Update from the Vice-Chancellor 27 November 2012

Planning for change

Dickens described it perfectly. He said these were ‘the best of times’ and ‘the worst of times’. In Higher Education generally, and here in Sheffield, it seems we are facing both. Opportunities and wonderful achievements. Challenges and frustrations.

I want to congratulate those who have done so well in recent weeks. As the European Research Council announced a new round of Fellows, our colleagues received accolades for outstanding scholarship, and magnificent funding for ground-breaking research. Our Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre was given the remit to engage our industrial base in civilian nuclear build, creating jobs and investment with an initial grant of almost £40 million. Our staff and students continue to have life-changing impact, through medicine and engineering to our new Arts and Wellbeing Network – applying knowledge to the experience of real people.

Our Sheffield Political Economy Research Centre is securing a national and international role as a focus for debate about politics following the economic crisis. And nourishing the spirit as well as the flesh, Dr Kaarina Hollo, a lecturer in the University's School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, was honoured with The Times Stephen Spender Prize for her exquisite translation of a profound and emotional poem about stillbirth.

There is so much of what we do across the subjects and at every level that makes us proud.

BUT many of us, including me, are rightly concerned by the perplexing pattern of recruitment that we saw last year, and the potential threats ahead. What does that mean for our future?

The picture is varied. Colleagues in some departments are dealing with the challenge of rapid growth; welcome, but raising its own issues to ensure that our students’ experience is up to the mark. Some, adversely affected by the dramatic changes last year, are quietly confident that the lifting of the cap for ABB will bring back the students they want to teach. Yet they are concerned the pattern of offers across the country makes it difficult to predict the movement of candidates between institutions, and they are looking keenly at how they will ensure conversion works well for them.

For others, under-recruitment against targets and national expectations of applicants’ achievements was a truly bitter pill to swallow, and the year ahead also looks uncertain. This has already prompted some to do a rethink of how they present their courses in a new ‘market’, which is hard and yet critically important work.

What almost all of us share in common though is change. We want to hold our values, but our context is shifting. As Lampedosa wryly observed: if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

So what can you do to achieve your potential in our brave new world?

The challenges and changes facing universities mean each of us must take collective responsibility. You will need information and support to know how best to plan. You will need to help colleagues involved in admissions or student recruitment in new ways. You will need to be actively involved.

We must be united, communicating with those on the frontline in departments, as well as keeping our University Council in the loop as things progress.

We cannot ignore the fact that Government policy will have a considerable long-term impact on the shape of Higher Education. The idea that the policy shifts of 2012 were a blip and all will return to ‘normal’ is far from the truth. Significant change and the economic and cultural shift which underlies it are our new reality.

This is sometimes hard for us to take. It is not that we want to preserve an outdated and inflexible model of Higher Education - The University of Sheffield has never wanted that. We do not think we are perfect, nor that the past is a Golden Age. But while we are proud of our achievements, they will not – and we cannot simply by wishing it to be so - change the way things are going.

Because there are so many policy changes coming in at the same time, we recognise that some are having unforeseen consequences. So we must adapt to keep what we rightly hold dear. We need to be ready to respond to developments that neither government nor the university sector wanted - which means being flexible and ready to change.

This is where we must focus our energies and our battles. We will not always preserve what we wish to in an ideal world. But the University will challenge where we can, and make a case for the value of our work – as in the current reduction in allocation of places for the Postgraduate Certificate in Education – while also understanding the need to engage positively in new opportunities. This is the approach from which I am proud to say our Faculty of Social Sciences and School of Education have not shied away.

And we will innovate and express our values and ambitions in new ways. We will be honest about what we are and what we can be. The fights we undertake will be for our educational values, for our principles of scholarship, research and its translation, outstanding teaching, fairness. We will not pick a fight with change itself.

This approach will define how we make our case as a University, and it is driving my own thoughts and actions. With my colleagues on UEB and in the Faculties, I will be working on the national scene to challenge the narrow ways in which we are measured and to champion key areas of concern, including:
• the role of postgraduate study in securing social mobility and a broad-based future academy,
• the contribution of international students,
• working with learned societies to ensure a more joined up support of key disciplines
• the importance of Arts and Humanities to our society,
• securing the ‘scientific century’ and our leading place in it.

On each of these fronts I am prepared to assert our position, and I know I do it with your full support.

It is a challenging time, certainly. But, despite that, I see in our responses to change a common determination. We are resilient and at our most creative and resourceful when we are challenged. And in this way we not only experience change, we shape it.

Our University is committed to discovery and growth – vital qualities for our nation and our planet. We want increasingly to be the place where the most talented, from the UK and from overseas, choose to work and study. I am committed to this and am proud to lead a University marked by this ambition. It is this very quality that will guarantee our success, and with it the difference we can make in the world.

Professor Keith Burnett
Vice-Chancellor