Readers may be expecting me to comment on the Comprehensive Spending Review today, but it's really too early to do so as we don't have sufficient detail.

This evening I attended the lecture by Lord John Krebs on climate change. It was an excellent lecture - well delivered, covering a broad range of material in a very accessible fashion, and very well and clearly illustrated.  The topic and the broad sweep of the discussion took me back to my first head of department when I arrived as ayoung lecturer in geography in  Sheffield in the 1970s.

He was a man who avidly read Nature and Science and who then immediately transferred the fruits of his reading into his inspirational first year lectures.  When I had done Geology in my first year at Oxford my notes on the final lecture contain the words 'there is also a theory of continental drift but nobodoy yet believes it'.  Within a very few years first year students at Sheffield were being taken right to the edge of scientific thinking on that topic by the head of department.  He brought in consideration of acid rain and its effects before it was accepted science.  He even touched on climate change as an interesting hypothesis.  These things were far removed from my own expertise in population and social geography, but I found it exciting keeping up with the new thinking in order to support discussions in tutorials which were carried out by all staff across the whole range of departmental teaching.

In recent years many ex-students have commented on those lectures by the head of department - how they realise that they were cutting-edge, that they inspired students, and that they encouraged many to take a new interest in aspects of their discipline or even to change their longer-term career intentions.

That head of department - his name was Ron Waters - was deeply respected not just by his students but also within his discipline.  He gave advice on the setting up of departments in new universities both in the UK and in the wider Commonwealth.  He managed the rapid growth in the size of his own department.  He served as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University.  He took a leading role in developing and teaching a highly successful Masters course, supported by UNESCO for students from 'developing countries', at a time when both overseas students and pgt programmes were a rarity.  In the wider world he was involved in the organisation of major expeditions, including one to the Karakoram mountains that provided some of the jigsaw pieces to prove the continental drift hypothesis.  He was elected President of the Institute of British Geographers - the premier disciplinary body for geography in higher education (which later merged with the Royal Geographical Society).

Yet in his whole career Ron scarcely published more than half a dozen academic papers - perhaps even less than that - and no books.  Reputations were made very differently in the 1960s when he was appointed to a chair at Sheffield.  But I suspect that his legacy is still felt more sharply in many parts of his discipline, and in many of his ex-students, than does the legacy of many highly-published research stars of his day.  But Ron would never have been considered for a chair today, nor for many of the positions of distinction he held.  What a waste it would have been if today's criteria had applied to his career.