It has been a very busy month since I last blogged – not just for me but for everyone else in the university, I am sure.  The combination of the Browne Report, the Comprehensive Spending Review announced on 20 October, and the government’s response to (a small number of issues arising from) the Browne Report on 3 November has created a situation where we face greater uncertainties in UK higher education than at any time since the early 1980s. During the last month I have been involved in a number of discussions about these matters – at a private conference for the HEFCE board and its five strategic advisory committees, at a dinner I hosted last week at which Sir Alan Langlands (Chief Executive of the funding council) was the guest speaker, and with colleagues from the Russell Group and a variety of other universities.

But I want to start this penultimate blogging week by mentioning what I have been doing over the last few days.  I am writing this on the train on the way back from Gatwick Airport, having flown in earlier this evening from Thessaloniki where I have been visiting our International Faculty – CITY College.  I spent Thursday and Friday there with four senior colleagues from across the University, in discussions with a variety of staff, meeting students, and being involved in a series of workshops over issues such as the next Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy; handling assessment feedback; handling complaints and appeals; developing students’ employability and so on. 

We in Sheffield have a lot to learn from aspects of what CITY does.  As one of my colleagues said after the workshop day on Friday: “They don’t realise how good they are.”  CITY has cracked (or partially done so) a number of issues that we in Sheffield find challenging – for example, creating an international environment on campus, and fully involving employers in all programmes.  And as a private college they have done so with no direct public support (except sometimes through government scholarships for students).  They have been entrepreneurial in seeking out new areas of business.  A CITY colleague who also has experience at Sheffield, and to whom I was talking at dinner on Friday, has offered to produce a brief paper on what Sheffield might learn from her colleagues in Greece.

My final event at CITY took place last night when the Principal of the college and I had dinner with the Minister of Education of the Republic of Macedonia who had undertaken the 5 hour round trip from Skopje (or had got his driver to do so!) simply to discuss ideas for a CITY / Sheffield academy for managers to be developed, with some funding from the Macedonian government, in his own country.  CITY doesn’t just deliver the Sheffield experience in Greece: it currently does so in Serbia, in Romania, in Bulgaria, in the Ukraine – and soon in Albania and Turkey.  We were joined at dinner by another Macedonian government official – who took the International Faculty’s MBA and who is thus a Sheffield alumnus, and who is now starting on a PhD supervised jointly from a department at Sheffield and by a colleague at CITY.  The esteem in which the University of Sheffield, and the International Faculty at CITY College, is held in south-eastern Europe is considerable: here was a minister suggesting developing a programme with a foreign institution rather than with one of the 5 universities that he funds within his own country.  So I reflect that in addition to my colleague’s view that CITY staff don’t realise the quality of what they are doing, I would say “We don’t seem to recognise the potential that CITY has created for the University in the region.”  And we are going to have to develop something of the entrepreneurialism of CITY in the coming months and years.

(And before anyone thinks they can trip me up over the fact that I referred above to the Republic of Macedonia, I know all about the disputes about its name – the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Northern Macedonia and so on.  We thrashed that one around in a good-natured way last night, but the combination around the restaurant table of English, Greeks and Macedonians did not manage to come up with a solution acceptable to all parties.)