President's weekly update
7 March 2024
City celebration of our bicentenary
The City of Manchester hosted a wonderful event at the Manchester Art Gallery to celebrate the bicentenary for our university and Manchester Metropolitan University. It was hosted by the Lady Mayoress. Presentations were made by the Lord Mayor, myself and Professor Malcolm Press, Vice-Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan. We were joined by many local MPs, councillors, local business leaders, senior staff from both universities and our guests. We both talked about the great value of the civic partnerships in our city region, which are second to none.
Schools and Faculties visits
I visited the Faculty Leadership Team in Humanities. We discussed the challenges and opportunities for humanities in the future. We also talked about what feels like increased polarization of views about topics such as Israel/Palestine and the pro-life society at the Students’ Union. Many of our staff, students and wider society have strong and varied views on such topics and must be free to express those views, but in a respectful and peaceful manner.
Students in the School of Natural Sciences wanted more networking opportunities and events with alumni. They felt that prices at Food on Campus were high, had mixed views on the balance of online and in-person teaching and one asked about our commercial partnerships.
Some staff who attended our visit complained about administrative load, loss of experienced staff, SEP and marketisation of higher education, but at the end, one thanked me for attending open meetings and my leadership which gained a round of applause.
Meeting with university leaders
In a meeting with about 50 leaders from across the university, I highlighted a number of our recent successes including our bicentenary events. Balanced against this, I talked about worrying messages concerning financial difficulties from several universities. Patrick Hackett, Registrar, Secretary and Chief Operating Officer, updated on the good progress we have made in addressing the operational difficulties that we faced at the start of the academic year and the much better start we have made to Semester 2. This was followed by, Professor Dawn Edge, Academic Lead for EDI, who described our recent successes in Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter Mark and Julian Skyrme, Director for Social Responsibility, spoke about our platinum (the highest) award for our public engagement activities. Professor Nalin Thakker, Vice-President for Social Responsibility, reported on the successes for our Whitworth Gallery, Museum and Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre.
Ethnicity and disability
I met our new participants in the 100 Black Women Professors programme. I am pleased to say we have had participants in each programme over the three years it has been running. They were very positive about their first event and already had a lot of ideas of how we can support black women who want to succeed in academia.
I was also delighted to take part in an interview with Dr Hamied Haroon as part of the ‘Let’s Talk Disability’ series of podcasts. This will be available to watch soon.
We are now seeking successors to Adele MacKinlay and Banji Adewumi (when she leaves us in June) to continue their great work on our People and EDI agendas.
External Relations and our wider reputation
At the external relations strategy group meeting, we had a presentation on the annual independent review of our reputation amongst our many stakeholders internally and externally. In some cases the net promoter scores (the balance of positive against negative scores) had improved, notably for our staff and students, and we were again ranked third for reputation behind Oxford and Cambridge which was good to see. Scores for prospective PG and for international students were, however, down. We also heard about our response to the biennial external stakeholder survey of our university and plans for next year which will include gathering more international views. We also had updates on our work with Greater Manchester Further Education Colleges, on the regional innovation review and on Manchester’s very positive award as a UNESCO City of Lifelong Learning.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor