This is the second of three blogs from my opening address to Hallam staff. In it I set out some of the challenges the University faces. Universities may be becoming more and more important in economies, society and culture. But there’s a price: as they do, expectations and demands on them become greater. We can…

In the first week of February I spoke to staff audiences across the University to set out my impressions and first thoughts. Over the coming weeks, I will set those out in three blog posts. There has never been a time in the history of the world when universities have meant more to more people than…

University admissions are changing – and at a phenomenal pace. Universities have always been competitive about admissions, and there has always been a mixed and complicated relationship between recruitment and selection. But in the last few years the pace has quickened. Students have been required to meet more and more of the direct costs of…

Universities are simultaneously intensely local and expansively global. They are shaped by their communities, and they shape their communities: without their universities, Oxford, or Cambridge, or Boston, or Heidelberg are unimaginable. The first thing you see as you emerge from Sheffield station is Sheffield Hallam University. One of the ways in which universities shape their…

Who Do You Think You Are? It’s a great programme, and makes for compelling TV. We’re all interested in the stories people have to tell, and every family history turns out to have complicated, often mysterious twists. As I walk around the University meeting new colleagues, I try to ask people to tell me something…

There’s no script for being a new Vice-Chancellor. In fact, what is clear is that you enter midway through someone else’s script – and a script with many authors. If you’re lucky they hand you a copy as they leave the stage.  Given that I have taken the stage in January this means that I arrive…

Something over thirty years ago, in my first job, I remember asking a colleague how some particular process or other should work. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said, “it’s just the same as last year”. It was no doubt well-meant, but it’s obviously not a very helpful thing to say to someone who is new. In…