President's Weekly Update

6 February 2014

At this week’s Senate meeting, we discussed amongst many other things, the success to date of ‘lecture capture’ to record lectures for students, where the number of downloads by students has been vast, changes to guidelines on PhD student supervision and issues around staff pay and pensions.

I attended the dinner at a conference for our senior staff in the Professional Support Services (PSS). I commented about the value of our PSS staff, but also suggested that a problem is that our academic colleagues too often make no comment when all runs smoothly, but only voice their opinions when things don’t go so well. We discussed the challenges and opportunities we face and the level of ambition we have for the future.

I was lucky to have a personal tour of the Imperial War Museum North on Salford Quay, led by Graham Boxer, Director of the Museum. It is interesting because their key theme is not war or weapons but rather about human responses to war and indeed the resolution of conflict. They already have a number of links with our University and we discussed further opportunities for collaboration.

Last week I gave a talk at Brunel University for their inaugural annual Athena Swan lecture, called ‘A Life in Science’ about my career, which sounds worrying like a memoir on retirement; some of our research; external activities and a bit about my current role as President and Vice-Chancellor. Brunel also has a woman Vice-Chancellor, who was appointed quite recently, Professor Julia Buckingham. I have known Julia for about 30 years - we met when we collaborated as much younger scientists.

From Brunel I went on to the Council of the Royal Society which I joined just before Christmas, where future government funding for research and universities was a major topic of discussion.

This week I visited the School of Materials, where a huge group of students came to tell me what they loved about their course and the University, but that they wanted more feedback and ideally a little less assessment.

At another visit, this time to the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, students were again generally very positive about their programmes but raised some issues around time-tabling, course unit choice and lecturers needing to understand the different backgrounds of students. Then an international student spoke - he was from Iraq. He said he had come to the meeting for two reasons, first to say that he thought that the University was truly fantastic with brilliant staff and resources, and second to meet me and have his photo taken with me. It was a reminder to us all that there are so many countries where universities have almost no resource or support.

I hosted a lively dinner for new professors - some promoted internally but many recruited externally. There were many helpful comments and much feedback - they loved Manchester, the ambition and interdisciplinary approach of the University, but felt we have too much bureaucracy and are a bit too risk averse on some issues.

At a lunch with staff from across the University this week, we talked about how we better disseminate information across a University of our scale and diversity and how we promote so many of the good things that we do. The usual ongoing concerns were raised about a number of our processes - which we are trying hard to fix. Some expressed real interest in getting to know more about how the University is run and suggested that we might offer ‘shadowing’ of senior managers.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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