This will be the last blog in the series that I started in
January 2010 when I was a Pro-Vice-Chancellor.
Over the last six-and-a-half years I have made 259 entries. I started blogging as part of the scheme for
members of the University of Sheffield’s executive board to mentor senior women
with a view to increasing their representation at the topmost levels of the
university: I was trying to contribute to greater transparency on what a
Pro-Vice-Chancellor did. I can’t take
the credit, but since I started the blog the number of women in academic
positions on the executive has gone from zero to 4. At first the blog was only visible within the
University of Sheffield, but with changes to the initial platform (it is now on
Google blogger) it has gone worldwide – and some posts have gone ‘viral’. Others have been controversial. The pageview data over the last two years
shows that after readers from the UK the next most represented countries, in
descending order, have been the USA, Russia, Ireland, France, Germany, Ukraine,
Spain, Italy and Turkey. I find the
presence of Russia, Ukraine and Turkey in that list particularly
intriguing.
Although this is the last blog under the ‘Paul White DVC’
banner it’s not the end of my blogging.
Anyone interested in reading my thoughts can turn to, or bookmark, ‘Paul
White places’ or a new blog I have just started under the title ‘Paul White
Europe’ – take the following links to do so:
So, why I am I stopping this blog now? Because today is my last day in employment by
the University of Sheffield. After 42
years (well, actually it’s 41 years and 11 months, but it’s easier to round it)
I am retiring. I have wondered about
making a small selection of these 259 posts and privately printing it or
distributing it to interested colleagues (tomorrow they will be ex-colleagues!):
if anyone thinks that would be a good idea do contact me – my email address will
remain the same: p.white@sheffield.ac.uk
I’ve been reflecting on the differences between the
university in 1974 and today, and those thoughts will conclude this series of
posts. Inevitably I am largely thinking
of my own department and discipline of Geography here, although I guess there
may be echoes of these contrasts in a number of other departments.
Of course, a first difference is that the university was
very much smaller. There were about 7000
students then as opposed to the around 26000 now. The staff complement was also much smaller –
and that meant that there was a great deal more mixing. A high proportion of staff used the ‘Senior
Common Room’ and got to know colleagues from other departments: many actually
ate ‘proper’ lunches instead of, as today, snatching a sandwich. And many of today’s university buildings
weren’t there – or had other owners. There
were also departments then that we don’t have now – Latin, Geology, Economic
and Social History, Ancient History, Mining Technology. But similarly we have new departments such as
Journalism Studies or Nursing and Midwifery (for which in both cases I played a
role in establishing in the university).
In my interview for my lectureship all the questions had
been about what I could teach – I don't remember a single question about my
research ambitions (the faculty administrator present at my interview is still
alive so perhaps I should see if he corroborates that memory). I was still completing my doctorate, which
was successfully viva’d early in my second year in post. In my third year, as I
moved towards the end of my probation period, a head of department asked me
whether I had been doing any research and whether I was thinking of publishing
anything. (His predecessor, head when I
was appointed, had, I think, published only two articles in his whole career,
and my doctoral supervisor at Oxford had published only one, so these ideas of
research and research dissemination were not well established in my mind.) Fortunately I had published material from my
thesis, and had already got a research council grant to move into a new area of
research – but there had been no university mentoring or advice to do so.
Teaching took up a much higher proportion of a young
lecturer’s time than it does (at least in my department) today. In my first year I had a teaching load of 13
hours contact time each week – plus a very significant amount of marking – made
up of practical class supervisions, small group tutorials (6 each week), and my
own final year option class for which I was producing completely new
material. I point this out not to
indicate that staff today don’t teach enough, but to indicate that Sheffield
was still largely a teaching university with research taking second place and
being fitted in round the edges.
Colleagues around me were active in the vacations in writing books – but
these were student texts. It was a new
professor appointed in the same year as me who started to raise interest in
research in my department and by the end of the 70s that aspect had come much
more to the fore – although there were a number of my colleagues who never
embraced it.
In the mid 1970s the connections between schools and
universities were much closer than they are now (once again, at least in my
department). Several colleagues had
started their careers as teachers. Every
summer many people turned from university scripts to A level marking. School teachers came to guest lectures and
seminars in the department, and a number of colleagues held positions in the
professional body of geography teachers – including taking on the role of
president of that body. We went out to
talk in schools, and teachers came in for short courses we put on for them on
new ideas in my subject. (I had taken Geology
as a compulsory course as an undergraduate and I still have my notes where, in
the final session, the lecturer had said ‘there is also the notion of continental
drift but no one has proved it yet so we won’t deal with it’: within 5 years I
was supporting first year students in tutorials on this by then accepted fact
of life.) These links between schools
and universities were taken as ‘natural’.
They were not part of an agenda of widening participation, or to boost
recruitment. They were just part of the
established landscape of continuity in education.
The student and staff body in the 1970s was also different
from today. My department had a
postgraduate course, financed by UNESCO, which brought in overseas students –
many from Africa or the Middle East – but they were the only exotic elements
around. I don’t remember teaching a
single non-British student for many years (the first ‘foreign’ students I
recall having contact with were from Gibraltar – and I recall one English girl
whose father had been Governor-General in Hong Kong, but she had never lived
there). Most students were, I suppose,
lower middle-class. But over the years
we also had quite a crop of public school students – including in one memorable
cohort two Etonians. Why do students
from the ‘top’ public schools not come to Sheffield now, I wonder? In one way, however, Geography at Sheffield
was a very modern department in as much as there was a balance of male and
female students even in the mid 1970s at a time when in the university as a
whole over 60% of students were male.
We did have one Dutchman amongst our academics but no other
‘immigrants’. Today Geography has staff from, amongst other places, Argentina, Australia,
Greece, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, and the USA. But 40 years ago there were ‘overseas’
interests in the department through the fact that a number of staff had had
experience teaching (and in one or two cases even researching) in countries of
the British Commonwealth – New Zealand, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda and
elsewhere.
But there was a keen interest in ‘other places’ and it is
perhaps odd to reflect that my retirement brings to an end the continuity of
teaching about the Geography of Europe that goes back to at least the early
1950s (although field classes on the European mainland will continue).
One element that has changed hugely during my working life
in the university has been the use of technology. I spent many hours in my first year or two in
the department teaching students how to draw maps and diagrams with mapping
pens. Today diagrams are produced in
Excel – and students scarcely ever think of producing their own maps now,
taking existing ones from the internet (too often without proper
acknowledgement!) instead. The first
session in my practical class on quantitative methods was spent teaching
students how to use the hand-cranked calculators that had recently been
purchased and screwed to large boards to prevent such valuable commodities
being stolen. Student handouts were
produced on ‘Banda’ machines which made use of chemical fluids that I suspect
could have provided ‘legal highs’ if mis-used.
Lectures were illustrated by 2-inch slides, the material for which had
to be provided some weeks earlier to the technicians to convert. Anything for typing was handed in to the
departmental office. There was no
photocopier in the department. And on my
corridor there was one external telephone in a booth at the end. I am not someone who argues that ‘everything
was better in the past.’ Indeed in these
and many other aspects of university life things today are much more exciting
and provide many more opportunities than they did when I started out.
So finally, what are the ‘best’ memories of working in a
department over 42 years? Teaching my
own specialist option to interested final year students must be one (and I have
done so in each of the 42 years I have been on the staff – even in years when I
had sabbatical leave, when I taught in the semester when I was here). The thrill of opening a parcel to reveal the
published version of a new book with one’s name on the cover is an obvious
one. But above all it is the contact
with students that is most memorable.
Watching the timid first year develop into a confident and knowledgeable
graduate provides a huge reward. Seeing
how a group of students actually learns new things and develops new skills
through a single module has been greatly satisfying. Listening to the broad and
impractical thoughts of starting postgraduates, supporting them as they narrow
their PhD topic to something manageable, and then seeing their careers develop
in later life is a privilege.
And that is the note I shall end on. Spending my working life in higher education
has been a great privilege. And if
you’ve read this blog as far as this, thank you for doing so.
