The election results are in. The political gridlock of the last three years – to which we had all become accustomed – is over. The outcome is, if nothing else decisive. It’s far more decisive than I had hinted as a prediction in my blog just after the election was called. We now have not…
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 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…
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,…
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…
How do you feel when you’re asked how you feel? University Mental Health Day (UMHD) is this week – a national initiative on Thursday 7 March to focus attention on mental health: on the importance of good mental health and on the challenges – for all of us – of mental ill-health. Deborah Harry, our…
Traditionally, it’s the time of the year to look ahead and make predictions about what the New Year has in store for us. But predictions are – mostly – a mug’s game. The New Yorker magazine had great fun a couple of weeks ago revisiting an article it published in 1968, in which it invited contributors…
Most of us have our festive traditions – the family meal, the Boxing Day walk, the silly sweaters. My definition of a tradition is that it begins when something happens two years in a row for the same reason. And so, like last year (and looking forward to next) here are 2018’s twelve Hallam days…
We are just halfway through the University’s annual graduation ceremonies. I spent a good deal of last week, and will spend a good deal of this one, at City Hall, as participant—and, of course, observer—as another cohort of the University’s students complete their journey with us. You have an odd perspective from the stage: the…