President's Weekly Update
22 March 2018
We held our annual Accountability and Planning Conference with our Board of Governors. We discussed the University’s performance across all areas over the past year and priorities for the next year. The Board asked questions on many aspects and there was a notable focus was on equality and diversity.
We received an excellent lecture from Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who told us of media and political criticism of universities in Australia, which is very similar to that in the UK. He urged us to continue to disseminate and communicate widely and frequently about the wider value (not just economic) of universities to society and noted the strength of our activities in social responsibility. This advice aligns exactly with my view and I have often expressed my concern that as a result of the current focus on 'value for money' there is a risk of the key purpose and value of universities being lost or forgotten. He also spoke of the transformation of Manchester as a city and the opportunities presented by devolution. Glyn holds an honorary chair in policy with us so spent the next day meeting colleagues in Policy@Manchester, the Faculty of Humanities and staff responsible for our international activities to build on our growing partnership with Melbourne.
Professor Rob Bristow, who has recently joined us from Toronto as lead for cancer research in Manchester, talked about the huge opportunities for cancer research and treatment in Greater Manchester. Board members also met a lively group of very impressive students from our Manchester Access Programme and Peer Support groups led by Stephanie Lee and Marcia Ody. We also had a broad conversation about the future of the sector, and the opportunities and challenges for our University over the longer term.
The recent strike action in response to proposed changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pension scheme has ended, although the University and College Union (UCU) has indicated that further strikes may take place in April and June and action short of a strike is still in place.
I want to thank our staff and students for the respectful way that the vast majority of them conducted themselves during the strike action, which I know was a difficult decision for many of our staff. I also know that some staff are anxious to provide teaching that did not take place or to help students catch up in other ways. We will do all we can to facilitate those that want to ‘make up’ for lost teaching, where this is feasible.
In one of the regular meetings with the Students’ Union Executive we focussed on how we might benefit students who have been affected by industrial action. The Students’ Union has invited comments and we will jointly now seek views on a number of different options. We will continue to work with our Students’ Union to determine how we can best use any pay deducted to benefit students. We are currently assessing the very different impacts on students across the University and we are using information based on where staff that have declared they were on strike to do this. At present up to 560 staff per day have reported taking strike action. We will assume that staff will have reported by the end of 23 March. For the latest message to all our students see: My Manchester News industrial action update.
USS has released some information and facts about the pension scheme and how its financial status is determined. The discussing deficits section is particularly useful.
I attended the Russell Group of Vice-Chancellors where pensions and industrial action featured heavily. We heard presentations from, and had discussions with, Nicola Dandridge (Chief Executive of the Office for Students), Paul Johnson (Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies), Sir Nicholas Serota (Chair of the Arts Council), Sir Richard Lambert (former Director of the CBI, former Chancellor of Warwick University and Chair of the British Museum), Philip Rycroft (Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU) and Sir John Kingman (Chair of UK Research and Innovation).
I attended the Greater Manchester (GM) Local Enterprise Partnership board meeting. Several topics were of direct relevance to the University including the development of skills, capacity and inward investment in digital technologies and links between GM and India.
The outgoing Chief Executive of the National Centre for Universities and Businesses (NCUB, of which we are a member) David Docherty met with Professor Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and me to discuss our many activities in business engagement, licensing of our intellectual property and spin-out companies and what NCUB could do to help us and the university sector more widely.
I gave a welcome to the UK China Infrastructure Academy, which is being run by our Alliance Manchester Business School to provide training for Chinese leaders of major infrastructure programmes. I spoke of our strong and growing links with universities and companies in China, the many Chinese students studying on campus and our new Manchester China Institute.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor
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