The campuses blossomed into new life last week – like the sudden arrival of spring – as our students arrived and returned. By the end of Friday, 23 September, 11,019 (that’s 96%) of our new students had fully enrolled, and 14,890 returning students had re-enrolled (that’s 91%). The sheer numbers involved are remarkable, and the…
In very early photographs of towns, villages and cities, something appears to be missing: there are almost never any people in them. There’s a technical reason for this. Due to the long exposure time, many individuals who walked the street were not in place long enough to make an impression. The first photograph to capture…
It’s the beginning of a new academic year. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, The History Man – itself a vicious satire of 1970s university life and morals – opens at the beginning of a new academic year with a few sentences which catch the sense: “Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. …
The French Emperor Napoleon, or it may have been Frederick the Great of Prussia, famously commented that “an army marches on its stomach”. A Clearing operation is sustained by bacon and sausage sandwiches. By 7am last Thursday, thirty minutes after the Hallam Clearing and Adjustment lines had opened, the food outlet in the Owen Building…
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,…
It’s been a remarkable few weeks. An unexpected referendum result. The collapse of the Government. A ferocious start to the leadership campaign in the Conservative Party. A no-confidence vote in the Leader of the Opposition. Havoc in the Labour Party. And Wales in the semi-final of the European football championships. The script, when they come…
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…
The iPhone. The 2007 economic crash. Leicester City winning the Premiership. Did you see them coming? Predicting the future is always likely to catch you out. As someone once said, nothing dates faster than the future. So it’s a bit bold to suggest that we should base our new strategy on our aims for the…