One of the great fringe benefits of working in a university is the opportunity to hear visiting lectures by a wide range of distinguished speakers - free.  Over the years I have attended, and enjoyed, lectures by (amongst many others) Ralf Dahrendorf, Kenneth Galbraith, Sir Paul Nurse, Stuart Hall, Sir Liam Donaldson, Archbishop John Sentamu, Roy Hattersley, General Sir Mike Jackson and many more.  We have the opportunity to try topics that lie outside our normal field of interest, and often to pose questions to these speakers.

Tonight I attended an illustrated lecture by Christopher Hogwood, founder and conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music, the lecture being given as part of a series organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.  I don't think I've ever drawn attention to the next fact in my blog - but my main leisure activities revolve around music, either listening to it or playing the piano.  So tonight's talk was always likely to be a special one for me. And so it proved, with Hogwood being an engaging and interesting speaker and drawing on examples of recordings from 1888 to the present day.

But the nature of the audience was also of interest. This was a lecture that attracted a lot of people from outside the university. But music is also something that transcends the Freddy Leavis / C P Snow 'two cultures' debate.  I noticed a number of people from faculties other than Arts and Humanities - Physics and Biomedical Science were represented, as also were Medicine and social scientists.  I didn't notice any engineers, but there may well have been some.

There is discussion at various levels within the university about extending the intellectual range of our students by encouraging (or even requiring) them to study material and concepts from disciplines outside their own. Our employers have asked for more evidence of intellectual breadth from our graduates.  There is, however, a question about the extent to which the staff of the university are prepared to avail themselves of the breadth of opportunity that lies within our own institution.  Inaugural lectures these days rarely attract more than a handful of poeple from disciplines other than that of the speaker.  Perhpas we should all make a resultion to attend one guest lecture a month from a discipline removed from our own. That might broaden our minds, make us more united as a university community, and provide a platform for asking our students to undertake something similar during their time with us.