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President's weekly update

23 June 2022

Valuing our staff

In recognition of the huge efforts that our staff have made through the global pandemic and the domestic challenges that now face us, as a thank you, we will be creating an extra day’s holiday on Tuesday, 30 August, and will also make an additional, one-off payment of £500 pro-rata to staff in grades 1 to 8 inclusive, to be paid in the July salary. Of course we also greatly value the many and significant contributions of our staff at grade 9 and above whose salaries are determined very differently and salary uplift or one-off payments can be made on an individual basis.

Jodrell Bank

We held an event to mark the opening of the amazing new First Light Pavilion at Jodrell Bank. Despite the travel problems with the national rail strike, we had many attendees including Her Excellency, Laura Davies, the UK Ambassador to UNESCO, the organisation that awarded Jodrell Bank World Heritage status, and many of the funders of the project, including the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We watched the summer solstice at 13.11 as the sun shone directly through the window facing due south. The event was a great success and a huge testament to Professor Teresa Anderson and her staff and many others within the University for their amazing work.

Our Chancellor

Many from within and outside the University attended the fantastic thank you event for our Chancellor, Lemn Sissay, as he comes to the end of his seven-year term. After the reception in our Museum’s Living Worlds Gallery, we held a dinner in the Whitworth Hall. I spoke about Lemn’s enormous contributions and accolades over his tenure as Chancellor. We welcome the fact that this is not goodbye to Lemn, as he will continue as an honorary chair in Creative Writing and we hope he will take part in many activities. We watched a film of Lemn's latest poem, 'Gift of Time'.  The attendees were from such varied backgrounds within and outside the University, with many from the arts sector. You can view a great caricature of the speeches.

Internal meetings

Prior to the thank you event, Lemn chaired our General Assembly. I gave a general update and Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research, presented our brilliant results in the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF). There were so many excellent questions.

At our Board finance committee, we considered our current financial position, next year’s budget and longer-term challenges. Benchmarking of our finances against key competitor universities indicated that we are relatively strong, but as discussed at the Russell Group recently, we are all very concerned about rapidly rising costs as much of our income is fixed, so declining in real terms. We are starting to consider options for funding new student residences, which are needed urgently.

Community engagement

I met Bev Craig, Leader of Manchester City Council. Bev (one of our alumni) will take the lead for GM on business engagement, so we discussed the many current opportunities, the work of Innovation GM, progress on ID Manchester, Northern Gritstone and the fact that UK Biobank will have its new headquarters in Manchester, right next to us. We also discussed student recruitment, Cultural Manchester, our health inequalities developments and the success of our BeeWell project.

Philanthropy

While in London, I spent quite a lot of time with alumni and close friends of the University. Some of them have been engaged with us for some time, for others this was the first time we had met; some had graduated only a few years ago, others have children who are considering studying with us. It was good to be able to discuss our successes in REF, innovation, student recruitment and many aspects of social responsibility. I also met Simon Collins, chair of our Global Leadership Board, to discuss our plans for fundraising.

Travel

Recognising the impact of rail strikes on staff travel, we opened all of our University-owned car parks throughout this week so all staff without passes could park and those with passes were not charged.

Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor

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