This is the third of my blogs which is drawn from my all-staff addresses earlier in February. It sets out my first thoughts – with more to come – on shaping the University in response to the challenges I set out in the previous two blogs. A Vice-Chancellor’s job is essentially simple: it is to…
This is the second of three blogs from my opening address to Hallam staff. In it I set out some of the challenges the University faces. Universities may be becoming more and more important in economies, society and culture. But there’s a price: as they do, expectations and demands on them become greater. We can…
In the first week of February I spoke to staff audiences across the University to set out my impressions and first thoughts. Over the coming weeks, I will set those out in three blog posts. There has never been a time in the history of the world when universities have meant more to more people than…
University admissions are changing – and at a phenomenal pace. Universities have always been competitive about admissions, and there has always been a mixed and complicated relationship between recruitment and selection. But in the last few years the pace has quickened. Students have been required to meet more and more of the direct costs of…
Universities are simultaneously intensely local and expansively global. They are shaped by their communities, and they shape their communities: without their universities, Oxford, or Cambridge, or Boston, or Heidelberg are unimaginable. The first thing you see as you emerge from Sheffield station is Sheffield Hallam University. One of the ways in which universities shape their…