Like Christmas, graduation comes but once a year, and, like Christmas, never fails to be engaging in all sorts of ways. It is, of course, an enormous logistical exercise designed to produce flawless occasions: it is essentially a two-week run of performances to full houses at Sheffield City Hall with a shifting repertory cast. I’m…
The General Election will take place on the 12th December. It’s going to be a long six weeks running through the shortening days of the Autumn: a season of vicious political debate, a fair amount of mendacity and, doubtless, numerous twists and turns. The nation is deeply divided. There are deep political, economic, social, cultural…
It was badged as ‘Super Saturday’: the day on which Parliament made a definitive decision about the Prime Minister’s negotiated deal with the European Union. That might have meant that Brexit would be almost over, or that the difficult discussions were just beginning. Which of these judgements you make on Brexit probably depends on your…
The campus has come alive again. Students are spilling out of lecture theatres, seminar rooms and informal study spaces. The campus feels busy and engaged; teaching has begun and students I’ve talked to in the cafes, lifts and corridors are already feeling enthused about their studies. A new academic year is underway. On Friday 27…
Let’s start with a quotation: “One of our big civic universities, Sheffield Hallam is enjoying something of a renaissance. Students have repeatedly given it good ratings for the quality of its teaching, but this year their assessments have propelled the university to a new high. Achieving sustained success in this area is hard, all the…
There’s a map which the University’s planning team sent me a few months ago. It’s a map of the UK, with the home address of every single one of the University’s undergraduate students represented by a single dot. As you’d expect – it would be true of almost every university in the country that recruitment…
This is my last blog of the academic year; after this week, the blog will take its summer break. It’s an opportunity to look back over the year just gone and to step back a little. It’s been a busy and full year for the university with some striking achievements. The University has secured its…
We are coming to the end of the conventional academic year. Across most of the University, exams have been taken and marking is well underway. But that also means that – as the title of this blog indicates – it’s showtime. In the Head Post Office, the Sheffield Institute of Art degree show is on,…
Last week, the government published the long-awaited independent panel report for the review of post-18 education and training funding. The panel, chaired by the former banker Philip Augar, was initially established by Theresa May in early 2018. Its remit was to look at the long-term funding of universities and the balance between university-based higher education…
I love books. I always have two or three books on the go. Always a novel, which tends to get read in bed. I’ve just finished Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley, which opens as a pastoral idyll of England in the 1930s but darkens and deepens, with fascism more than in the background and a…