A week of Excellence

I spent most of last week caught up in excellence:

Perhaps most importantly we completed the process of promoting colleagues to Readers and Professors.  Engineering did particularly well with  8 new Readers and 6 new Professors.  Announcements will be in the next Faculty Newsletter (1 Feb, I think).

Apart from that, I spent four days in Germany as part of a review panel considering submissions for Clusters of Excellence in the frame of the German Government's Excellence Initiative (EI).  Can you imagine travelling to small provincial city (Swindon, perhaps) as part of a 20-strong delegation from your University to sell your vision of how you could develop a world leading cluster?  Imagine taking your Vice Chancellor and your State Minister of Science (Education is traditionally a state, not federal, matter in Germany) and then being grilled for 4 hours by a 20-strong international panel.  The prize?  €40M per successful cluster.  So far the EI has handed out €1.9B in the first round with a further €800M to be distributed in the present second round

The Science was good - though no better than three or four similar clusters we might advance in Sheffield - but most striking was the need for very significant reform in hiring and progression policy,  most obviously in connection with gender equality.  The norm seemed to be about 5% women among professors in German engineering.  Since one of the objectives of the EI is gender equality, it is not surprisingly these interconnected issues were scrutinised carefully.  Given the priority that we are giving to Women in Engineering at the moment, it was very interesting to see some of their quite bold ideas.

The most sobering point from a UK perspective was the intense political will - at both federal and state levels - to make good German universities even better and to harness that improvement for the good of the country.  While our own government speaks of the value universities can add, there aren't many €40M pots to bid for at the moment and David Willett's recent speech advocating a growth in world-class science with no more money, seems faintly ridiculous by comparison.

Should 'Engineer' be a protected title?

Well I think so, and prompted by one of our students I've just signed an e-petition:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/6271

Now, it's not that I object to a washing machine repairer being called an engineer (or not much, anyway. Besides the guy who repairs my washing machine is an engineer - me) Instead I want to make a noise about the virtues of engineering as a discipline and as a profession. It's simple really: engineers work with their brains not their hands.

New Year Stuff

This is the season for resolutions and crystal-ball gazing.  I do have a New Year's resolution - it is to get fit enough to ride the Maratona dles Dolomites in July - roughly the equivalent of riding up and down Froggatt Edge  20 times!


And the crystal ball?  I think the key issues for the Faculty this coming year will be:

1. The Research Excellence Framework (REF). Each year the Faculty receives a little over £10M from the government as part of our core grant, reflecting the quality and volume of our research.  We spend that money on general running and staff costs.  The assessment of quality happens every few years through what was known as the RAE, and will be known as REF.  This is the year where we start to crank up our preparations at faculty level - commencing with the appointment of a Faculty REF coordinator.  We have taken a deliberately low-key approach until now, confident that departments have things in hand and that the best preparation for the REF was to give people time to do world-class research. In that respect, if I were to make one observation of how best to prepare for the REF it would be: finish writing that killer paper before second semester starts.
2. 2012 is here!  2012 in this context being not just a date but the year in which home undergraduate fees rise to £9K.  This means two things: our admissions teams will have even more work to do than usual managing student recruitment and when the students arrive we must give them the experience we promise.  In that regard, Richard Tozer recently wrote a very interesting paper for Faculty Learning and Teaching Committee about student satisfaction.  The upshot was: the great majority of our students are thoroughly satisfied because the great majority of our staff make the effort to do the things we say we do.  So my one message would be: keep doing the things we say we do.
3. Buildings.  A lot of people in the Faculty will spend a lot of time this year planning the delivery of the new Engineering Graduate School (on the corner of Broad Lane and Newcastle Street), the design of the New Engineering Building on the Jessop's East Site and the refurbishment of the entire Mappin quad.  This is surely a once in a generation opportunity to change the environment in which we work - get involved!

Happy New Year