President's Weekly Update
19 October 2017
Senior staff and I met with the new members of the Students’ Union Executive to discuss the many ongoing activities in our University and beyond. They each told us about their current focus, which include some great initiatives such as better engagement of the Students’ Union with postgraduate and international students and those living at home; addressing mental health amongst students; supporting student carers; ensuring student safety and students supporting work to tackle homelessness.
You may have seen that Her Majesty’s Treasury has announced a review into student loans. If this reduces student debt it will be welcome, but universities need to ensure financial sustainability and the importance of investment if the UK higher education sector is to remain as a world leader. As we heard from Universities UK, universities bring almost £100 billion pa of value to the UK. We very much hope that the review will consider these issues.
I visited the site for our new Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD), which is vast and dominated by a very large hole in the ground and enormous cranes. As I have said before, this development, expensive though it is, will cost much less than half that of maintaining our estate on the North Campus. It will also confer many benefits by bringing together all of our students, reducing running costs, helping us to achieve our carbon footprint targets and releasing a huge amount of land that we own in the City centre. MECD is a major investment in the University’s long term future.
We have just begun the Annual Performance Reviews of all areas of the University. These address all activities including research and innovation; teaching and students; social responsibility; staff views and costs and future priorities and planning. In times of such uncertainty, planning has challenges, but as I said in my Foundation Day address last week, we also have many exciting opportunities and some major successes to celebrate.
I spoke at a Pro Women event organised by ProManchester about my career and the lessons I had learnt to an audience of about fifty people, mainly from the local business community but including some from the University and one I had been at school with!
Edward Pong, one of our senior alumni from Hong Kong, visited us for a few days. He was most impressed by our Foundation Day celebrations and I met with him to tell him about our current and planned activities and our growing links with Hong Kong and mainland China.
I introduced the annual Doubleday Lecture in the School of Medical Sciences supported by John Doubleday, whose son sadly died in his final year of medicine with us. This year the lecture was given by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, on the UK political system, his own highs and lows of politics, his concerns about the North-South divide and why he thinks that devolution of powers and budgets to city regions is the right solution for the UK.
Alan Ferns, Associate Vice-President for External Relations and Reputation, and I met Lucy Powell, our local MP. Lucy has set up an all-party group of Greater Manchester MPs to discuss regional issues and suggested that we may nominate some attendees from the University on relevant topics. We talked about concerns about student safety in parts of the City and about student mental health.
I gave the opening welcome at an event to launch the Dams 2.0 project which is supported by £8 million funding from the government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. The project, which will run over four years, brings together researchers from across civil engineering, politics, social and environmental sciences in the University with many international partners and is led by Professor David Hulme, Executive Director of our Global Development Institute.
Professors James Thompson, Vice-President for Social Responsibility, Ian Greer, Vice-President and Dean of Biology, Medicine and Health, and I attended an event to mark the opening of the Manchester Science Festival at the Museum of Science and Industry. This is now the largest science festival in the UK and many of our staff and students contribute to events.
I met the Right Honourable John Bercow, Speaker at the House of Commons, who also holds an honorary professorship in politics with us. He was just about to speak to our students for the second time about current politics.
Clare Marchant, the new Chief Executive of UCAS, visited the University and met our student recruitment teams and toured the Learning Commons. I met her to discuss trends in applications for undergraduate study and the issues faced by many universities around confirmation and clearing, not least because of the changes to A level syllabuses which make prediction of students’ grades more difficult.
Dr Andrew Hosty, Chief Executive of the Royce Institute, came to see me to update me on progress on the Royce including growing activities to engage with industry, development of the new building and the work with our partners in Royce.
I visited Manchester City Football Club just before they were playing Napoli in the Champions League, mainly to meet Marty Edelman who also holds an honorary professorship with us and who has been extremely helpful in building international links, particularly with Masdar in Abu Dhabi on advanced materials. Masdar is a key funder of our Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre. For those of you interested, Manchester City won 2-1.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor
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