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88 22
March 2012 ***************************************************** 'Truth:
lies open to all' ***************************************************** Every
fortnight during term-time. All
editorial correspondence to: subtext-editors [at] lancaster.ac.uk. Please
delete as soon as possible after receipt. Back issues and subscription
details can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext. The
editors welcome letters, comments, suggestions and opinions from readers. subtext reserves the right to edit submissions. subtext does not publish material that is submitted
anonymously, but is willing to consider without obligation requests for
publication with the name withheld. For
tips to prevent subtext from getting swept up into your 'junk email folder',
see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/dejunk/. If
you're viewing this using Outlook, the formatting might look better if you
click on the message at the top saying 'Extra line breaks in this message
were removed', and select 'Restore line breaks'. CONTENTS:
editorial, not all about Liverpool, external examiners, BPR hots up, LUSU, Centros, Cambridge
student suspended, Adrian Cunningham, Bill Potts, University Court report,
concert review, letters ***************************************************** EDITORIAL On
12 March the Russell Group of 'research-intensive universities' announced
that it was expanding. The four new
members were announced as Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary and York Universities,
who had all previously been members of the 1994 group, to which Lancaster
belongs. According to the press release at http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/russell-group-latest-news/151-2012/5216-russell-group-of-universities-agrees-to-expand/,
these four had 'demonstrated that - like all other Russell Group members -
they excel in research, innovation and education and have a critical mass of
research excellence across a wide range of disciplines'. They had therefore
been invited to join the Group, and all had accepted. This
development takes the Russell Group up from 20 to 24 members, and the 1994
Group down from 19 to 15. The Chair of the 1994 Group tried to put a brave
face on the defection. Professor
Michael Farthing, V-C of Sussex, said he was disappointed by it, but wished
the four universities well in 'their new mission group'. They were excellent
institutions with global reputations, like all 1994 Group members, he said,
and it was 'a mark of pride' that the 1994 Group had helped them build on
these reputations (see http://www.1994group.ac.uk/newsitem.php?item=427).
The
omission of Lancaster from the list of invitees felt like a bit of a snub. We
are doing very well in league tables, better indeed than the new Russell
Group members: we are 7th in the Guardian's tables, 9th in those of the
Times. We also score very well in terms of research quality – in the 2008 RAE
the proportion of Lancaster's submitted staff graded as 3* or 4* was 61% -
closer to the average of the Russell Group (61.9%) than that of the 1994
Group (56.9%). In contrast, that of Exeter was only 56%. But
these are clearly not the most important criteria for the Russell Group.
Apparently the metrics that they prioritised in choosing which of the 1994
Group universities they would invite to join focused more on things like
total research income and total number of PGRs and PGTs – and clearly
Lancaster's absolute size put it at a disadvantage here. Our proportion of
undergraduate entrants with AAB was probably also a factor in our being
overlooked; there have been recent improvements, but these have not yet made
their way through to the official figures. The
news has prompted many to speculate how it might affect the various
university mission groupings. Some bloggers are wondering whether it might
cause a collapse of the 1994 Group – with the Russell Group even becoming the
group for all pre-1992 universities. Others wonder whether the Russell Group
is more likely to split, with the top 'Golden Triangle' universities of
Cambridge, Oxford and London (Kings, LSE, UCL and Imperial) breaking ranks
and forming their own elite grouping, free from contamination by association
with 'lesser' universities. How
much should Lancaster care? Focussing on league tables through improving the
student experience seems to be serving us well – and keeping our respectable
place in them may be in tension with chasing Russell Group membership. It
would certainly not be good if this development panicked us into a hasty
merger with Liverpool – larger, and already a Russell Group member, but with
only 52.1% of submitted staff at 3* or 4*. Besides, in subtext 68 we
suggested that the four university 'mission groupings' were perhaps best
regarded as little more than clubs for V-Cs, and that the rivalry between
them has prevented universities from working together for the good of the
higher education sector as a whole. Perhaps
we should simply use the game of 'mission-grouping musical chairs' as a
prompt for a more considered debate about the direction in which Lancaster
should be developing. Current discussions about a merger with Liverpool
certainly seem to be taking up too much energy, and have arguably prevented a
more balanced exploration of options from taking place (see next item). ************************************************** ALTERNATIVE
FUTURES FOR LANCASTER – IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT LIVERPOOL In
the debates around the proposed ever-closer union with Liverpool, Deputy
Vice-Chancellor Bob McKinlay has on more than one
occasion challenged sceptics to come up with their own alternative visions
for securing Lancaster's future. A group of senior University members are now
responding to that challenge by organising a meeting at which sixty or so
representatives of the University community will be asked to identify and
sketch out three different ways of securing Lancaster's prosperity which do
not involve merger with Liverpool. A formal announcement will be circulated
soon, but we have heard that the meeting is planned for 27 April. The idea is
that after this initial meeting the Vice-Chancellor will be asked to put the
resources behind working all three up into full feasibility studies. Some
are cautioning that this exercise could simply be used as device to secure a
kind of democratic legitimacy for the Lancaster-Liverpool 'collaboration'
option. Certainly, it would be very difficult to develop any new plans to the
same level of detail as has by now been achieved by the advocates of the
Liverpool option. Yet on the other hand this does seem like a genuine
opportunity to put some flesh on the bones of a number of other ideas about
Lancaster's future that have been suggested since the Liverpool option was
mooted. It
has not yet been finalised exactly who will be invited to the meeting, but
the list is certain to include all academic Heads of Department. So we
recommend that subtext readers who would like to feed their own ideas into
the process do so through their nearest HoD. ************************************************** ANOTHER
ADROIT MOVE BY NEW V-C? It
seems that Professor Smith is taking a surprisingly close interest in the
quality of our external examiners. He has apparently issued an edict that
externals for MA courses should only be selected from institutions with an
affiliation to either the Russell Group or the 1994 Group. As such, he has
tried to blackball more than one individual who has already been performing
this duty for Lancaster departments, preventing the departments from
continuing to use them in the next academic year. Initially,
the collective was inclined to dismiss the report as the product of
mischief-making by someone who has been vexed by the new VC's warm initial
reception (not least from subtext itself). However, it turns out to be true.
Faced by this evidence, subtext can only regard this as another master-stroke
from the V-C. Noting the satisfaction which has greeted his initial
decisions, he has decided to emulate King Canute by reminding us that, after
all, he might be fallible. Rather than exposing himself to the icy waters of
Morecambe Bay, he has adopted the more sensible approach of pretending to
espouse an idiotic and wholly indefensible policy. He surely knew that it
would provoke an outraged response, allowing him to make a graceful
retraction which will, nevertheless, teach his chastened devotees that it is
foolish to expect people who have reached high positions in university
administration to be capable of making rational decisions at all times. subtext
awaits confirmation that the bogus edict has been rescinded, and that it will
be safe for us to maintain existing professional or social relations with
people from outside the sanctified (and self-anointed) sphere of the Russell
and 1994 Groups - provided, perhaps, that we adopt a suitably haughty
demeanour when addressing them. ************************************************** BUSINESS
PROCESS REVIEW STEPS UP A GEAR In
another sign that the mood music emanating from the V-C's office might be
changing, on Monday academic staff received an email from the V-C, giving an
update on the Business Process Review and saying that 'both Finance &
Procurement and Marketing were on track for key decisions to be made by
March', i.e. before the end of next week. This looked like a very compressed
time scale, likely to allow for precious little consultation and offering no
opportunity for debate or for input from the academic departments. As
if to confirm these fears, Heads of Department and Department Officers in the
Faculty of Science and Technology were emailed about an hour later, to invite
them to a briefing meeting about the new Finance and Procurement Operating
Model, to be held at 11.00 the following morning (Tuesday). Separate
invitations to this meeting were sent to departmental admin staff whose roles
were thought, or known, to involve a significant proportion of financial
matters, and who were told, ominously, that following the briefing they would
be 'invited to an individual discussion to take place later this week if
possible'. Why the sudden rush, one wonders? At
the shared briefing meeting, staff were presented
with the new Finance Operating Model, which involves the complete
centralisation of procurement. Departmental admin staff for whom more than
50% of their current role is identified as 'in finance' will be told at their
individual interviews later this week whether they are considered to 'slot
in' to the newly created posts in central Finance, or whether they will be
placed in a 'pool for selection', and will have to compete for the remaining
posts. They have been told that they can take their union rep or a colleague
along with them, and they will be well advised to do so. Although
called a 'briefing', Tuesday morning's meeting was clearly more than that.
The whole process, and it is a big one, has evidently been planned down to
the last detail, but there has been little or no consultation with
departments, nor with the members of staff who may be affected. This is
already damaging morale; if it proceeds, it will distract people from their
proper roles, and will take up a lot of time that would have been better
spent on pursuing the University's proper functions. The speed with which it
is proceeding also seems likely to produce perverse decisions based on
inadequate information. Should not small and detailed functions be devolved
to the places where and the people by whom they are carried out, rather than
trying to bring them all to the centre? Is this not likely to prove a very
cumbersome and ineffective way of arranging things? Furthermore, little if
any thought seems to been expended on the question
of who will take over the non-financial parts of the work currently being
performed by those departmental admin staff whose posts will vanish. The
new Finance and Procurement Operating Model appears to be driven
overwhelmingly by the idea of financial control. But surely the more
important thing is to secure delivery of the University's principal
objectives, namely excellent research and teaching; financial control should
be seen as a means to that end, but not the end in itself. ***************************************************** COMMUNICATION,
COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION A
contributed article by Ronnie Rowlands, 2nd-year
student. In
each annual set of races for LUSU full-time officer positions, almost every
candidate will run on the basis that Lancaster University Students Union
needs more 'communication' with and 'accountability' to those that it serves.
These words emblazon poster after poster. Attendees at candidate hustings take swigs of alcohol every time they are
uttered; they leave in very, very good spirits. Of Lancaster's 10,000+
students, little more than 3000 vote in the LUSU elections, because the vast
majority don't know what its purpose is - a sure sign that despite its
synonymy with every campaign, communication has indeed 'broken down'. But
communication is more than putting a new banner on a website or having an
open door policy. Students are right to be apathetic or unaware of their
union - not because it does nothing, but because it does nothing spectacular.
Clubs, societies, the Sugarhouse, JCR-led events, Campus Fest, Extrav, LUSU living, the LUSU shop and the like would not
exist without LUSU, but the idea of making the students 'aware of what we do'
essentially boils down to pointing at these commodities and asking to be
thanked for them. What
LUSU rarely (if ever) facilitates is any kind of campaigning in which the
input of its members actually makes a difference. Take, for example, the
Business Process Review (BPR), which galvanised the student body core and
resulted in a meeting that reached quoracy and
beyond. Those present were riled, passionate and disgusted with the BPR, and
voted for LUSU's FTO team to lobby the university to abandon the BPR, to put
a stop to further centralisation of student services and to retain
administrative staff. What has happened since then? Who knows? The
incumbent president, George Gardiner, is clearly doing his level best. Perhaps,
though, the university might pay more attention to a mass organised protest
from a proportion of the student body higher than that of six paid officers
acting on the votes of 370 people out of a possible 10,000+. Maybe the
students would even be made to feel a part of the union's operations. Where
is the literature? Where is the presence? What's the plan? Who knows? In
week 9 LUSU staged a protest against hidden course costs, inviting passers-by
to write down their expenses on pieces of paper hung next to a banner which
read 'THEY MUST THINK MONEY GROWS ON TREES'. For this it should be
congratulated - giving its members a creative vehicle to stick it to the
University is admirable, and, that day, everyone who walked through the
square became aware of and involved in LUSU's operations. The same should be
said for a recent campaign to install lighting on the hill up to campus. But
these are exceptions to the rule, and action taken against the BPR,
accommodation costs and crises and whatever else the union claims to be
combating is self-contained to say the least. A
while ago, Lancaster University Against The Cuts (LUAC) wrote an invitation
to some protest or other on the wall of County College's Facebook
page. The public response came from the administrator of this page; 'Please
f*** off.' An article (written at the start of this academic year) informing
its readership of the dangers higher education is in was denied inclusion in
a printed issue of SCAN for being 'too political'. Voter apathy was combated
with the deployment of an £800 fibreglass publicity stunt. If
LUSU's long term plan is to mobilise students' concerns, then it is currently
emptying a magazine into its foot. ************************************************** CENTROS
RETURN subtext readers will probably recall the pubic planning
inquiry held in Lancaster in 2009, which considered the plans to develop a
new retail area on the canal corridor site (basically, the triangle of land
between Moor Lane, St Leonardsgate and the canal).
After concerted campaigning by English Heritage, SAVE Britain's Heritage and
local group It's Our City, the Inspector recommended to the Secretary of
State that he turn down the proposal, which he did (see subtexts passim).
Since then, Centros have been working with the City
Council and English Heritage to come up with a revised scheme that would meet
some of the objections. And the new scheme (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/docs/CCN_2012.pdf),
announced in a press release last Thursday, certainly shows some significant
changes when compared with the old (http://www.itsourcity.org.uk/planning/2008/Apps/08-00866/043018-D-05R-a3.pdf). Gone
is the highly controversial pedestrian bridge at Stonewell, that would have
allowed pedestrians to flow from Moor Lane up over Great John Street into St
Nicholas Arcade, but would have spoiled what the Inspector called a
'distinctively Lancastrian' part of the city fabric. Instead we get a 'broad
surface-level Toucan crossing' (it's like a pelican crossing but for both
pedestrians and cycles - two-can – geddit?). Gone
is the relentless emphasis on big box units. Most of them have been replaced
by a larger number of smaller premises, more in keeping with the scale of the
city. There is still a large store for Debenhams, of course, whose drawing
power is supposed to drive the economic model of the whole development, a
'variety store', and a supermarket facing onto St Leonardsgate.
The heart sinks at the thought of another supermarket for Lancaster – and it
will probably be a Tesco – but at least its being in the town centre rather
than Scotforth should reduce traffic and benefit
the surrounding small retailers. The
Old Mitchell's Brewery Building and Malthouse
(parts of which date back to the 18th century) is to be retained and used to
re-house the Musicians Co-op, whose existing premises would be demolished.
Similarly, the Joseph Storey and Heron Works buildings would be retained, and
used to create a restaurant quarter by the canal. The
new plans also involve the creation of new 'public spaces' (though these
would presumably be privately owned). There would be an expanded, landscaped
area at Stonewell, a new public space on St Leonardsgate
just past the Grand Theatre, one on Mill Lane to the right of the Golden Lion
and one in the middle of the development. There would also be a new park near
Alfred Street joining the development to the canal – and a general
improvement of the canalside area. The
revised plans are getting a cautious welcome from local groups and the media
(though It's Our City is reserving final judgement
before it can consult with its members and stakeholders). Certainly, even if
the plans go ahead as they are, Lancaster residents can be proud that thanks
to their vigilance the development will be much better than it would have
been. However, there will still be a car park with 800 short-stay spaces,
replacing the approximately 300 long-stay places on the site at present,
suggesting that serious traffic problems will ensue. Despite the intervention
by the Planning Inspector, Stonewell is to be dramatically made-over, with
the loss of some modest but characterful
buildings. And
of course there is still the sense that this development must surely drain
revenue and life from the existing town centre, where there are already many
empty shops. The lack of a pedestrian bridge, combined with the recent
extinguishing of the ancient right of way through the St Nicholas Arcade
site, makes access between the Centros site and the
old town centre even more difficult. Centros are doing a presentation on the scheme in the
Gallery Meeting Room at the Dukes Playhouse on 27 March at 7.30 pm - email
Mark.McVicar@centros.co.uk if you want to attend. The planning application is due to be
submitted at the end of this year; if the scheme is approved, it might be
completed by late 2016 or early 2017. ***************************************************** CAMBRIDGE
STUDENT PROTEST RESULTS IN SUSPENSION Readers
will no doubt have seen in the national press the extraordinary case last
week of Owen Holland. The Cambridge PhD student has been rusticated (i.e.
suspended) for 7 terms following the reading aloud of a poem at a public
speech by the Universities Minister David Willetts,
forcing Willetts to abandon his talk and leave the
stage. Holland led the protest, standing and reading a few lines at a time,
with others in the audience repeating them after him. Apparently, this
communal protest infringed the free speech of the minister, or so argued
Holland's judges at the university disciplinary committee (the students' free
speech was evidently less of a concern). But the sentence handed down has
generated particular outrage at Cambridge and across UK universities. Not
only was Holland singled out for disciplinary action, but his sentence is
also seven times that recommended by his prosecutor, the University Proctor.
It is also of unprecedented severity: the 'Cambridge Student' journal notes
that the last time a student was expelled (and a 2.5 year suspension for a
PhD is little short of exclusion) it was for the copying of a thesis. Petitions
have been set up in support of the student. One limited to Cambridge staff
and students amassed over 1000 signatures with 24 hours. Most dramatic, however, is a 'Spartacus'
letter, signed by over 60 staff and students, calling for the same punishment
to be meted out to themselves. For more information,
including on petitions open to non-Cambridge staff and students, see: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/issue/news/outrage-students-and-academics-react-in-horror-to-shock-cambridge-ruling-on-student-protest/.
You can also watch the whole protest at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco0zOFN8sA. ***************************************************** ADRIAN
CUNNINGHAM subtext was saddened to hear of the death on 5 March of
Adrian Cunningham. He was a
long-standing member of the university who arrived as a founding member of
Lancaster's pathbreaking Department of Religious
Studies in October 1967. Born
in London, he was raised and educated in the Roman Catholic tradition, which
was very much a formative influence in his life. Two other great influences
also manifested themselves early – left-wing social thought and the
psychology of religion. While still a schoolboy, he made contact with the
Dominican priest Victor White, who had sustained a long correspondence with
the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Indeed, many years later, Adrian was to co-edit
the published Jung-White correspondence. He was clearly finding the
temptation to roam beyond the school syllabus irresistible. He
won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English, and
it was through joining the local Catholic CND that he met his wife-to-be,
Angela, then aged just 18. They soon married, for
which the college authorities duly fined him, given his status in the college
as a junior member in statu pupillari.
Remaining at Cambridge to pursue postgraduate research, Adrian threw himself
into journalistic activities, particularly those related to the causes
dearest to his heart. He co-edited the Cambridge Review with Martin Golding,
a life-long friend and now the Senior Fellow of Peterhouse,
Cambridge. He also helped to found Slant, an influential and controversial
publication that attempted to combine Catholic belief with Marxist politics.
Among his fellow workers and supporters were Terry Eagleton and Herbert
McCabe. It
was out of this busy Cambridge life that he came to Lancaster in 1967 to help
found the new Department of Religious Studies, the first department of its
kind in the UK. His two colleagues were Ninian
Smart, the founding Professor and fellow lecturer, Bob Morgan. The
intellectual freedom provided by the new department allowed Adrian to pursue
his manifold intellectual interests, and over the years, he taught a wide
range of courses, including Modern Religious and Atheistic Thought,
Pilgrimage, Myth and Symbol, and Psychoanalysis and Religion. Many
generations of students remember him fondly as a teacher who opened up to
them new intellectual worlds, was generous with his time and whose door was
always open, while at the same time eschewing demands for spoon-feeding.
Among contemporary academics taught and supervised by Adrian are Richard
Roberts (Stirling/Lancaster), Roderick Maine (Essex) and Jeremy Carette and Leon Schlamm (both
at Kent). Many others who were not formally his own students recall stimulating
occasions in college bars where Catholicism and Marxism were fiercely
debated. In
addition, Adrian continued to develop his journalistic activity. He was one
of the small group of editors of Lancaster Comment,
which inaugurated a long-standing Lancaster tradition of independent critical
comment in published form. He was pleased to see this tradition perpetuated
in electronic form through Inkytext and, later,
subtext. Later, when Ninian Smart moved to Santa
Barbara and Bob Morgan to Oxford, Adrian was the sole remaining founding
member of the Religious Studies Department, and in the 1980s, he undertook a
particularly long stint as Head of Department. Among his achievements in that
role, one of the longer-lasting was the appointment of Wendy Francis, who
continues to be Departmental Officer in the now merged PPR Department. In
later years, he was plagued by ill health, suffering from both ME and
arthritis. It was in this context that he took early retirement from the
university in 1999, although he continued for a time to do some part-time
teaching at postgraduate level. In retirement, Adrian and Angela remained as
devoted to each other as ever, and continued to extend hospitality to friends
old and new in their house in Westbourne Road. Angela continued to sustain a
remarkably active life in many spheres of activity until she was struck down
by a brain tumour some months ago, a condition that turned out to be fatal.
She died only four weeks before Adrian himself. A funeral mass was held for
Adrian at St Peter's Cathedral on Tuesday, which was attended by family,
friends, colleagues and former students from around the country. ***************************************************** BILL
POTTS Bill
Potts, former Professor of Biology who died recently, was a colourful member
of the academic staff, even if that colour was always a vivid Conservative
blue, or possibly somewhere in the ultra-violet, beyond the spectrum of the
present Conservative Party. One
of his more memorable exploits was to recover the corpse of a 7-metre-long Sei whale which was beached at Sunderland Point in September
1980. With the aim of keeping the skeleton of this creature for the Biology
Department, Bill arranged for the body to be moved to the campus (this
involved the use of a chainsaw and a JCB - don't ask - operated by staff of
the City Council) and buried somewhere above the cricket pitch. After some
years of decomposition, it was exhumed. The skeleton was cleaned up and
expertly reassembled by technicians of the Department, and it was put on
display in the Biology Lecture Theatre, where it still is, hanging from the
ceiling. Bill
was a man of wide interests. With Susan Stuart, he wrote on early balloon flights, and in particular a flight of a hydrogen balloon
from Lancaster Castle by the Italian balloonist Vincenzo
Lunardi in 1784. This spectacle had been promoted
by the local entrepreneur Richard Gillow. Lunardi came with his balloon, but in the event he didn't
take off. Nonetheless, Gillows introduced their
balloon-back chair in celebration of the event, and it sold well during the
next couple of years. Bill
also wrote on 'William Pickard of Lee and the legend of Robin Hood' in the
Centre for North West Regional Studies Regional Bulletin (1992). Perhaps
his best-known publication is the book Queen Victoria's Gene, written in 1995
with his brother Malcolm Potts, Professor of Population and Family Planning
at the University of California, Berkeley. In this book they examine the
history of haemophilia in the royal families of Europe, and the profound
effect this had on the course of history. They argue that this disease,
carried genetically from Queen Victoria to most of the royal families of
Europe, played a role in the origin of the Spanish Civil War and contributed
directly to the Russian Revolution. They also show it is highly unlikely that
either of Queen Victoria's parents had a genetic mutation (the chance is 1 in
at least 25000), and that it is much more likely she was in fact the
illegitimate daughter of a haemophiliac man.
Royal families were of course notoriously promiscuous then, so
illegitimately-conceived children were probably quite common. But who could
the man have been? And if Victoria had been found to be illegitimate, who
should have succeeded to the throne? These speculations are of wide interest:
rather wider, it has to be said, than most scientific publications. Bill's
funeral will be at 11.00 a.m. on Monday 26 March at St Paul's Church, Brookhouse. ***************************************************** UNIVERSITY
COURT The
Annual Meeting of the University Court was held on 21 March – a Wednesday
afternoon instead of the usual Saturday morning. Although the timing must
have made it more difficult for many members to attend, there was a
reasonable turn-out from both the University and the various constituencies
represented on Court. Professor Smith was welcomed to his first meeting, on
the 81st day of his tenure as Vice-Chancellor. The
meeting was opened by the Chancellor, whose introductory remarks were
followed by a short report from the Pro-Chancellor Bryan Gray. He made an
analogy between Paul Wellings and noted football
manager David Moyes: as chair of Preston North End
he had appointed the latter as manager, in the expectation that in due course
he would go on to better things, in this case the manager's job at Everton.
Lancaster as Preston North End, Wollongong as Everton? George
Gardiner, LUSU President, presented the annual report, and did a competent
and lucid job. He noted that the National Student Survey now includes a
question about student unions (LUSU had come out of this well), and mentioned
LUSU's long-standing wish for a bigger and better building – not merely a
matter of LUSU's convenience, he suggested, but a reputational issue for the
university. Asked why the politics of LUSU seemed so exclusively parochial,
he said that LUSU was reformist rather than revolutionary, and that anyway
students these days worked harder than they used to. The
Vice-Chancellor then spoke to the Annual Report of the University. Lancaster was an institution wary of change
but one that might be prepared to take some risks (as with Engineering and
Chemistry). As befitted the occasion, he emphasised the university's regional
links and commitments as well as its international ones. He talked of the
'Greater Lancaster' area and the significance of the University's location in
'rural north Lancashire'. He said the Liverpool Question was the big issue
'which I inherited'; it was not that Lancaster was doing anything wrong, but
we had to think 5-10 years ahead. The question of why the league tables were
dominated by US and UK universities was being asked in other countries, and
some – notably Germany - were starting to do something about it. He ended in
up-tempo style, and praised Marion McClintock's 'Shaping the Future', which
had helped him understand Lancaster's ways. Responding
to questions, he said that the loss of four universities from the 1994 Group
was a disappointment, but that it was more important to be a really good
university than to be in the Russell Group – though it would be nice to be
both. He wondered if the 1994 Group actually helped Lancaster, and if so,
how. He said that no decision – or at least, it appeared,
no firm, irrevocable decision – would be taken on Liverpool before the next
meeting of the Court, and that whatever the connection turned out to be it
would definitely not be a merger. On LUSU's building, he said that he had
thought it was on the small side, but then reflected that other space for
students existed but was dispersed across the colleges – so there was a
question about whether we could afford both central and college resources,
and if we couldn't, how the tension could be resolved. The
final presentation was by Sarah Randall-Paley on the University's accounts.
This was cool, brisk and lucid. The essence was that our finances were in
good order. The debt to income ratio was rising, but this was according to
plan. She agreed in response to a question that it would mean a slowing down
of the capital building programme. The Chancellor then brought the
proceedings to a genial close, after two hours of well-informed, active
discussion, which showed that many members of the Court believe that its
meetings should be more than ceremonial occasions. ***************************************************** UNIVERSITY'S
NEW GREAT HALL PIANO INAUGURATED After
some 30 years of service in the Great Hall, the University's Steinway concert
grand has had to be retired. Visiting soloists were beginning to say they
would never come again to play on this old warhorse. The price of a new
Steinway piano is a bit less than for a new Ferrari, but raising the money
for it was still not going to be easy. Fortunately generous donations were
made, including a large one by the Friends of the Concerts, and the
University matched them. The new piano arrived in time to be used in the
performance of German songs given on 8 March by the tenor Mark Padmore with accompanist Andrew West, former Lancaster
pianist in residence. Padmore has a substantial repertoire of German lieder.
Evidently a fluent German speaker, he sings from memory, engaging the
audience with direct eye contact throughout, and this gives his performances
an immediacy which is often lacking if the singer has to hold a book. He
opened with six Schubert settings of poems by Heine; but it was his performance
of the song cycle Dichterliebe by Schumann that was
most gripping in its intensity. Having received permission to marry Clara,
the love of his life, Schumann wrote the twenty songs of Dichterliebe
in one week of ecstasy. The songs are among the most perfect of all lieder,
and the performance by Padmore and West did them
justice. At
the next concert on 15 March, the piano was officially inaugurated, with
performances by Kathryn Stott of solo pieces by Fauré,
Ravel and Debussy. These were preceded by a performance by the Doric Quartet
of the string quartet by the French composer Chausson,
a contemporary and friend of Debussy. Completing the evening of French music,
the second half of the concert consisted of a performance of the Chausson concerto for violin, piano and string quartet.
It is rare indeed to hear this highly romantic work, because it is not easy
to put together a concert that uses this combination of players, but in an
inspired piece of progamme planning this
performance brought together the brilliant young violinist Jennifer Pike
(youngest-ever winner of the Young Musician of the Year competition) with
Kathryn Stott and the Doric String Quartet. This was a revelation. Chausson's efforts to escape the influence of Richard
Wagner produced here a highly original piece which uses the instruments very
skilfully, never allowing the piano to dominate the less powerful stringed
instruments. This work deserves to be
better known. ***************************************************** LETTERS Dear
subtext, I'd
like to congratulate you for proving Godwin's law in issue 87, something I
would not have expected from your esteemed publication. 'What's that?', I hear some readers say: it is the semi-humorous
observation that online discussions inevitably invoke Hitler or the Nazis at
some point. The
BPR and the LULU link may have been ill conceived, are odious to many of us,
and are potentially highly damaging to our university, but Nazi Germany they ain't, so I felt your reference to 'peace in our time'
was a bit much. I
shall not be cancelling my subscription – keep up the good work! Johnny
Unger, Linguistics and English Language ******* Dear
subtext, I
read with interest your article about the University Twitter feed ('we follow
it so you don't have to', issue 87), specifically your comment that 'Mainly
the university twitter feed consists of excitable messages noting that a rep
from the university will be at some university fair in Nigeria, or Moscow.'
For the benefit of those who may indeed be relying on subtext's account
rather than visiting the channel itself, I must point out that this is not a
fair or accurate representation of the diverse content updates that we
publish via Twitter. Indeed, if you were to review the last one hundred
tweets then you'll see that just fourteen were in relation to university
fairs and UCAS events (and of those fourteen just one tweet apiece for events
in Nigeria and Moscow). Using
Twitter helps us to highlight the varied and valuable research being
undertaken at Lancaster, as well as promote courses, disseminate news and
publicise events, all of which help to raise the profile of the University
and its activities to the wider world. I'm delighted to report that the
number of people following our account has doubled over the last twelve
months to over eight thousand, and that engagement activity on Twitter and
other social networks (including The Student Room and Facebook)
has risen considerably over the last year, with many prospective students now
using these channels to find out more about Lancaster before making an
application. Best
regards, @russellreader, Digital Marketing Manager ***************************************************** The
editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order)
of: Rachel Cooper (PPR), Mark Garnett, George Green, David Smith, Bronislaw
Szerszynski and Martin Widden. |
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