Thursday 12th February 2015 - Which committee?

Perhaps I'm on too many national committees. A count of active memberships today amounts to three HEFCE committees or groups, 1 for the HEA, 1 for the Russell Group and 1 related to a widening participation initiative with 14 other universities.  That's actually fewer than it was in the past when I was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching.  One distinctive thing about such committees is often the 'recycling' of members - if you show that you can be an effective member of a group you get asked to join another.  And that means you see various people from other universities in a number of different contexts.

I explain all this in order to provide a context for an incident that happened to me today - and to try to convince people that it wasn't just the result of a 'senior moment' or stupidity.

I arrived a few minutes early this morning for a HEFCE committee meeting at their London offices near Chancery Lane.  As I went to get in the lift a colleague emerged saying 'the meeting has been moved to Woburn House: that's what they said upstairs.'  (Woburn House is the headquarters of UniversitiesUK and around half an hour's walk away.)  I checked my papers and they said the meeting would be held in the building where we were - HEFCE's London offices.  But if my colleagues had been told that the meeting was to be at Woburn House we would need to get a move on to get there.  So the two of us set off to Holborn to find a taxi, embarking in the meantime on an interesting discussion about issues of black and ethnic minority achievement in higher education.  

Five minutes into our taxi ride, heading up Grays Inn Road and just after crossing Clerkenwell Road, a feeling came to me that I didn't remember seeing this particular colleague - a familiar face - at previous meetings of the committee I was heading to.  A quick check on what he was expecting his day to be about - and the discovery that he had very different expectations from me - resulted in a request to the driver to stop and let me out.  And that was followed by me retracing my steps to the HEFCE offices where I had to explain to the receptionist that my name had already been crossed off on her list because I had both entered (and left) 10 minutes earlier.  

And that is why I was the last to arrive at my meeting - several minutes late.  Is it that I am on too many committees, or is that I know too many people?