Presidents' Weekly Update
28 May 2015
I held one of my regular lunches with a group of staff from across the University to hear their views about the University and try to answer their questions. The main topics that came up were: raising the profile of the University (interestingly the subject of my next Unilife article); distance learning -how we do it; how we test markets and which partners; managing change and helping staff to deal with change; promoting the arts and humanities; enhancing research quality; and ensuring that staff have routes to communicate their views ‘upwards’ in such a large and complicated organisation.
We also talked about how to make more time for our core activities of research, teaching and social responsibility, and become more efficient and effective in what we do. Of course some of the pressures on our time are external as we are increasingly accountable on so many issues. But we also need to think carefully about the relative importance and efficiency of some of the things we do and try to ‘work smarter, not harder’.
At the Social Responsibility Governance Group meeting we heard an excellent report on the public engagement of our research activities from Dr Sheena Cruickshank, who is the University lead in this area. It is clear that we do a huge amount, but this work needs to be more coordinated and better evaluated, so we planned how we deliver this more effectively. We also received a report from Professor Ken McPhail (Associate Dean for Social Responsibility for the Faculty of Humanities) of a very successful undergraduate activity ‘JUSTFEST’ which engaged over 1,000 students in discussions on social justice.
I met regional representatives of HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) who spent a day with us learning about our main activities and plans. I gave an overview of our successes and concerns about future funding and how HEFCE can help us to deliver our objectives. Of course they are also thinking hard about the forthcoming spending review and what it may mean for their various funding streams.
Senior colleagues and I met Josh Hardie, who is the main liaison person for our research collaboration with Tesco. Professor Dale Southerton, Director of the Tesco Sustainable Consumption Institute, updated Josh on progress and Professor Luke Georghiou, Vice-President for Research and Innovation, told him about other areas of collaboration. It was good to hear of Tesco’s continuing commitment to corporate sustainability and health in spite of their recent issues, and their strong wish to continue their collaboration with us.
I had a meeting with Professor Stephanie Marshall, who leads our Centre for Higher Education Research Innovation and Leadership (CHERIL), to discuss the activities of the Centre and how we develop innovating and excellent teaching across the University, and meet the need to demonstrate the excellence of our teaching.
I met with Professor Kostas Kostarelos, from the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, to discuss progress on research into the application of nanomaterials to biomedicine and health and I linked him up to the two incoming Vice-Presidents and Deans.
I met Johnny Lundgren, Chair of the Greater Manchester Academic Health Science Network (MAHSN), Professor Tony Whetton and Dr Mike Burrows, Chief Executive of the Network, to discuss the changes that will result from devolution of the health budget to Greater Manchester, development of precision medicine which Tony is leading on for the University and how we engage with healthcare companies. Johnny has been head of the British Association of Healthcare companies and has a great deal of experience with companies large and small.
I also had a meeting with Ian Williamson, who is the interim Chief Medical Officer for Greater Manchester, about the exciting opportunities of delivering effective health and social care with the devolution of budgets to Greater Manchester.
We had the last formal meetings with our two interim Vice-Presidents and Deans, Professor Julian Davis in the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences and Professor Steve Flint in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. Both have done an outstanding job leading up to the arrival of the two new Vice-Presidents and Deans on Monday.
I presided over one of the regular Citizenship ceremonies at Manchester Registry Office, where about 20 people were conferred with British citizenship.
Voting is now open until 18 June for the next Chancellor of the University – for more details see:
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor
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