Beyond buildings that inspire

There’s an episode in series one of The West Wing (it’s episode 18, ‘Six Meetings Before Lunch’, a day I can understand), in which Sam Seaborn, the junior speechwriter, is talking about education policy and defence policy. He says “Schools should be palaces. They should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge…

Meeting the challenges of change

Since I arrived in January, I have been setting out my ideas on the future of Hallam, and have written here about refreshing the University’s strategy. From today, you can find out more about how we will approach this work and keep up to date with developments here. Alongside that, I have been looking hard…

Why referendum voting is really a young person’s game

I’d be lying (and that’s something Vice-Chancellors should never be caught doing) if I said that I played any part at all in the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market. I was sixteen, I had plenty of other things on my mind. There was the first Cricket World Cup to occupy me,…

The Hallam Fund – enabling us to do good things better

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago caused something of a stir. It looked at the connection between university degrees and subsequent earnings, using HMRC data to track individuals over time. At the core of the report is a simple challenge which characterises higher education systems across…