This is the text of the address to University Court given by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol, in the Great Hall of the Wills Memorial Building on 8 December 2006.
Madame Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen
Harold Wilson famously said that a week is a long time in politics – well, to take the analogy further, a year is a long time in higher education. Last year I spoke to you about the future and our investment plans and there appeared to be few clouds on the horizon. Since then, a lot has happened.
I suppose the two most important issues for Court are:
We have also recently had the issue of contact hours, which precipitates a fundamental question about the pedagogy of a degree and who owns it. During this speech I shall address all these issues.
However, before that I want to reassure Court that the University is still on track for the future as I described last year. All our performance indicators are positive. In the latest global league table published by Newsweek, we are 49th and that is based on current indicators of performance rather than historical ones. Our staff continue to receive numerous verifications of esteem by their peers. We have never failed to get at least one FRS in each of the past five years; recently, two of our staff, Rosemary Deem and Guy Claxton, were made Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences; and George Davey-Smith, one of the leading epidemiologists of his generation, was made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Our research income continues to increase and we are seen to be right at the cutting edge of numerous diverse areas of activity including widening participation and reach-out, technology and knowledge transfer and charitable fundraising. So far this year we have seen a 19% increase in the number of applications to become a student here – we are, by a country mile, the most popular university in the land. It may be that Starter for 10 is the reason for this, but somehow I don’t think it is only that. Our students are the best and brightest of their generation. This is not an idle boast – you only have to interact with them to know that. Two of them doorstepped my office about 18 months ago and persuaded me to part with some money to enable them to visit Cuba. They were part of Engineers Without Borders, which is a national initiative in which engineering students address practical problems in developing countries. Our students were helping Havana sort out its water problems – it has lots of water, it is just not delivering it to the right people at the right time with the right infrastructure. I went to their lecture recently in which they described what they had done and how they worked with the Cubans and what particular additional added value they brought. It was, quite literally, stirring stuff. I felt immensely proud that they represented the University of Bristol and I felt immensely proud of our British youth. I say this every year, but I don’t apologise: we have outstanding young people in this country and I am confident with my future in their hands.
This year I should like to focus on our postgraduates. We have nearly 8,000 postgraduates studying for a variety of certificates, diplomas, Masters and PhD programmes and they come from all over the globe as well as here in Bristol. Postgraduates are an essential part of the intellectual lifeblood of this University. They are demographically very different from our undergraduates and much more diverse in age and background. They bring a whole different set of dimensions of experience and insight. At the PhD level, they are engines of our research ambitions. They are not simply passive recipients of knowledge but active participants in the generation of that knowledge – they are part of the creativity of this place.
The University has made extra efforts over the past four years or so to ensure that the postgraduate experience is as good as possible. The only criticism of our teaching in the institutional audit of some two years ago was that our supervision of postgraduate research students was not as good as it should be for a university of this quality; robust measures have been taken to address that. Perhaps most importantly, the students have formalised a Postgraduate Union. This was founded initially as the Postgraduate Society in 2000 and became the Union in 2004. It exists to represent the needs and welfare of all postgraduates and to provide a social focus for the postgraduate community. As a reflection of its commitment to postgraduates, the University has also appointed a full-time member of staff to co-ordinate its activities. It is now a very successful Union with all sorts of support mechanisms, social events and campaigns to ensure the postgraduates’ needs are met.
I could go on and on, and some have criticised this annual speech for being an uncritical hagiography of our university. My reply to them is that this really is a first-class place with numerous, almost daily, examples of excellence. What we present is the truth – our staff and students really are that good and we are certainly not going to shy away from saying so. As you will have gathered, I am going to address some of our problems this year but this must be taken against the background of all the positive news and messages we have.
The investment programme is going ahead and Council has approved a new Maths and a new Biological Sciences building for a combined cost of over £70 million. Council has also approved the refurbishment of Physics and the Wills building. There are business plans to support these investments and both disciplines will operate in new ways once they are inside the buildings. It is interesting to analyse the reasons for each of these investments because they highlight the future operation of the University. Biological Sciences is currently housed in the Fry building on University Road. It is a lovely building of which many are quite fond, but it is completely unsuitable for performing cutting-edge Biological Sciences research in the 21st century. This is a simple statement of fact – modern biological sciences research requires certain facilities that the Fry building, never mind how much we refurbish it, simply cannot supply. The choice is that we rehouse Biological Sciences or stop doing it and it is unthinkable that this research-intensive University should not be prosecuting research and teaching in the century’s dominant science – Biology.
The story is different for Mathematics. I am absolutely clear that world-class Mathematics is the cornerstone of research success and crosses all our disciplinary boundaries from Pure Maths, through to Physical and Biological Sciences and finally into the Social Sciences. I am also clear that we have a superb Maths Department that has embraced inter-disciplinarity and excellence in a unique way. It is vital we increase its excellence and success. The department is currently housed in a building which the staff have not only outgrown but which was built in the 1960s yet somehow manages to be only one step away from falling down. We must give this group the accommodation they need so that they will not only keep the current, excellent staff but continue to attract the very highest quality recruits in both staff and students.
We have an excellent Physics Department with a history of Nobel Laureates. However, the Wills Building with the 1960s addition is now in significant disrepair. I have to say that I was a child of the ’60s and I love the decade, but the one thing they certainly did not get right was good buildings! The Wills building is listed and we have to maintain it – of the £44 million investment required, over £20 million is simply about keeping a listed building upright with a decent roof. We have no option if we to remain a responsible public body. But we must also invest in Physics – as Bill Boyd the last Dean of Science reminded me, this is about the fundamental nature of matter. Physics is central to our inter-disciplinary science endeavour from nano-technology to quantum computing right out to edges of black holes – we cannot not be in this discipline and be in the world’s top 50 and therefore we cannot do anything but give them the best facilities.
Before we leave our investment programme, I want to stress that we are investing in Social Sciences and Arts as well. Over the last five years we have increased the staffing in our Faculty of Social Sciences significantly, as well as investing in infrastructure. We have also been investing in the fabric of the Faculty of Arts to make it a better environment for both students and staff. We also recognise that the library resources have to be improved for both these faculties.
So that is the good news. Where have the challenges been this year and what remains as a challenge going forward? The first issue we dealt with this year was industrial action. Coming from a sector (medical practice) where industrial action is unthinkable, this was my first exposure to the phenomenon and a fairly unedifying experience it was from all sides. I rapidly learnt that truth is definitely the first casualty in industrial action and that the language used on all sides was pejorative and certainly not conducive to a positive working environment. One of the main problems was that we have national pay bargaining, which meant that I could not speak to the staff at a time when the national discourse was so destructive. We also did not have a mechanism for communicating in real time. Anything I wanted to say was often rendered anachronistic or just plain wrong within 24 hours and it would, of course, have been picked up by the Press, whose ability to misinterpret statements knows no bounds. In the end, a wage settlement that is at the outside limits of affordability for Bristol was reached, but everyone was left rather bruised and battered. It is, of course, right and proper that staff should ask for some of the additional income that increased fees bring – no-one is well paid in universities in comparison to their peers. However, there was a complete lack of understanding, wilful or not, of exactly how little these fees contribute – by 2010, Bristol will receive an additional £18 million per year from fees, which will be about 7% extra income. Our salaries increase by about 5.5% each year through the national pay settlement, promotions and incremental drift. This increase in fee income keeps us afloat; it most certainly is not some lottery prize. I am, however, very pleased to tell you that the staff at Bristol were polite and approachable throughout. It is never fun going through industrial action for anyone, but nobody descended to some of the rhetoric displayed elsewhere. Let’s hope we don’t have to go there again.
The one group who certainly did not gain from the industrial action were our students. Our relationship with our students is changing and their expectations, quite rightly, are also changing. Some people call this consumerism but I don’t think it is that. It has always been reasonable for our students to expect their lecturers to appear for seminars and tutorials and to be available. That is just basic politesse. However, our recent issues over contact hours raise much more fundamental questions. Historical Studies decided four years ago that its curriculum needed revisiting and refreshing. In fact, it had been explicitly told this by its external examiners who commented that there was little difference in pedagogy between the three years of the degree and that they were not developing their students intellectually as well as they could – especially when they were getting some of the ablest young people in the land joining the course. Over four years they developed a new curriculum that had greater contact hours in the first year and then less in the third year when the students do a dissertation. What went wrong here was that we introduced a new curriculum during some students’ degree and therefore did not match their expectations as we described to them when they started. Needless to say, the Press made an absolute meal of this; yet again, Bristol was on the front pages and this “lack of contact hours” became the story. I have, of course, given up any hope of the Press being either impartial or telling anything remotely resembling the truth, but this is not a good portrayal of the University of Bristol.
Right at the heart of this lies the issue of who determines the pedagogy of a degree. Is it the academic staff, the student or the Press who determine the content of a degree course? I do have anxieties about what I have called the “schoolification” of university – the idea that university is simply a different form of school rather than a completely different intellectual journey. It absolutely essential that we ensure a university degree produces self-directed individual learners – a History degree should produce historians and historians are not people who can simply reproduce facts. They are people who can search for facts, analyse them and then construct new paradigms around them. These are life skills that will serve our students well even if they never do History again. I would argue that that is exactly what a degree from Bristol should do – we are a world-class university and our job is to enable people to develop world-class minds. The decision to use that pedagogy is rightly the University’s and it must remain there. It certainly isn’t the right of the Press.
What, then, of our students? Don’t they have a say here? Of course they do, but it is not reasonable to expect them to determine the pedagogy, the intellectual flight path, of a degree. I certainly wouldn’t have understood that in my early twenties. What they do have is the absolute right to get what they expected when they arrived here. We have to ensure three things. Firstly, that we are using the same definitions; secondly, that everyone understands why the degree is structured in this way; and thirdly, that we deliver what we say we are going to deliver.
I will start with the first. As a final year medical student in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1975 to 1976, I had no contact hours for the whole final year. There was no formal teaching scheduled in that year. None of my peers complained and, in fact, many argue that the final year was their defining educational experience. We were posted on the wards and it was entirely up to us to get our teaching from the consultants, the junior medical staff and the nurses. And it was fantastic. When I think of it now, we were literally drinking in new knowledge every hour. Of course, you could seek not to ask the registrars why something was done like that, why the patient had presented with these symptoms, why it was better to operate and you would not learn, but nobody did – the knowledge that you gained was going to serve you well in the years to come and you knew that. We need to get some agreed definition of what we mean by contact hours and what we believe them to be for.
Secondly, we need to be explicit with our students why the degree is structured in such a way and why we believe that benefits them. In fact, History had consulted the student body considerably, but as there was turnover there was no cultural memory of the logic of the changes. There has to be an understanding that the degree will be difficult and challenging – actually, that is a central purpose of it. Many disciplines in Arts and Humanities do not offer a set of technical skills in comparison to Engineering and the Sciences. The individual’s development is intellectual and that will be difficult and challenging – it has to be. Our daughter, Rachel, is doing a Masters at the LSE where it was made plain from the beginning that it was going to be challenging and she has found it so – particularly Political Theory, which has not proved easy for a classicist from UCL. But she is relishing it and rising to that challenge. What she does have is academic staff who are there and willing if she needs them and that is what we must ensure we supply for our students – the challenge is fine as long as you know there are able people willing to help you.
Finally, we must be explicit with our students about what we will be providing. I would love to read History here – it fits exactly with my idea of a degree, but I love independent, self-directed learning. Some don’t and prefer a much more didactic environment. That’s fine, but that is not what Bristol will provide. If a student wants that, they will need to study elsewhere. That statement is not pejorative, it is simply factual. This university will continue to provide the intellectually challenging environment in which its first-class students will thrive.
This is a post in which you learn on the job, so to speak – there is no fine personal development programme. That learning comes from some unpredictable quarters and one of the best pieces of advice I received came at a social dinner in the University of Exeter when I sat next to their Chair of Council who had been a Chief Executive of one of BP’s main businesses. His advice was that once you get to be Chief Executive of a certain sized business, you never don’t have a major problem on your table and you just have to learn to live with that – there is never a problem-free, sunlit upland! Costs are certainly one of those perennial problems. However, four factors have really added to those pressures – pension costs, the price of energy, the introduction of a single pay spine with a reassessment of every job in the University and, finally, wage settlements. These four factors have concatenated to make the next two years very tight indeed. We are, however, still budgeting to be in surplus and we are still budgeting to carry on with our investment programme. We may well have to restructure our approach to how we finance that with an increase in our planned borrowings one major possibility – I would, however, like to reassure Court that we will remain very safely inside our borrowing limits as required by the Higher Education Funding Council. We may also have to re-schedule the timing of some of the projects so we can fit them to our predicted cash flow and borrowings. However, we are confident that we can manage the tight financial position over the two years and also keep us on our trajectory to secure and even improve our international standing.
I have one last comment I would like to make. This is Moger Woolley’s last Court as your Chair of Council. We will have other opportunities to thank him, but it is only right and proper that I, as his Vice-Chancellor, should use this occasion to thank him. Moger has asked that such comments be kept brief, but suffice it to say that he has been the very best Chair of Council in every sense and the health of the University as you see it today is due, in no small measure, to his leadership and wisdom over the years. It’s not easy being Chair of a university Council these days, but Moger has got it exactly right – we shall all certainly miss him, but I am delighted to see that you will be asked to endorse him as a Pro-Chancellor in the formal meeting so that we can continue to have his invaluable input. In the end, our feelings are really quite simple – thank you, Moger, and well done.
So, Madame Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, your University is facing challenges but is still delivering international quality education and research and will continue so to do. I have every confidence that when I speak to you next year there will be more good stories to tell and still more challenges to face – as the Prime Minister said when he gave a lecture here in the summer, “This is a great city and this is a great university”.
Thank you.