John Gottman researches marital relationships. After analysing a normal conversation between a husband and wife for an hour, Gottman can predict whether that couple will still be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyses them for 15 minutes, his accuracy is around 90%. But if he analyses them for only three minutes,…
My update this week takes the form of a short video blog (or vlog), thinking about our community at Hallam and what ‘Brexit’ means for us.
Last week, I used my blog to set out the reasons why I believed that the UK should remain in the European Union. As the last Prime Minister who took us into a referendum is reputed to have said, “a week is a long time in politics”, and one week on, the landscape looks very…
This is a momentous week. The EU referendum is more important than a General Election: where General Elections come around every five years, this is a once-in-a-generation vote, about the sort of country we are going to be. In earlier blog posts, and in interviews, I’ve made my personal position clear – I will be…
They are selling replica Leicester City shirts on market stalls in Beijing. They weren’t selling them a year ago. That’s what topping the Premier League does. It’s almost certain that Leicester’s two universities will now see a spike in international, and probably UK, applications: everyone loves a winner. The Guardian published its 2017 University Guide…
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…
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 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…
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…