President's weekly update
19 May 2022
Cockroft Rutherford Lecture and other University events
We held our annual alumni lecture in person for the first time since before the pandemic, in MECD. The lecture was given by Maggie Philbin OBE, a well-known TV and radio presenter and co-founder of TeenTech, supporting young entrepreneurs. She spoke about ‘Innovators of Tomorrow’. Our Chancellor, Lemn Sissay also conferred an honorary doctorate on Maggie. You can watch the recorded event on StaffNet.
The lecture is aimed at thanking our many alumni volunteers and donors and a reception was also held for visitors in the Maker Space in MECD. Maggie is one of our alumni, as is her daughter, and we spoke about how we can engage with her charity TeenTech which aims to inspire young people to go into science, technology and engineering.
I was also pleased to attend and speak at the official opening of the British Pop Archive in our John Rylands Library on Deansgate, which was attended by about 200 people from the University and pop music industry in Manchester, including some famous names! It is a great honour that we are hosting this national archive, which recognises the major role of Manchester in popular art and culture.
Staff meetings and engagement
Meeting with and listening to staff and students is a key part of my role. This week I met a group of staff from across the University and we discussed what is good and what is less good about us. This was on the day that the REF results were made public so we discussed how we build on our success. They all welcomed our values, our infrastructure, collegiality and support from other colleagues, commitment to social responsibility and our recent Race Matters report. They raised concerns about meeting our carbon targets, our scale - which has many benefits but also mean staff feel rather lost and distant from leadership, transparency of our finances, data acquisition from the NHS, our lack of agility and slowness to change in some areas and future access to European funding, through Horizon Europe and the European Research Council, which still remains uncertain. All challenges for us to address as much as we can.
An online meeting was also held with about 60 new staff. After a brief outline of the University, our strengths and ambitions, I answered questions on our future plans, hybrid working, community engagement, our school governors programme, health inequalities and our 200th anniversary and planned fundraising campaign.
External meetings
V-Cs from across Greater Manchester met to discuss our work with the Further Education Colleges, our Civic University agreement, the REF results and Innovation Greater Manchester. Professor Malcolm Press, V-C of Manchester Metropolitan University who hosted the event, has written a great blog on our partnership. We met in MMU’s School of Digital Art which is really impressive.
At a Russell Group event, we met Indro Mukerjee, Chief Executive Officer of InnovateUK, to discuss how research-intensive universities such as ours can work more closely with them. We also talked in some detail about the role that innovation will play in the government’s levelling up agenda and they referred to the work in Greater Manchester, for example with Rochdale.
I joined the final evidence session for the Times Education Commission (I’m one of the commissioners) which met several experts to discuss post-16 education in further and higher education, including Nick Hillman who is a member of our Board. We talked about the narrow education in the UK pre-degree, the need to expand higher education as demographics change, the importance of further education and the increasingly unsustainable funding of universities. The final report of the commission is due out in just over a month.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor