| On 26 October 2017 Hallam celebrated its 25th birthday as a University. As part of the celebration we are featuring a series of stories in Eview over the next 12 months from staff who have been part of the University for 25 years or longer and remember the transition from ‘poly’ to University well.
Get involved: If you have stories and memories of Hallam at this time (or even better photos/videos!) that you would like to share with Eview we want to hear from you – get in touch via eview@shu.ac.uk or Twitter (@HallamStaff). |
Story of the month:
25 years on Mark Swales talks about the changes to the SHU estate since the nineties and the people that have kept him at SHU since then.
Stories so far:
Jill Lebihan (Head of Student Engagement) remembers a Sheffield City Polytechnic world of pigeonholes and no email.
Professor Susan Laird reflects on first “grim up north” impressions and how far attitudes to female academics have changed.
Bev and Dave Weaver, husband and wife, whose eyes met at Collegiate Crescent after starting at Hallam just five days apart.
Dr Malcolm Denman of ACES who has some fabulous 90s memories where open days included a trip to the infamous Sheffield Ski Village!
Mark Swales
My very first memory of Hallam
I was appointed as House Services Manager and started on 1 June 1992 with responsibility for our facilities management (FM) and on-campus service operations. I’d come from Keele University, a single campus institution, to Sheffield City Polytechnic with seven different teaching and residential campuses. I remember on my first day, Alex Pettifer, who was Head of Business and Commercial Services, driving me around to visit all the sites and how everything was either silver or burgundy, the corporate colours. From floor tiles (not much carpet in those days!) to staff uniforms, it was all very drab and bland. The estate was in a very poor condition, particularly the residences which for many of the student rooms still had the old two-pin plugs. We did a roaring trade in selling plug adapters apparently.
On that first day, the JCB diggers moved in to start clearing the site for the Campus 21 project which created the City Campus atrium, Howard, Harmer and Sheaf buildings we know today. That’s what brought me back to Sheffield Polytechnic in the first place after I graduated here in 1981. At £27m, it was then the largest single capital investment in a higher education institution.
By October that year we had become Sheffield Hallam University and I remember the event we put on at the Don Valley Grass Bowl to celebrate the launch of the University. We sponsored a concert by Opera North with an orchestra and fireworks for the grand finale. We’d hired a marquee and walk-in fridges to support the champagne and canapé reception with a host of invited VIP guests. The secretary of state for education gave a speech in the main hall that month and we had mounted police in Hallam Square; unfortunately this didn’t stop him getting floured and egg bombed!
My stand out moments
There have been so many. I guess my daughter, who was six years old at the time, presenting the flowers to the Queen when she came to open the Campus 21 project in 1994 is one. As is the Facilities Directorate winning the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards, amongst the many other external recognition awards the team have won over the years. It’s a great credit to the fabulous people in FD who rightly deserve the pat on the back these provide for a job well done.
The tenth birthday party when we had over 900 staff attend a great evening of food and entertainment in three different venues. We had fire eaters and trapeze artists in the atrium, a staff blues band in the main hall and a staff rock band in the student union. The excitement of the Tour De France events was another highlight as was receiving my master’s degree the first year that FD took on the responsibility of operating the graduation ceremonies. In June 2007 when 12 staff stayed behind to look after 500 stranded Sheffield folk due to the floods was another memorable event. We gave them all dinner and breakfast the next morning and by 10 am you wouldn’t have known anything like that had happened. We received a special commendation award from the City Council for all our efforts.
I guess my final one has to be being appointed as Director of Estates and Facilities back in 2010. I received fantastic support from my colleagues, which continues today, and I feel so lucky to lead such a great team and to have the opportunity to work with University Leadership Team and professional services colleagues to make Sheffield Hallam University an inspiring place to be for our students and staff.
The biggest change since I started at Hallam.
I guess it has to be the incredible changes we’ve made to our campus locations over the years. I have been involved in the disposal of our residential estate – remember Norfolk Park? Then there were the teaching campus closures that I have had to deliver from Totley and Psalter Lane to the more recent Hallamshire Business Park. We have transformed the physical footprint and our services have gained a national reputation for the quality of our FM, commercial and estates operations. This has delivered a very different student experience to the one that was on offer back in 1992 and I believe it is for the better. Keeping abreast of all the teaching and learning developments alongside increasing expectations from our customers has been the driver for all the changes we have made.
What has made me stay at Hallam?
It’s got to be the people and the opportunities to develop my skills as a leader. I have worked with some amazing people both across the Directorate and the University which has been an honour. There is something about being a member of the Hallam experience that you cannot put your finger on but it just gets to you. Everyone I meet has that “Hallam First” ethos that inspires me every day to do my best for this institution. It is contagious. I have had so many opportunities to grow my professional life at Hallam, contributing to the HE sector through the work I did with UUK on student accommodation to delivering the very last HEFCE Value for Money Study which covered cleaning and other facilities operations! At Hallam I have had the opportunity to implement Investors in People, EFQM, Customer First and a range of international standards which have all been great learning experiences. I have always felt supported to explore news ways of working. It is that personal challenge and growth and working with superb colleagues that gets you out of bed every morning.
And finally… the best thing about working at Hallam
It has to be our amazing students. I love working with the student union officers each year, they bring a fresh challenge and keep you on your toes. Just experiencing the sense of pride at the Varsity competitions or sense of achievement at graduation fills you with a level of satisfaction that you have in some small way contributed to enabling our students to succeed in transforming their lives.
I arrived at Sheffield City Polytechnic in 1991 on a one-year temporary contract, with a partially completed PhD thesis, a couple of unstarry publications and a year of experience as a graduate teaching assistant to my name. I’m acutely conscious that if I were applying to a similar post in today’s market, I wouldn’t get even a sniff of an interview. I was allocated a bay-windowed office, complete with wisteria, looking out over a willow tree at the top of Collegiate Crescent. I shared my room with an older colleague, Frances Dann, and her encyclopaedic knowledge of nineteenth-century literature and her roots in the Totley teaching college from whence the University sprung. She taught me much about being a lecturer, and about George Eliot, and she left me her first edition of Middlemarch when she retired.
We had books but no computers, a pigeonhole for messages in the staff office, and taught all our seminars, of 8-12 students, in the same Georgian building with steamy windows and an idiosyncratic boiler. I had 21 contact hours a week, but there was a four-week break at Christmas and at Easter, no email, and not that many students. My dad thought it was hilarious that I was getting paid to read books. I knew it was a privilege.
In 2018, I have a hot desk in an office with 80+ others in Oneleven with a view of the buses and traffic of Arundel Gate. My responsibility as Head of Student Engagement is emphatically a modern University creation and my student cohort is not a handful but thousands. I read fewer lengthy nineteenth-century works these days, and more online documents of higher education policy and pedagogy. My message box is at the 60-a-day mark (the poor old pigeonhole would never have coped), and my seminars are with new staff who are becoming teachers. I am also involved with student leaders, peer educators and researchers, who are currently working with me on bystander interventions to prevent harassment, and a project to promote mutually respectful discussion on campus (@dontstandbySHU). Working with students on ethical behaviour and the professional use of social media seems prescient in the wake of the Toby Young debacle that assailed the launch of the Office for Students, a governmental body appointed precisely to oversee our relationships with students. If nothing else, it provides me with a lively case study to illustrate how not to behave on public forums.
It’s hard not to feel nostalgia for that past. We knew our students so well, and had great freedom in what and how we taught. No Office for Students then. I was not heedless of student preferences, but I negotiated in person rather than by survey, and as we launch the annual National Student Survey, we need to remember that the formal evaluation is necessary to provide an overview but it is not in any way a replacement for having friendly discussions with our students about how things are going, how they’re managing their work, about how we can help them learn, and how we can change what we do when it’s just not doing what we hope it will.
For more information on NSS at Hallam this year head to: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/NSS/
My time so far at Hallam
I started work in April 1989 as a lecturer in the Division of Biomedical Sciences, having moved to Sheffield from London. It was a week before the Hillsborough Disaster and it was strange listening to something that was so close unfold on the radio. I had previously completed a PhD and Postdoctoral position studying adrenocortical endocrinology at the Medical College of Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and was ready for a lecturer position. Whilst at SHU I have taught various subjects including Physiology, Cell Biology and Reproductive Biology. I have been course leader for HND Biomedical Science and BSc Human Biosciences. I have been a subject group leader, Head of Programme Area and I am now Head of Department of Biosciences and Chemistry. I have been an active researcher throughout my time at SHU and have developed a research career in reproductive biology, in collaboration with clinicians at the Jessop Wing, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. I am interested in the role of the endometrium in embryo implantation; if we can understand how it works on a molecular and cellular level we may be able to designed informed treatments for reproductive disorders such as infertility and recurrent miscarriage. I have published over 150 abstracts and papers and presented my work at and national meetings and conferences. This culminated in my appointment as Professor of Reproductive Biology in 2016. This integration of research and teaching is really important for the University – without it we are no different from Further Education Colleges.
My very first memory of Hallam
I remember my interview which was held in the Surrey building and looking out over the original Park Hill flats. It was a cold and grey January day and Sheffield did not appear the most inviting place to move to.
I remember how different it felt being an individual lecturer rather than a member of a research group. You really did feel on your own in front of a group of students. I soon got used to it.
My stand out moments
The best thing is making a difference to the student experience and seeing individual students fulfil their academic potential; the value we add to individual student lives is amazing. Even as Head of Department I still do some teaching and the personal thanks that I get from students who I have supervised still gives me a real buzz.
I am also incredibly proud of being appointed Head of Department and also of obtaining my Professorship, which was something I did not envisage when I started work here.
It was also pleasing to be part of the leadership team which re-introduced the Chemistry degree to the University. We never stopped delivering Chemistry (as highlighted by the 50th anniversary of the introduction of Chemistry events this week), but had to disguise it as Pharmaceutical Sciences or Forensic and Analytical Science for a number of years. It was a really good decision to bring back the course- it is the most successful new course to be introduced to SHU; it recruits well and has excellent student satisfaction.
The biggest change since I started at Hallam
The main change is the number of students; When I started the biggest course cohort was 40-50 students, now it can be over 120. We have also diversified our provision and are offering a portfolio of courses rather than just a single degree and HND course.
Other changes include that there is more acceptance of the equality of women – at my interview I was asked what my husband would do if I was offered the post – I suspect that the male applicants were not asked that question and we would never even think about asking it now. I also remember being in an exam board where the chair assumed that I was a member of support staff, I assume because I was young and female.
What has made me stay Hallam
Sheffield Hallam has offered me the opportunities to develop my career in a way that I have wanted. There were times when I got frustrated and started to look elsewhere for opportunities, but each time something new and appropriate came up at SHU. My research has always been really important to me and in recent years it would have been really difficult to keep that going if I had moved away from Sheffield and lost all my links here.
There are things about SHU that are frustrating, but it is probably no different to other Universities.
And finally…the best thing about working at Hallam
The people and the collegiate spirit. Certainly in the areas that I have worked in we all work together to solve problems, but also to celebrate success.
Bev and Dave Weaver have 50 years’ service for Sheffield Hallam between them.
They both started at the then Sheffield City Polytechnic, shortly before it became Sheffield Hallam University in October 1992. But it was eight years later that the couple finally met when Dave, who works in security, transferred to Collegiate Crescent after the old Totley campus where he was based was closed.
Beverly was working as a cleaner and then catering assistant at Marshall Halls of Residence when Dave moved to join the security team there.
Dave said: “We got to know each other when we collected the takings from the catering outlets on the morning shift. We started talking and found a common connection.
“It turned out that for years I had worked nights with her dad, who was also in security, at the old campus up at Totley before I moved to Collegiate Crescent. We also worked out that Beverly started at the University five days before me.”
They married in 2008 with a number of their colleagues there to help them celebrate the occasion. Meeting his wife isn’t the only major event to have taken place at work for Dave. He also saved a colleague’s life.
Dave explains: “A member of staff in the Stoddart building wasn’t feeling well so a colleague and I were called over to give first aid. We had been looking after him for around 30 minutes when he collapsed and stopped breathing.
“We dragged him to the floor and gave him CPR and fitted the defibrillator to his chest. As a result of the CPR and the shock from the defibrillator he survived.”
They both have fond memories of working with the students in the halls despite both now moving to new roles within the University.
Bev said: “I loved meeting all of the new students and parents. When I worked as a cleaner in halls, I used to always work on the Sunday when the new students arrived. I loved that, being there when they get dropped off all excited and then seeing them the next day upset about leaving their parents. It’s a massive change for them being away from home, and sometimes they treated me as a mother.”
The halls of residence where they met have since been demolished to make way for the University’s new Heart of the Campus building, but Dave isn’t too sentimental.
“My work colleagues, not the buildings, are the reason I have stayed so long, as they are a great bunch of people. Also, never knowing what’s going to happen day to day as anything could, and has, happened.
“I’ve never really thought about how it makes me feel to have worked for the University for 25 years – apart from making me feel quite old.”
Bev also says she is still happy here after a quarter of a century and doesn’t have any plans to leave any time soon.
“There’s been lots of change but that’s good, there are lots of new buildings and many of the old ones are gone.
“I just love working at the University. My brother has worked for his firm for 30 years; loyalty must run in the family.”
Dr Malcolm Denman (ACES) is now in his 40th year at Hallam and below he gives us a few snippets from 1992…
Engineering were at the forefront in the development of the Open Day which later became university wide.
The photo at Sheffield Arena shows our prospective students and parents and two Canadian Ice hockey players ‘Rocket’ Ron Shudra and Steve Nemeth who played for the Sheffield Steelers (photo taken on 22 Jan 1992).
Questionnaires had identified students wanted to know more about the accommodation and facilities in Sheffield so the coach trip took in Sheffield Arena, Ponds Forge, Meadowhall and Norfolk Park student accommodation.
On other occasions we visited Don Valley Stadium and included a trip out to the peak district (traffic then was less of a problem). We even arranged one group of students to have a skiing lesson at the Sheffield Ski Slopes.