The University approved a new strategy, for 2015-2020, in late 2014. I was obviously not here, but I’m told that the strategy was the result of extensive consultation across the University over an extended period of time. Since the 2015-2020 strategy was published, any number of things have changed: there has been a general election,…
The English author and critic Simon Gray had a pretty caustic view of his university experiences. “I wrote all my papers”, he claimed, “with a fraudulent fluency that could only have taken in those who were bound by their own educations to honour a fluent fraud”. Others, of course, have a nobler view of what…
It’s a new term, and a new season: the headline is itself a quotation from Browning’s poem, Home Thoughts, from Abroad, which begins ‘oh, to be in England, now that April’s there’. The clocks have gone forward, bringing lighter evenings and a sense of Spring arriving. It’s the beginning of – either – my second term…