mark graduation.  But, at least in the UK, we don't generally have a ceremony or ritual to mark the change of status that actually becoming a student involves.  Instead we may have a 'welcome talk' from someone important within the university, but otherwise it is bureaucratic necessity that dominates the earliest stages of arrival at university - at least from the point of the university authorities.

Actually, when I arrived at Oxford there was a ritual to be gone through. We all had to put on subfusc (a dark suit, white shirt, white bow tie, and gown for the men - black skirt, white blouse, black ribbon tied round the next, and gown for the women) and parade to a Latin ceremony called 'matriculation' which took place in one of Oxford's grandest buildings - the Sheldonian Theatre.  I have no memory of what was said or done, other than that my neighbour at this ceremony had smuggled into his mortar-board a tiny kitten which he then had to keep hushed throughout the proceedings.

I note from Oxford's web site that matriculation still takes place - symbolically admitting students to the new status of members of the university.   Although I also note that the details of who should and who should not matriculate seem designed as much as anything to exclude certain groups who would elsewhere be very much included as members of the university.  See:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/students/new/matriculation

(I will leave on one side recent accusations about other rituals of admission to aspects of Oxford life. I knew nothing of the existence of dining societies such as the Bullingdon throughout my 6 years at Oxford, let alone any alleged intimate relationship with pigs as part of initiation into other clubs.)

These thoughts about rituals and rites of passage have been set off because I have just returned from visiting some Portuguese universities.  Established students in Portugal have a uniform that is remarkably similar to Oxford's subfusc - with the addition of a black jacket for women, and of a cape worn over one shoulder.  This cape can also be adorned with badges showing various achievements whilst a student.

The start of the academic year is marked by a formal ceremony with processions of academics, speeches by the Rector, music (the Portuguese guitar, played by black-clad students features strongly), and food and drink receptions.  I have witnessed these in previous years.  Established students seeking to sign new ones up for activities are formally dressed.  This all makes the process of becoming a new student rather impressive and significant - not just a signature on a piece of paper.

But there is another side to these activities.  Down in the city centre I saw several groups of established students, in their black 'uniforms', instructing new students to perform various self-denigrating stunts - such as singing songs whilst wearing cardboard asses' ears, carrying signs with strange incantations on them, having tee-shirts smothered in various cooking sauces.  It all looked as if it was being done with good humour.  But there are reports in the Portuguese media about things getting out of hand.  The rituals are collectively called Praxe and there have been reports of deaths in recent years (students swept off a beach in the Algarve while undertaking a Praxe task), and of serious injuries.  Whist waiting at Lisbon Airport yesterday for my flight the television news magazine was clearly holding a debate about whether Praxe activities hold be curtailed, although the sound was turned off so I couldn't follow it (even if my limited Portuguese had ben up to it).  The previous day, at various bars around the city, crowds of students - older in their black uniforms and capes, and new in ordinary dress - were singing and laughing in the late afternoon. But I didn't stick around to see how things progressed later into the night - although I would not expect alcohol to play such a significant role in Portugal as it certainly would amongst UK students.

So I have mixed feelings about these rites of passage and signs of 'club' membership.  On the one hand I rather like the smartness and sense of belonging of the traditional Portuguese student 'uniform'.  I also like the idea of some way of marking the accession of new students into the wider community of student status and as members of the university.  But on the other hand initiation ceremonies - as so often in sports clubs but also in other spheres of life - can create opportunities for the abuse of the newcomers by those established within a group, and some of the tasks that (allegedly) have been asked of initiates may be beyond good taste and acceptability.   The official side of rites of passage may be fine - it's the additional informal aspects that create difficulties. 

Monday 7th September 2015 - Serendipity, choice and research agendas

What do academics, entrepreneurs, and artists have in common?  To me the answer is that they can choose what to do rather than being told what to do.  Certainly their choices must be 'sellable' to someone else, but they have much more freedom than almost any other profession to follow their own instincts and their own interests.  Entrepreneurs and artists have to sell a product, an idea or an experience.  Academics need to sell their ideas for research to funding bodies or organisations, and their written outputs to publishers and journals.  But the freedom to choose what to work on, within those constraints, is very considerable, and a real privilege: we are in my view one of the luckiest of professions, to have that choice.  And the choice is sometimes driven by serendipity rather than strategy.

Exactly a week ago I visited a village in Normandy where, many years ago, my own research career took a new turn.  How did this happen?

On the day I arrived to take up my lectureship in Sheffield a senior colleague gave me the news that I would be accompanying him to Normandy on a field class the following Easter.  He had been there over the summer and identified the ideal area, and a hotel that could put up a student group. (I discovered later that one of the prime factors in the choice had been the presence in a nearby village of an outstanding restaurant.)  I knew that taking a group of students to do field work in rural France was going to be a challenge for me.  For a start, my doctoral research had been carried out in Switzerland and Italy, on the impacts of tourism on rural communities, and I knew little about conditions in rural France - or about the data sets that might enable students to create projects there.  Secondly, with the exception of one spa town, there was no tourism in the area of Normandy we were going to, so it would not be possible to use the field class to test any of the ideas I had generated in my doctorate.  Thirdly, my French was much rustier than either my German or my Italian - both of which languages I had been using much more recently.

However, another doctoral student who inhabited the same workroom as me in Oxford had been writing his thesis on population change in the Massif Central of France, and I had picked up ideas on possible lines of enquiry for other areas of rural France.  The field class was a tolerable success, and over the next couple of years (and without the senior colleague accompanying me) I developed it into quite an intense investigation of rural depopulation in an impoverished agricultural region.

And at the same time my own research appetites were whetted.  I got into the literature on rural France; I explored rural depopulation more generally; I learned about French data sources; I worked on my French.  And my first post-doctoral research theme emerged - rural population change.  

Could I 'sell' that interest?  Well, it proved very sellable indeed at a period before second home developments, rural commuting to cities, or rural holidays had transformed the fortunes of poorer rural regions.  I secured funding from the forerunner of today's Economic and Social Research Council, and from the British Academy; a research team at the University of Caen learned what I was doing and invited me to join them, with their funding coming from French state research sources; local radio in the UK was interested in whether my findings in rural France would also hold true in areas such as the Peak District.  And I got those all-important publications - at least three book chapters (one in French), and (more importantly) three articles in good journals.  

I later moved on to other research interests - migration, the geography of languages, minority groups in cities - but in each case there has been an event or happening of some kind that has set off a change of direction in my enthusiasms.  I owe a great deal to that colleague who had organised for me to lead a field class in Normandy with him.  But returning there last week, I recognised that my interest in the area had not dissipated.  There are new issues there, new patterns of change.  Apart from going back to a beautiful area (and yes, the restaurants are still excellent - as is the cider, the calvados, the cream and so on), perhaps I will look up some of my old materials and data sets, and take up research to bring them up to date to analyse what has changed over the last 40 years or so, and take up visiting there again.

Friday 25th September 2015 - The human signpost on campus

I don't think it's just because I'm a geographer.  It's not because I want to show off.  I'm not doing it to try to strike up long-term relationships, or use it as a 'chat up' line.  But when I see a student looking earnestly at a map of the campus my first instinct is to go over to them and say 'Can I help you?'

With this year's new cohort of students arriving over the last couple of weeks, I've lost count of the number of times I have made that enquiry.  So, who have I met?

There was the Lithuanian student and his parents who also wanted a family photograph taken outside Firth Hall.  The postgraduate from Turkey who I walked along with since I was going to pass the building she had so far failed to find.  I have helped an American student, confused by the practice of floor numbering on this side of the Atlantic, which is different from that in the States (curiously, the lift in the multi-storey car park at Sheffield Station would be more at home in Pittsburgh in that respect).   I have directed quite a few Chinese students, as well as a Columbian.

It isn't always plain sailing.  One year I offered assistance to a French student and his parents who, when they found out that I had some seniority in the University, wanted a detailed explanation of the marks (les notes) we give in the UK which work on a different scale than in France, and the father needed that explanation in French.

The bit that IS about me as a geographer is that I usually ask where those I am trying to help are from.  I have a reasonable mental map of several parts of the world and can often produce some hidden titbit of information about wherever it is that adds to the impression of humanity that assistance gives.  Often people will name the city they are from and quite often I know the name of the university there - and often new postgraduates in Sheffield have actually studied in the institution I have named.

But there is one question in my mind about this whole aspect of campus life at the start of the new academic session.  Why is it that so many other people in the university - colleagues, established students - walk past the poor individual trying to orientate a map and don't offer to help?  It's a simple gesture but one that is always much appreciated and that helps newcomers to feel that the people around them really care.

Thursday 17th September 2015 - The university community coming together: the 'Big Walk'

Today I've been involved in one of those glorious activities that brings the whole of the university community together - the 'One Day Big Walk Challenge.'  Over 120 of us have just walked the 19 miles from Edale in the Peak District National Park back to the University to raise money for research into pulmonary arterial hypertension - a terrible disease that has a lower life expectancy than even the 'worst' of the cancers, pancreatic cancer.  100 or so of us joined 21 colleagues who had already walked the Pennine Way from north to south, adding the extra lap back to Sheffield.

So what was so good about it?

Well firstly the scenery was spectacular.  We made the steep climb up from Edale to Hollins Cross in glorious sunshine, with mist lingering on the top of Kinder Scout to our west (it was early - not long after 8 o'clock).  Then we had the Edale Valley on our left and Castleton on our right as we descended to Hope.  Later we climbed the old Roman causeway to reach Stanage Edge and then walked along that to Burbage and thence back to Sheffield along the Ringinglow Road and down the Round Walk, in lovely early autumn afternoon sunshine.

Then there was the camaraderie, and the chance to walk and talk with so many colleagues from all over the university.  Although the Vice-Chancellor was not able to join us, there were three current University Executive Board members on the walk, as well as two recent departees (one of them being me).  But it was the chance conversations with people from all faculties and from all professional services that made it so memorable. It's nice to meet new people as well as seeing old friends and colleagues in different situations.    There were porters, technicians, research funding managers, learning and teaching support people, human resources specialists, as well as many academics from every faculty.  I was surprised to find two Chinese postgraduate students with us - they had only arrived in Sheffield two months ago but saw this as an opportunity to explore the English countryside.  I walked at different points with pro-Vice-Chancellors and secretaries, IT technicians and senior lecturers, planning officers and events organisers.  For much of the journey I was in a middle group who took our breaks together.  It was only in the last few miles that we got more strung out.

And then there was the reaction from others not involved in the walk.  A walker from Manchester joined my group at one point and was impressed by what we were doing.  The Anglers' Rest in Bamford had a welcome sign out for all of us, and a free bottle of water for those who wished to claim it, our graduate and honorary graduate the distinguished mountaineer Andy Cave joined us for a few miles, a walking group near Burbage listened with interest to the story of what we were raising money for, and coming back into the city people were asking us how far we had walked and what our cause was. (We were by then all wearing matching tee-shirts proclaiming our cause.)

So, it was great day in all respects.  And despite my advancing age my feet and legs stood up better to the challenge than did those of some much younger colleagues: 'training walks' over the last few weeks (although none had been anything like as long as 19 miles) had clearly helped.

So has it been worth it in terms of the research funding objective?  Well the overall team's total stands at around £55k, against a total of £60k which we should reach.  Anyone wanting to contribute to my own total (currently just under £400) can do so at

https://www.justgiving.com/Paul-White40/

But that has been only part of it.  To me, one of the greatest aspects of the day has been the university acting as an integrated community.  The worlds of too many people are confined to their own department or service: today was a chance to open the door on the wider university.

Tuesday 18th August 2015 - Why God could not be appointed as a university lecturer

This week's edition of Times Higher Education contains a nice cartoon piece, from Laurie Taylor, on why Karl Marx would not be appointed to a post in an economics department at a university today.  Whilst clearing the accumulated paperwork of many years in my room I recently came across a similar piece entitled 'Why God would not be given tenure.'  It originates, I believe, in Canada and, like the piece on Karl Marx, provides a comment on the expectations made of academics today - to produce short articles rather than long books, to be able to cite immediate impacts, to produce replicable research findings and so on.  Perhaps the big picture analysis from a great thinker, distilled over many years of scholarship and reflection,  is no longer compatible with the modern university.  Here are some of the elements relating to God's failed application for a permanent position in a university (with no offence intended to anyone with strong religious beliefs):

• he has only produced 1 major publication to date.
• Published in Hebrew rather than a major world language (preferably English)
• Inadequate provision of source references
• Not published in a refereed journal subject to peer review - appears to be some sort of self-publishing
• Questions are often asked over authorship
• The scientific community cannot replicate the results
• Did not get permission from an ethics committee to use human subjects
• Killed off some of his human subjects when experiments failed
• Expelled his first two students
• Did not post regular office hours or locations for personal advice: sometimes met in deserts or on mountaintops
• Set only 10 learning outcomes, yet these proved almost impossible to achieve

Monday 27th July 2015 - Advice on how not to organise a conference

I am in the process of changing rooms, and that involves sorting through a mountain of 'stuff' that I have accumulated over the years. I've identified 4.5 metres of books that I no longer need, and already dozens of sacks of papers have gone for recycling - or to the confidential waste shredder.

But in the course of this long sorting process I keep coming across some gems from the past.  One document that got me chuckling again was a short piece published in the Finnish journal Terra (Vol 96, No 3, pp. 227-8) late in 1984.  It was headed 'Golden Hints to Make Your Congress a Great Success.'  When I first saw it all those years ago I immediately knew what meeting it was that had set off these sarcastic thoughts, despite the fact that the author, Matti Seppälä, did not identify the place - I had been there and experienced exactly the same things.  It was the four-yearly meeting of the International Geographical Union - a very big event.  I have checked with Matti and he doesn't mind me quoting from some of his 'instructions' in this blog. I've added one or two of my own comments on some items.

- "The registration of participants should take place only at one small table in a narrow corridor, and the identification cards for everybody should be in just one small box.  Do not use alphabetical order or divide people into groups as this might increase the speed of registration." [I will add that I registered on a very hot Sunday afternoon when the queue was not too great - at other times it must have been impossible]  "To register 2000 participants by this method should take no more than 1000 minutes, which is equal to 17 hours.  Do not make any estimates like this in advance of the congress."

- "Standing in a queue for a few hours only does good to people, mentally as well as physically.  They get to know each other.  It is also good for them to get some fresh air and sunshine in the queue before sitting in dark lecture halls later in the congress."

- "The list of participants should only be available to the organizers.  Who else could be interested in the other participants?  They can be met occasionally by chance in the corridors [or in the queues].  The important thing is, of course, that the organization committee knows the participants."

- "Do not, before the congress starts, tell the authors of abstracts whether they are allowed to present their papers or not.  Nor is it necessary to print a list of papers and give it to participants.  They should come and take a look at lists pinned on the doors of lecture halls just before the morning and afternoon sessions."

- "Do not make any advance selection of which papers should be presented orally.  It is possible to have 52 papers in four hours in one session.  It does not matter if there is just four minutes for each presentation and no time for discussion." [Confronted with the realization that he had come all this way to have 240 seconds in the limelight, my then Head of Department asked me to take him off on a visit to some urban renewal districts instead - that must have increased the time available to the other presenters in his session by around 5 seconds each.]

- "When you invite people to a welcome party do not mention in the programme or on the map the exact address of the celebration, otherwise almost all those invited will find the place and this might cause chaos."

And the element I remember as the most memorable (I have slightly reworded Matti's original here to fit my own recollections):
- When the banquet is to take place, keep people waiting outside for an hour beyond the scheduled start time but do not indicate which doors to the building they will need to use.  Serve the food on a long table in a narrow room, putting "the empty plates at both ends of the table.  This makes the atmosphere very intimate when nobody can move" either way at the middle of the table once they have collected their food, and those who are still waiting outside get a further lesson in patience which does them good.

[Actually, rather than a feeling of intimacy at the middle of the table I detected a sense of panic, and at least one person mentioned the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' as a historical precedent for our predicament.]

This centre-piece of the congress was part of a three stage travelling circus.  I had already take part in a very well-organized specialist meeting in Rouen, a short train journey away from the major capital city that was the seat of the actual congress.  And I went on afterwards to an oustanding field excursion in Munich and Vienna.  The organizers in those other venues clearly needed the advice Matti Seppälä later offered them.

Tuesday 21st July 2015 - The opportunities and fun of being on a university executive

It may seem that my last blog, on 30 June, was a little negative about life on a University Executive Board.   It was not intended to be, but to show that - as in many other walks of life - existence near the top of an organisation can be a little fragile from time to time.

But life as a PVC, and more latterly as Deputy Vice-Chancellor, has had huge elements of interest - not least in the people it has given me a chance to meet, and the places I have been privileged to go to.  I blogged on 31 March this year about the countries I have visited during my period on the university executive.  Within the UK I have also been in places I probably would never otherwise have seen.  I am not boasting here - most of these places I will never go to again, and I never really became part of them - but they provided interesting experiences, often of buildings or locations that are not open to the general public.

In London I have actually got to know the premises of the Royal Society and the British Academy a little - sitting on opposite sides of Waterloo Place in the St James area.  Within the same district, I have been inside a number of the London clubs - the Institute of Directors, the Athenaeum, the Reform, the RAC - places that, as a teenager growing up in West London, I never imagined I would ever see inside.  I have several times been to meetings, meals and other functions in the Houses of Parliament - on one notable occasion actually bumping into one of my daughters (a civil servant) in the Central Lobby.  A particularly memorable hour was spent sitting on the terrace of the House of Lords in a group of four, talking with a peer about European policy matters.  I have also been to dinners in Middle Temple Hall, and been inside several of the headquarters of the great professional associations (such as the Royal College of Surgeons, or the Institute of Civil Engineers).

Outside London many of the most interesting places I have visited have been universities.  Of course, as I have pointed out in earlier blogs, I had already been to many of these before, but as a member of the 'senior team' I have been to private function rooms and Vice-Chancellors' suites that would otherwise have been off limits.  Which is the most memorable of those locations?  Probably the Vice-Chancellor's room at the University of Greenwich, in the former Royal Naval College.

But it has not just been about places - life as a PVC and then DVC gave me the chance to meet many interesting people.  As a group, some of the most impressive have been ambassadors - both those of the UK and those posted to the UK by foreign governments.  High Court judges have also been memorable companions over dinner.  My own interest in classical music has meant that I have felt very privileged to meet and spend time with Sir Mark Elder (principal conductor of the Halle Orchestra), Elizabeth Watts (opera singer), Trevor Pinnock (early music specialist) and, in Thessaloniki, Goran Bregovic.  (If any readers of this have never heard of him or his Weddings and Funerals Orchestra I advise a visit to YouTube.)  Most notable of all was sharing a lift with Alfred Brendel, the pianist, and getting him to autograph one of his cd's that was already in my possession.

Others I have been lucky enough to meet include Eddy Izzard, the comedian; Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer; Lord Robert Winston, the scientist; General Sir Mike Jackson, who led the UK forces in the first Iraq War; Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach (but then I had also taught him when he was a student in Sheffield); Sean Bean, the actor; and Brian Lara, the cricketer.  I have met a number of Nobel prizewinners - the most special of whom to me was the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott with whom I talked over lunch about Heptonstall and the late Ted Hughes (and Walcott, like Brendel, was kind enough to autograph one of his own works at my request).   There have also been Hilary Mantel, and Philip Hensher amongst other writers.

Senior politicians I have got to know to some extent have included David Blunkett, David Willetts and Nick Clegg. But I have also met the current Leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling, and I awarded an honorary degree to Richard Caborn who was Minister for Sport at the time when London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. There have also been members of the Royal Family.

So life as a PVC and DVC created superb opportunities for interesting experiences.  But I also wonder whether some of the most influential people I have met have not yet showed their potential.  Perhaps some of those 88 or so student union officers I worked with over the years, or some of the other students whose hands I shook while conferring their degrees on them, will hit the top.  And then I'll pretend that I saw their potential all along!  

Tuesday 30th June, 2015 - Survival in the fragile world of university executive boards

A close friend of mine was an industrial manager.  He moved regions twice at the behest of the company board (of which he was a member) to take on new roles.  One day he went into work to be met by the Director of Human Resoucres, who had travelled across the country specifically in order to tell him that he was sacked as an executive manager and had until lunchtime to clear his desk and leave the premises.

This blog is about survival. It is now exactly two months since I stepped down as Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and I've been musing on the fact that I survived on an executive board for exactly eleven years.  Universities are no different from industrial companies, and I have learned over the years that executives come and they go - the latter sometimes extremely quickly.  In the examples that follow I am making NO use whatsoever of cases from my own university - Sheffield.  Instead I have had the possibility, through membership of various national groups, to observe changes in other institutions, and it is those that I exclusively refer to here.

Sudden change can occur right at the top.  Between successive meetings of a national committee I was on a high-profile vice-chancellor simply disappeared from his university - and with it from the national committee and its sub-committees where I had come to regard him as a very sound colleague.  A Christmas card from a board-level friend at another university implored me not to ask what was happening to her vice-chancellor whose name was at the time all over the 'trade press'.  At another institution the board of governors rejected the appointee selected to take over the vice-chancellor's role, thereby consigning their existing institution head to stay on longer than he had intended. (I suppose that's a case of unwanted survival.)

But PVCs come and go.  One I knew retired gracefully from his post at the end of his allotted period of office, only to be thrust back into the same role two years later by the vice-chancellor who had summarily demoted his successor.  I have also seen colleagues in other institutions shuffled between portfolios like a pack of cards - with apparently random outcomes putting senior colleagues into roles for which they did not seem fitted.

It is surprising that some of those who have left posts suddenly reappear elsewhere remarkably quickly.  I know of one executive board member who parted comany with two vice-chancellors in successive institutions before taking on his current role - again as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor.  And Vice-Chancellors can leave one institution and pop up later at another too.

I was first alerted to such elements of instability in senior roles very soon after I became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2004.  At the first national meeting I went to one colleague, who I had known for some years, was looking very glum.  Over a few drinks some of us persuaded him to tell us why.  That morning he had been to see his Vice-Chancellor, and had been asked to take an HR adviser with him.  The HR adviser expressed surprise when my friend told her that he'd not seen the VC on a one-to-one basis for six months - indeed the HR adviser mis-heard and thought it had been six weeks: six months of no contact was even more surprising.  And the reason the VC had called my friend along that day (together with the HR adviser)?  To sack him as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

So I am retrospectively taking some pleasure in the thought that I survived.

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 - Changes in technologies to support teaching

I am preparing to move rooms, having been in my current one since my appointment as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2004.  A lot of  'stuff' has accumulated since then - to add to the small mountain of files that moved with me in that particular year.  And in sorting the mountain out I keep  coming across  interesting documents from the past.

One I have just found is a student handout labelled "The Use of the Internet", and indicates that it is intended "for those who have not used the internet before".  It is dated January 1996.  That's less than 20 years ago, and within the lifetimes of students who will graduate this year.  And I remember that back in 1996 virtually no student (at least in Geography) actually HAD used the internet before they reached their third year (for whom this handout was intended).  I wrote that handout less than two years after the first world wide web conference was held at CERN, and whilst various standard web protocols were still being worked out and implemented.  I don't know whether was at the start or the end of the adoption curve for my department, although I suspect near the start.  My handout ran to two-and-a-half pages and included information on such things as URLs, hot links, searching (I recommended Lycos), and the two-letter country codes for most of Europe (I was teaching a course on that continent).  I noted that the internet could be quite slow: "Delivery is generally quicker earlier in the day, before Americas wake up and start using their computers." [Was that actually true? I don't know.]  But I know now that I was wrong in explaining that "Because the internet was invented in the USA, servers in that country have no national identifier in their address, just as British stamps do not have a country name on them."

Today we take the internet for granted: I wonder how many of today's students could cope with the style of literature and information searching that was necessary up to, say, the mid 1990s.  We can't turn the clock back, though.  Journals now are delivered on line with no hard copy available, and we have all adapted to these developments.

In throwing old materials out I have also noted changes in the way I have illustrated my lectures.  I did make some use of overhead transparencies for diagrams, tables and so on, from the very start of my craeer, but until the 1990s most of my illustrations were in the form of slides.  These, of course, necessitated planning head since the technical staff took time to convert paper versions of materials into 2 x 2 inch transparencies.  All the illustrations for my inaugural lecture, in April 1998, were transparencies.

For a time I mixed slides with overheads. The latter had become very easy and quick to produce - as long as one always used the right, thicker, acetates in the photocopier (something that one of my senior colleagues never learnt, polluting the departmental atmosphere with acetate burned onto the photocopier, and necessitating a technician call out from the leasing company).  But by then I had a vast collection of slides, including hundreds taken of European cities (which was the theme of many of the lectures I was giving at the time). Mixing slides with overheads meant one could write on blank copies of the latter during lectures, taking feedback from group discussions in the lecture theatre, for example.

From my work on the sedimentary layers of papers in my room I can date my changeover to Powerpoint pretty precisely - the session 2003/4.  From then on all the acetates disappeared from my active lecture notes, and indeed my style of lecture notes changed.  From originally two sides of typescript per one hour lecture I pregressively moved to no notes at all other than the Powerpoint slides.

But just as we could not now easily go back to information retrieval without the internet, it would also be impossible to go back to earlier technologies of lecturing - we just don't furnish our lecture theatres now with slide or with overhead projectors.

And that leaves me with one problem - what should I do with all those photographic slides I have of Paris (over 1000), Berlin (around 500), Lisbon (maybe 250), Düsseldorf (100) and other cities?  At some point they will become interesting as historic documents, but for the time being the little boxes in which they sit, labelled, are just gathering dust.

How technology has changed the way we work!

Friday 12th June 2015 - The end of the student year

It's just after half past four in the afternoon as I write this, and all around the campus small groups of students are heading for the Students' Union.  Most appear to be first years, although given the direction some are coming from (in other words, not from the student residences) I suspect there are some other years there as well.  But most final year students seem already to have gone. (However I did speak to one in Coffee Revolution this morning who was working his last part-time shift before leaving Sheffield for good.)

It's the end of 'term' (as many, many people still call it).  Stalls have been set up inside and outside the Union.  The bars and cafés are probably full (although I didn't investigate).  Various bits of apparatus have been set up outside on the concourse - trampolines, weight testers, a bouncy castle etc.

I actually find this a slightly sad and reflective day.  Another academic year, at least for undergraduate students, is over.  On Monday the University will feel much quieter and, apart from the flush of activity of graduation week in late July, along with some open days for prospective candidates (for 2016 admission!), that is how it will now stay until mid September.  Working in education is to work to a particular annual rhythm in which the years pass by ineluctably.

Academics will now carry on with the marking; hold exam boards; catch up with research; continue to supervise the theses of Masters students; carry on guiding research students; deal with the mid-August admissions flurry; prepare teaching for next session.  But our next door neighbours at home will say to us "Have all the students gone now?, "I suppose you've finished until September?" and "How I envy you your long holidays".

Academics (and non-acacdemic members of universities who are equally busy) have many things to fill their time over the next few months.  But what I don't know is how many of the undergraduate students out there partying on the concourse have worthwhile things to do over the summer.  How many have got internships?  How many are taking part in summer schools?  How many will be travelling in waysand to places that give them fresh experiences they can draw on in the future?  How many will be undertaking volunteer work and extending their skills in that way?  I know that some (for example from my own department) will spend part of the summer collecting data or evidence for their dissertations.  But in what ways will the cvs of others develop further as a result of what they will do between now and September?  Because we know that it is the things that students do outside their academic work that are these days as important as what they do in their degree for securing future employment.  It might seem a bit intrusive, but when I was a personal tutor I generally asked the question at the start of the new session "What did you do over the summer?"  It would be interesting to have a systematised set of anwers for students from across the university.  We might then be led into new strategies for 'whole person' student development.

Friday 29th May 2015 - Grade point averages

Did yesterday mark a stepping stone in UK higher education or not?  We will have to wait some time to find out. But I note that the press coverage today is generally very positive.  So what happened yesterday?  We need to go back a little to look at how we got there first.

On a gloomy day in the autumn of 2010 a small group of us assembled for a sandwich lunch in the room of the Vice-Provost of University College London to talk about how we could create greater discrimination in the degree awards we make to our students.  We all observed that the proportions getting both first class honours and upper seconds were rising and - for example - the range of performances covered by an upper second was now very broad.  Among the ideas that we thrashed around were dividing the upper seconds and doing the same with the firsts (an 'upper upper second', a 'lower upper second' and so on) but we quickly discarded these possibilities.

After looking at various alternatives we alighted upon the use of grade point averages as the way forward.  This was something that had been considered before by a national group chaired by Bob Burgess, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, but it had been felt to be too difficult to introduce nationally at the time.  We, however, were prepared to contemplate going it alone with our own universities if necessary.

We met several times in the course of the next year, and when the Vice-Provost of UCL retired I took over as chair of the group.  We had by then gone public with our thinking, and had recopgnised the need for background research and for some form of modelling.  Ultimately we decided that we needed to broaden the number of universities involved in our discussions.  The then universities minister, David Willetts, was interested in what we were doing, and supported the idea that the Higher Education Academy should take on running a project on the introduction of grade point averages.  I handed over leadership of our small group to Bob Burgess to lead a national steering group.

And so we come to yesterday's launch of the national report at the headquarters of UUK - a couple of hundred metres from where representatives of seven universities had met four and a half years earlier.  In many ways it's a simple report with a remarkably small number of recommendations:
1. A common scale for grade points across all UK universities.
2. The retention of university autonomy to decide local rules on things such as the inclusion or not of first year performance, weighting issues around later years of study, and so on.
3. Dual running of the current honours degree classification system with grade point systems for a number of years.

As with many wide-ranging projects, these recommendations represent a compromise but as a member of the group I have signed up to them.  For myself, I would have preferred not to have dual running, but instead to move to recording all achievments on a grade point (rather than percentage) basis and to discard the degree classification.  But I recognise pragmatic rasons for the recommendation.

I was on a panel at yesterday's event, chaired by David Willetts who has retained an interest in this topic even though he is no longer a minister, or even in parliament.  The National Union of Students representative spoke strongly in favour of a move to the use of grade point averages, and so did the employers' representative.  Someone from a university that has jumped the gun and already introduced dual running also spoke of their experience.  And I ruminated on the extent to which the final national report matches the aspirations expressed over sandwiches and coffee in a UCL room back in the autumn of 2010.

But the time does seem ripe for change.  There is a greater consensus now than there has been in the past that grade point averages have a lot more to offer than the current degree classification system.  What we must now await is the political will to change what has become an entrenched (although arguably outmoded) way of dealing with assessment across the sector as a whole.  On a day when the University of Oxford has announced the appointment of its first female Vice-Chancellor in over 800 years perhaps change is in the air. 

Thursday 30th April 2015 - The end of eleven years on the university's executive board

It was on 1st May 2004 that I became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor and joined the executive board (then called the Senior Management Group) of the University of Sheffield.  Today therefore represents the completion of exactly 11 years in a senior role: that amounts to 9 years and 7 months as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching, 4 months as Acting Vice-Chancellor, and 1 year and 1 month as Deputy Vice-Chancellor.  And, perhaps fittingly, today marks the day when my current contract runs out. I will now 'step back' to being an ordinary professor in my department.  In other words, despite what some may think, I am not retiring but will continue in a different role for a some time to come.

It has been a fascinating period of 11 years for me, and I have been reflecting on the things that I have been involved in doing within the Unviersity of Sheffield as part of my role (I will leave on one side things I have been involved with via national bodies such as the Higher Education Academy, HEFCE - the funding body - or the Russell Group.  And I will also leave on one side things I have done in my departmental roles in teaching, research and research supervision over the recent period).

So here are some of the things that I have played some role in - sometimes as instigator, sometimes as supporter.  All have involved team work in some way with people across the whole university.  The order below is random - they are just as they have come to mind.

• Introducing the concept of the 'Sheffield Graduate' around which we have built much of our strategic approach to learning and teaching.
• Supporting the winning of money from HEFCE to set up the White Rose Centre for Excellence in the Teaching and Learning of Enterprise (surely one of the longest titles), which then evolved into our very successful and prize-winning 'University of Sheffield Enterprise' facility.
• Supporting the bid to set up the Centre for Inquiry-Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS), which led to the embedding of an inquiry approach across large areas of the university where it had not previously existed.
• Creating the first widening participation strategy for the university and seeing that renewed and developed through time, including the annual negotiations over the agreement with the Office for Fair Access (OFFA)
• Stimulating the university into setting up procedures to welcome as students young people from a care background (a personal interest, since one of my daughters had written the government's Green Paper on care leavers).
• With colleagues, developing a set of criteria for academic promotions for those whose principal responsibility is for teaching - and seeing a number of individuals promoted to professorships as a result.
• Creating the Senate Award scheme for excellent teaching as it now exists, including the celebration of award winners at degree ceremonies.
• The creation of Sheffield's pathway college (Sheffield International College) as the first in a Russell Group university - and then seeing it develop, through a change of provider, into the University of Sheffield International College
• Creating a structure to allow joint degere awards with other universities, and participation in Erasmus Mundus netwroks. (We are still ahead of many other universities over joint awards.)
• Taking Sheffield from a mid-table place in the Russell Group in the first NSS (2005) to hold 4th place more recently, with overall satisfaction scores well aboe the national average.
• Helping Sheffield win the THE 'University of the Year' award in 2011, and reach top place in the Student Experience Survey in 2014.
• Creating a new Student Support Strategy for the university in the wake of the creation of new student residences structures and the demolition of the old halls of residence.
• The creation of the Sheffield Graduate Award to recognise extra-curricular activities.
• Acting as Chair of the Project Executive Group that delivered the Information Commons.
• Developing a new relationship with City College, Thessaloniki, and supporting their expansion into other cities in the Balkan Region - and witnessing what that has done to encourage peaceful coexistence in a troubled part of the world.
• The creation of degrees with employment experience.
• Chairing the steering group for the implementation of the SAP finance and HR system at Sheffield - not an easy process, but one which went better here than in many other universities.
• Creating the new Faculty of Social Sciences of 13 departments out of three former faculties, and seeing it grow in strength and importance. (A fourth Faculty - Education - had already been absorbed before I got to work!).
• Seeing the university through two successful Quality Asaurance Agency reviews of its student provision, and a number of specific reviews and accreditation exercises in key departments.
• The creation of an integrated Student Skills Centre - '301'.
• Participating in the mentoring programme for senior women, and witnessing the success of my mentees in advancing their careers - and the increase in female representation in many parts of the university.
• Bringing in a unified degree classification system for the whole university (not, I know, popular in some quartes, but we had been criticised for our diversity of such systems in a QAA treview before I took office).
• Overseeing the adaptation of the university to the Freedom of Information legislation, by chairing the key committee that created our system.
• Abolishing a number of former committees that existed when I took office - the loss of most of these has never been noticed.
• Seeing the university through periods of staff and student unrest - 'Action Short of a Strike', occupations and so on - without significant loss of trust and respect.  In 2006, for example, we only lost 2 exams through staff action when many other universities lost many more.
• Helping to manage the difficult admissions situations of recent years, and in particular helping to keep peoples' nerves on track during the crucial mid-August period.
• Working in clsoe partnership with the officers of the Students' Union.  I have worked with around 90 such offciers and got on well with all bar around 3.
• Adjusting to the way in which, with the creation of the strong faculties in 2008, many of the former direct powers of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching passed to Faculty Directors.
• Launching MOOCs and the university's presence in iTunesU.
• Supporting the creation of new structures for the delivery of lifelong learning.

That will do - there are certainly other things I could have mentioned.  What about the things that HAVEN'T been achieved?  .... Perhaps now is not the time for those.

What am I most satisfied with?  I was talking about this last night with David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary and local Sheffield MP who is also currently facing a transition in his career.  The things that I've been involved with where at the end of the day I've thought 'that was the right thing to do' have actually been largely unknown to most people.  They have been the small 'ceremonies' I have introduced to acknowledge the academic achievements of students who have died, of those who are terminally ill and won't complete their studies, or of those who similarly won't complete because of something such as a brain injury. 

I started this blog 5 or so years ago.  This won't be the end.  I intend to keep blogging about the bigger and smaller issues of university life (unless people ask me to stop!).  I have been asked to continue playing certain university-wide roles in coming months, and I am still on various national committees.  I am sure that interesting things will continue to happen to me.

And at some point soon I intend to start another blog relating to my substantive teaching and research interest in cities and other places.

If you've read to this point, well done. This has been a long posting!

Thursday 23rd April 2015 - Part-time degrees

In the first class on my first day as a lecturer at Sheffield I found that one of the students was a 55-year old retiree from a senior post in an oil company.  It so happened that the two research students who were assigned to support me in taking a practical class in statistics for first year students were also considerably older than me - one from an Egyptian university here to up-skill, and the other an ex-teacher pursuing a personal interest in her research topic.  That instantly destroyed any stereotypical views I had about the likely demographics of students (of all levels of programme).

But it's now several years since I had a genuine mature student in any of my classes.  Where once mature students amongst the 18-21 year-old undergraduates were not uncommon, they seem to have become rarer.

This afternoon, with over 100 others, I was at a launch event for the university's new offerings to seek to attract mature students and part-timers to study here once again.  Nationally the numbers studying part-time have plummeted in recent years - presumably as a result of the 2012 fees regime.  The general lack of part-timers in 'mainstream' programmes in the UK contrasts strongly with my experience in other European countries where a significant proportion of students work alongside their study and present themselves for examination whenever they feel ready - thus extending their programmes over a number of years as, effectively, part-timers.  The benefits seem obvious to me - both to the students themselves and to the wider classes of which they are part where they can bring their external experiences to bear in discussions and other study tasks.

When the University of Sheffield started (and I guess this is true for most UK universities like us) the majority of students were studying part-time.  It was the later 1940s when the balance shifted to full-timers.  Government policies since the 1990s have almost consistently acted to discourage part-time study in a variety of ways.  Some universities have closed down such study routes.

Today four students spoken eloquently, through videos, about what the opportunity to enter higher education as mature student learners meant to them.  But equally moving were the interventions by two of my executive board colleagues who demonstrated the significance of mature student learning in their own backgrounds.  One pointed out that "My mother became a university student - but by that time I was already a professor".  The other recounted how she had obtained her own first and second degrees while working full time, and whilst also bringing up a young family.

The image of students is too dominated by the stereotype of the 18-21 year old school leavers.  Others have as much, if not more, to gain from key decisions to come into higher education at other ages and through different modes of study.  Against the national odds, I hope we succeed in keeping such opportunities open. 

Thursday 16th April 2015 - The gender gap in university salaries

I've been trying to catch up on back numbers of Times Higher Education that have been around for a week or two, and as a result I have come up with a little riddle.

What do the following universities have in common with each other (and with no other)?
Bucks New
Cumbria
Gloucestershire
Kingston
Leeds Trinity
St Mark and St John (Plymouth)

One obvious comment (for those in the know) might be that among these 6 universities half have female vice-Chancellors and half male.  Bucks New, Leeds Trinity, and MarJohn (as it's very often known) all have female Vice-Chancellors - and in the case of Bucks New the new VC (Rebecca Bunting) recently replaced a female who was previously in the role - Ruth Farwell - a rare succession.

Across UK universities only 14% of VCs are female, whereas in this group of six 50% are women.

But that's not what is distinctive about the group, because it doesn't set them apart from any other group that could be constructed.

No, instead these are the only universities in the UK where, in the tables of salary information produced in Times Higher, female academics average a higher salary than male acacdemics.  We can only speculate whether there is some influence from having a female VC, but I suspect that's not the case.  In a senior research intensive university headed by a female VC (that actually narrows it down to one so I might as well admit I am talking about Manchester) the average female academic salary lags that of the average male by £7k per annum. Certainly in every university other than the 6 listed above the average salary of acacdemic men is higher than for women in similar positions.

These gender differences in salary are interesting and cause for concern.  But as a social scientist I am always looking for comparisons to be made on a like for like basis, standardising on key variables.  And that leads me to think about the distribution of men and women around various departments and faculties.  That leads into a number of observations that might temper a simple view of gender discrimination in salary:

1. There are very few female heads of departmnt in Engineering faculties, yet in Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities or in some subjects in Medical faculties female heads are commonplace.  In Sheffield there have as yet been no female heads in Engineering, yet all but one of the current heads in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities are women - as is their leader, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty.
2. This is in the form of a hypothesis.  I could unearth the data to test it but it would take some time.  I hypothesise that the average salary in subjects such as Mechanical Engineering or Physics is higher than in, say, Social Work or Education.  The first two of those subjects are weighted towards men in their staff complement, the latter two towards women.
3. It may therefore be that gendered differences in salaries are as much caused by the uneven distribution of women and men between high-paying and low-paying departments. Of course, university promotions committees are there to ensure fair play for all, but perhaps there are greater claims for paying 'higher than average' for those in some departments - on an argument about market competition.
4. This could easily become self-fulfilling, with disciplines with low percentages of women, and no female heads, 'expecting' higher salaries and acting through committee discussions to secure the permission to pay them.

So the simple statement that all bar six universities in the UK pay men on average more than women may need nuancing.  As important may be a pattern of paying those in certain disciplines less than those in others.  And that may also have a gendered dimension to it.

What I would like to see would be a table of average salaries for men and for women in faculties of science, engineering, arts, social sciences etc across the country, along with counts of males and females in each.  That could be interesting.

Tuesday 31st March 2015 - Overseas visits

I am currently in Brussels on what will be my last overseas visit as a member of the University's Executive Board.  This morning, with two colleagues, I arrived by train from Amsterdam where we had spent yesterday in visits to the University of Amsterdam, with an alumni reception in the evening.  Earlier this evening our final engagement was an alumni reception for graduates of the three White Rose universities - Leeds, Sheffield and York.  And the evening has been rounded off by a meal of moles et frites with our colleagues from York - for me an excellent final episode to overseas travel in my current role.

Over the last 11 years I count up that I have visited 13 countries on university business - some of them several times.  I have been to two countries in the Caribbean (St Lucia and Trinidad), eight in Europe (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria), one in Africa (South Africa), and two in Asia (Hong Kong, and China).  There have been graduation ceremonies and alumni reunions, meetings with government officials and the launch of new degree programmes, visits to partner universities, and tours of research centres.  There have been conferences with other university leaders, with associated visits to cultural sites for more informal networking (particularly memorable were the tours of the canals of Nanjing by night with a Chinese zither-player providing a rendition of Auld Lang Syne, and a wine tasting visit to the vineyards near Stellenbosch in South Africa).  Some of the great benefits of various of these visits have been meeting colleagues from other universities, sharing issues and finding out how they are viewing the challenges of global research themes, or educational development.

What are my conclusions from representing the university overseas?  Here are ten points:

1. There is a great fund of goodwill towards Sheffield University - although many people, whilst holding a good opinion of us, don't really know why.  Our reputation is rather generalised, and probably sits alongside the reputations of a number of other UK institutions.  Pushed for detail, many people (who are not themselves alumni) find it difficult to identify anything specific about us.

2. As Sheffield University, we have a problem with the image of our city.  Put simply, it is unknown to many people abroad.  We do not have a major football team; we do not have historic sites on a par with, say, York; we do not have an international airport; we are not a port; we are not strongly associated with a major pop group (Liverpool is still known abroad through the Beatles: the Arctic Monkeys are not associated with Sheffield in a similar way).  Where there IS recognition of Sheffield it is as an old steel town - and The Full Monty did us no favours, although fortunately memories of the film are starting to fade.  A very common question is 'where is Sheffield?' and the answer 'two hours north of London' brings the response 'Oh, halfway to Scotland, then.'

3. We need to work hard on education about who we are and where, and what our associations are.  I sat next to the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott at a lunch in St Lucia and he evinced little interest in us until I mentioned Yorkshire and the fact that Sheffield was in the same county as Heptonstall - I had done my research and knew that Walcott admired, and had  been a friend of, the late Ted Hughes.  That turned things round and he warmed to us.

4. Our alumni are desperately keen, in many cases, to continue to be connected with us.  But they are often diffident in offering their services to us.  They still see the relationship as us giving them something, but twenty years after graduation they are often now in a strong position to offer us something - advice, access to their business networks, support for research ideas, or lobbying with multinational interest groups.  We need to do more to show them how they can work with us.

5. And some of the alumni who are most proud of their Sheffield connections are actually those who engaged least with us - students who visited Sheffield on Erasmus mobility grants, or who came only for a one year Masters degree, or who studied at City College in Thessaloniki.  I guess that most of these alumni had also studied at another institution and are making a comparison with the educational style and the wider student experience elsewhere.  Those who only studied in Sheffield have taken for granted the nature of UK higher education and perhaps appreciate it less.

6. Although we might try to run graduation ceremonies abroad in exactly the same way as in Sheffield, local customs inevitably prevail.  I have attended ceremonies in a (rather nice) tin hut in St Lucia, in ballrooms in China, in a concert hall in Thessaloniki and elsewhere - and each has taken on surprising local characteristics.  And why not?  We don't normally have a calypso band at degree ceremonies in Sheffield; and I have never been as photographed in my life as after a ceremony in Beijing.

7. Visits to universities can be wrapped up in various aspects of protocol, but they generally result in vast agendas of possible linkages which ultimately shrink over the following weeks to two or three key action points.  Put a mixed group of senior university leaders together and they try to reconstruct the world - pragmatism sets in as others work to consolidate the ideas after the meeting has finished.

8. UK officials abroad are wonderfully welcoming.  I am not certain whether this relates to Sheffield per se or is more general.  But, among others, the British ambassador in Bucharest, successive Directors of the British Council in Hong Kong, senior UK officials at the European Commission and many others have all appeared genuinely delighted that we have taken the time to come to visit them. Not all universities do.

9. One has to be prepared to eat anything.  It can't be easy for vegetarians; and vegans probably need to look for alternative employment.

10. Finally, dealing with foreign media can be particularly challenging.  But nothing can quite prepare anyone for a 20 minute live interview on Turkish television on one's views of Turkish universities (with no foreknowledge that that was to be the topic); a succession of Bulgarian newspaper interviews following earlier stories that Bulgarian students could study in the UK and avoid repaying the fee loan; or - most adrenaline-using of all - being interviewed live on Romanian television with the simultaneous interpretation from Romanian to English through an ear piece not functioning.  

Friday 27th March 2014 - International students

Twice this week I have been involved in significant discussions over the UK's attitudes to international students.  One of these was with the Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Vice-Chancellors of other Yorkshire universities when we lunched with a significant VIP, and the other was with colleagues from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).  Indeed, the subject is one that comes up in some form or other almost every day.

The education of international students at UK universities represents a massive British export - by some reckonings either the second or third most important such source of international earnings.  International students provide a massive boost to the UK economy, and to the economy of the cities and regions where they study.  We in Sheffield (both universities along with Sheffield College) showed the significance of that contribution in a major piece of research we commissioned from economic consultants two years ago.  The presence of international students on campuses in the UK provides vital opportunities for inter-cultural mixing and the development of skills among UK students to enable them to work in multinational settings - vital since too many UK students lack the fluency in other tongues and thus need to develop their cultural competences in other ways.  International students who have enjoyed a great education and widened their own abilities and experience through studying in the UK constitute a major addition to the UK's 'soft power' of individuals well-disposed to the UK for the future.

All this is well-attested.  The Treasury knows it; the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills knows it; local authorities (such as the mayors and chief executives of Britain's cities) know it; local politicians know it.  Pretty well everyone with powers of analysis knows it.  In a period when the economic growth agenda is of profound importance nationally and locally, the recruitment of international students represents a vital component for development and for the creation of employment.  To universities themselves, fees  from international students are an important component of a mixed portfolio of income streams.

Yet the Home Office progressively - almost every week - brings in further hurdles to the UK's attraction for international students.  Alone amongst intelligent organisations and interest groups it operates to make the UK appear unwelcoming, to create bureaucratic systems to complicate the processes of visa application, to cancel existing arrangements for English language testing in a huge swathe of cities across the globe, to implement arrival registration procedures that almost seem designed to buckle under pressure, and to require students to leave the country before the ink on their degree certificates is dry (or even before they have had their degrees conferred in some cases).  The Home Office single-handedly seems determined to thwart the reaping of all those advantages that the recruitment of international students can bring to the UK.  

Why?  All I can presume is that the Home Office sees a populist anti-immigrant agenda as more important than all the agendas of national and local economic growth, of employment creation, of intercultural mixing, and of the development of the UK's soft power that I spelled out earlier.  Perhaps there is a sign in the entrance to the Home Office that reads "Adopt a Little Englander mentality all those who enter here", a paraphrase of Dante's "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate" ('Abandon hope all ye who enter here' - over the gate of Inferno).