It’s certainly different this year. The location and organisation is different. But the underlying essentials are the same: our graduation ceremonies, conducted in the shadow of the pandemic, are both different and the same. The University wasn’t able to hold graduation ceremonies in 2020, which means that this year’s events, which conclude this week, allow…
If CO2 were coloured, the sky would have changed hue in our lifetime. That’s striking enough, but perhaps more striking is the inevitable next question: would we have noticed? After all, any number of other major environmental changes have occurred in the last fifty years. The transformation has been remarkable, on the global scale the…
The UK Social Mobility Awards (SOMO) are a cross-society set of awards “established to recognise and encourage action that will promote and increase social mobility within Britain’s companies and institutions. These awards…recognise best practice and innovation and celebrate excellence and achievement and elevate social mobility as a cause equal to the level of other diversity…
It’s not over. It’s particularly not over in the global south, where vaccination rates and hospitalisations continue to place enormous strain on often rudimentary public health services. It’s not over in the UK either, though here vaccination appears to have broken the link between infection and hospitalisation. It’s not over, but in many small ways,…
Around the country, children have returned to school and students are returning – or starting – university. The pandemic may not be over, but many semblances of normality are returning. It’s been a long time for all of us, but if you are a young person, the last eighteen months has been a huge proportion…
Throughout my career, I’ve always had a very distinctive feeling at this time of year. You know that Autumn is in the air. The mornings are a little darker and a little cooler. The leaves beginning to turn. The “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is upon us. Despite a careful reading of Keats’s poem,…
It’s not true, of course, that universities close up shop in late July and August. There’s always a lot of work going on across campuses, visibly and less visibly. The academic financial year ends on 31 July, so finance teams are busy with year-end activities. A-level, International Baccalaureate and BTEC results are out in mid-August…
The Government has announced that all legal pandemic restrictions will end on July 19. Covid is not over: as the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid has said, as a society we are going to need to learn to live with Covid-19. Clearly, he isn’t wrong: Covid-19 is simply the latest coronavirus in global circulation. Four…
This blog is a week – to be more accurate, a week and a day – later. I took a week’s leave last week. and we went away for a week of walking, cycling and exploring to a remote corner of Herefordshire. We might have chosen a week of better weather, but it was nonetheless…
There’s an old, and now very hackneyed story which used to feature a lot in management training courses, about how (the example was always a frog) if a frog is in a saucepan of water which is gently heated, it simply doesn’t notice the change in temperature until it’s too late for it to react.…