I was attending a guest lecture today and found myself sitting next to someone who had travelled down from Leeds University to attend.   He beamed at me and explained that I wouldn't remember him, but he certainly remembered me because I had taught him when he was a student at Sheffield.  He is now the head of a significant administrative department in Leeds.  He went on to reminisce fondly about the field class I had taken him on to Paris in 1984 - he having apparently blagged his way out of a class in Iceland that he should have been on because he thought that my class would be more interesting.  I too remember that class - we turned up at a newly refurbished small hotel in the 11th arrondissement where the key numbers didn't match the door numbers such that the hotel receptionist ended by using the master key to let our students into their rooms, and then did so again later for other guests who arrived while we were out having a meal so that when we returned several students found other people asleep in their beds. The owner also had a pet dog who marked its presence in various places, generally in dark corners on the stairs.

Last week I was giving a lecture at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London and a senior serving air force officer came and introduced himself as someone I lectured to in the early 1980s. Again he went on to talk about a number of the Sheffield staff who had impressed him as an undergraduate.  A month or so ago there was a knock at my door and someone I taught on a field class in Normandy in the late 1970s entered: he was bringing his daughter to study at Sheffield, having persuaded her that since he had such a life-changing time here she would enjoy it too. He is now a professor in Japan.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a very productive time for me in research.  I won a research grant from the SSRC (forerunner of the ESRC) to undertake a study of rural depopulation in France.  I was invited to join a research group at the University of Caen.  I published my first two books (one joint with a colleague and the other a single-authored volume on European cities that established a reputation for me across mainland Europe).  I was publishing a good flow of articles in high quality journals. On the basis of this record I was promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Today I guess that none of my research output from that period is ever read.  (Actually that's not quite true - an article I co-wrote with two others on red-light districts in European cities was recently hailed as pathbreaking.)  But many of the students I taught at that time still remember me.  Few academics will ever write the seminal article that changes the thinking in their field and becomes a long-term citation classic.   But many academics will be remembered 30, 40 or even 50 years afterwards by the students they taught. Therein lies the longest-lasting reputations for most of us.

That's the end of this month's blogging.  By this time next month perhaps the implications of the Browne Review and the Comprehensive Spending Review will be clearer.