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.