This is the text of a speech made by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Eric Thomas, at Birkbeck, University of London, on 7 July 2006.
Thank you for inviting me to this conference to talk about something I consider to be one of the most important roles of a modern university. I was delighted when John Annette invited me, but a little disturbed when I realised it was one of the days when I had gone into the draw for tickets for Glyndebourne. You may wonder why this created a problem – surely Higher Education and Civic Engagement is substantially more important that a middle-class diversion on the Sussex Downs? You are, of course, correct, but the instruction for the visit to Glyndebourne had been issued by my 80-year-old mother who announced at a family gathering at Christmas that she “had never been to Glyndebourne”. Now, when such a statement comes from a Geordie matriarch it brooks no dissent, but I am delighted to report that we got the tickets for early June, were able to take her to see Cosi fan Tutte, which she loved, and I can still give this lecture. Everybody’s happy.
Perhaps the most important lesson I have learnt over the last six years is just how important a big university is to its local and regional community. You may say, ‘Well, that should have been self-evident to you long before that,’ but somehow you don’t see that crucial importance until you become Vice-Chancellor. Even as Dean of Medicine I was still locked into my parish of the hospital and medical school, and medicine is in any case rather peculiar in its lack of engagement in civic life. However, I am now clear that the University of Bristol is an integral part of the success and the future of the city-region of Bristol and that the success of that city-region is essential to the achievement of our own ambitions.
Some facts are helpful here. A study carried out in the South West some years ago showed that the economic value of a university to its city was about 1.74 times turnover, which means that Bristol brings about half a billion pounds of economic activity each year to the city. The city’s two universities add up to almost a billion pounds of activity. We are the largest independent employer in the city, with over 5,500 employees and a further 4,500 indirectly employed in the supply and service chains. We are creating new businesses that add economic value and increase employment. We own half a billion pounds-worth of assets, including some of Bristol’s most historic buildings – over 50 of our buildings are listed. We have over 5,500 continuing education students registered with the university, attending a huge diversity of non-accredited courses. For some of those students, these courses are the beginning of the road for them to attend university. Our staff and students give their time and skills to the local community in many ways. Members of our staff serve as governors of local schools and on local charities. Our students have Student Community Action, which is led by a sabbatical officer and involves over 1,000 students in over 60 projects; last year, SCA contributed more than 100,000 hours of student volunteering time.
I could just go on and on. As I wrote this speech, it became clear to me that I had opened Pandora’s Box and this is a talk that, if I had the time to write it and you had the time to listen, I could probably take over two hours to give! However, I will spare you that and I know that this day is planned to address all the Higher Education Community Partnership themes. What I want to do is get under the skin of activities that are not just about teaching and research – activities that many just don’t know go on. I hope you will accept my apologies if I use the University of Bristol as my example, but that is what I know about and I want to be clear that all universities are involved in the activities I will describe to different degrees and that many are doing more and better than we are at Bristol. So it’s not an advert for the West Country, simply an exemplar.
I am going to start with the students, because one thing a university like Bristol does is bring nearly 11,500 able young adults to the city. They are our largest interaction with the community and the inhabitants of many of our university towns and cities are ambivalent about their effects. They like the economic value they add and they particularly like the environment they create, the vitality they bring. However, it is clear that some cities feel that the concentration of students in houses in multiple occupation is making some suburbs difficult for other inhabitants – Headingley in Leeds and Edgbaston in Birmingham are good examples. We are working with the city council and local communities to make sure we avoid those effects in the relevant suburbs of Bristol. One of the reasons we have decided not to increase our undergraduate numbers is that we don’t feel that a relatively small city like Bristol can take many more students.
However, one effect that students have on their communities is often unreported and that is their voluntary activity. I am going to describe this in some detail because in Bristol the diversity of their activities is staggering. Let’s start with RAG which last year involved over 2,000 students and raised well over £100,000 for predominantly local charities. Bristol RAG has now raised an accumulated total of over £1 million.
But it is in their daily volunteering that the students have their biggest effect. Our Student Community Action group is led by a sabbatical officer, involves over 1,000 students and, as I have already said, last year exceeded 100,000 hours of volunteering for the first time. They break their activities down into six main areas: Children, Community, Disabled, Elderly, Schools and Sports. They have two main methods of working – they either run an activity completely themselves or work with an established local or national charity. In the Children area they take children who are also carers on holidays to give them a break; they take children from deprived families on outings and work in crèches in those communities; and, finally, they entertain the children of homeless families. Under their Community activity they work in night shelters and with psychiatric in-patients; they do music workshops for young people and help design green spaces in urban areas; they work on telephone help lines and in victim support; they decorate the houses of the elderly and discuss sexual health with young people.
In their Disabled portfolio they help autistic children and adults with autism and Asperger's syndrome, as well as organising trips and activities for adults with learning disabilities. They help the elderly with their shopping, work in a day centre for the elderly and every year arrange a dinner dance for local elderly people which my wife and I go to if we can – it is a thoroughly enjoyable evening and I can tell you, elderly people are the most outrageous flirts! In schools they mentor pupils and teach in certain areas; they assist in primary schools and run drama and music workshops; they work to improve attendance at schools, run workshops that simulate conflict resolution at the United Nations and have a very significant involvement with children at schools with special needs.
Finally, in sports they do riding classes for the disabled, swimming and hydrotherapy for children with special needs, and some of them train to become Community Sports Leaders. We have regular sports days when local schools use our major outdoor facilities and these are organised and run by the students.
If you go to the SCA website, each of these activities is identified, the lead student is named, the amount of time per week expected is noted and the level of training discussed.
You could argue that I have been a little over the top in describing what happens in so much detail, but I was absolutely staggered when I realised the diversity and quantity of the activities. This work will have profound beneficial effects on our local community in Bristol and simply wouldn’t happen to the same degree if our university was not there. Also, think of the benefits to our students. I refuse to be an ‘18 year old-ist’, repeating the hoary old observation that the youth of today are not as good as the youth when I was young. We get fantastic young people coming to our university and this volunteering work expands their horizons, exposes them to charity and philanthropy, improves their organisational and communication skills and makes them aware of a community and what that means. Middle-class students in nuclear families educated at selective schools can have little exposure to any sense of a local community or to individuals outside their peer group – this volunteering experience is not only very valuable but probably essential.
The next group involved heavily in the community is our staff. I have already noted that the University of Bristol is the largest independent employer in Bristol. Members of our staff give massively to the community – there are many, for instance, who are school governors and many who are involved in local charities. We provide substantial professional assistance to our local communities – our medical staff are deeply involved with planning and providing local health care. The staff in our Graduate School of Education are committed to assisting in local primary and secondary education. This is not only for research projects – we continually work with and advise the Local Education Authority, we advise local schools and are a major partner in one of our local academies. Recently we have been planning to start a Leadership training project for senior teachers locally in partnership with the LEA – this could have a profound effect on the quality of local state education. We have a significant widening participation agenda, which involves us closely with many local schools. I have already mentioned our students mentoring individual pupils at local schools, but we also provide taster days for local pupils and master classes for both pupils and teachers.
There is one slightly special aspect of the University’s civic engagement that I would like to highlight, and that is Public Engagement in Science and Technology. Bristol has been nominated as a Science City and one thing area of particular strength is PEST, with the At-Bristol hands-on science centre, the BBC Natural History Unit, Brunel 200 and the University’s Chair in PEST currently held by Kathy Sykes. We are working with all these partners to engage local adults and particularly school children in science.
But finally under the heading of staff, I would like to highlight the role of University in planning the future of the city-region. This is the time of city-regions and the air is thick with terms such as Core Cities, Science Cities and Ideopolis; elected mayors of city-regions are very much being discussed. The success of places like Barcelona and Toulouse has highlighted the fact that a city-region is a clear economic, social and cultural entity. Such success does not fall off the back of a lorry – it is, to a significant degree, planned. I often compare the Bristol of the 1960s with today. In the ’60s there was a series of heavy industries employing large numbers of people and the university had about 2,000 students and employed about 400 staff – it could, quite literally, sit at the top of the hill in Clifton as an ivory tower and be remote and distanced from the city. As I have described earlier, the situation couldn’t be more different now and therefore the university must take a formal role in planning the future of the city. Let me exemplify this – one of our PVCs has a portfolio called ‘local partnerships’. He operates the relationship with the city council, the business community, the charitable sector and the representatives of local communities. The Vice-Chancellor has a huge role in this and I want to detail some of my current responsibilities in this area. I meet the leader of the City Council twice a year; I have regular meetings with John Savage who leads the local business community. I sit on the West of England Partnership, which is a combination of the four local unitaries and other key partners who are planning the future of the sub-region. I am member of the Board of the Regional Development Agency and of the Regional Sports Board and I am a trustee of a number of charities. It is also me who is leading the Science City initiative and developing the way we take forward the nomination by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Bristol as one of England’s six Science Cities. Such roles, such responsibilities, would not be unusual for any V-C but it means we are a vital part of the local community.
I am not going to talk about our teaching interactions with the local community because I know Stephen Hill will be doing that later on. I would just point out that we have over 5,000 students involved in our local programmes, which therefore represent one of our major community activities.
There is one last area that I would like to highlight and that is the impact our plans for technology and knowledge transfer have on the local community. Bristol has spun out 25 companies in the last five years. We currently have one major incubator which has 22 companies in it, of which 16 are spin-ins, ie, they were local start-ups that we brought into the incubator and have given major support to during their development – support funded from. national sources through us and from our own internal resources. This has enabled these companies to grow and succeed; the firms in the incubator currently employ 103 people.
The impact of such activity on the local community is perhaps best exemplified by the Science Park. The University of Bristol, in combination with the universities of Bath and the West of England, has led the initiative to build a local science park and this is finally coming to fruition. The RDA bought the land for £30 million; a developer has been identified and will make an initial investment of a further £20 million, which includes the building of an Academic Innovation Centre for spin-outs and spin-ins. Over the next ten years, there are plans to quadruple the size of these facilities and the projections show a total of over 5,000 new jobs in the park. Equally as important, the space is being designed in a way that enables easy communication between the staff of companies sited there and between scientists and business. This creative business sector will function in a new nay. Situated next to theM4, barely an hour away from the world’s busiest international airport, this will be a major economic generator not only for the Bristol sub-region but for the UK and globally. And universities are not only at the heart of that; they are essential.
Perhaps I should highlight too that universities are part of the moral and intellectual agenda in their city. This is more diffuse but stems in part from the interactions of our staff around the dinner tables and social events within the city. We explicitly recognise this in our public lecture series and the other events we put on to enable debate about major issues. A good example is our involvement in Brunel 200, which was a big local celebration of the 200th anniversary of Brunel’s birth. Of course we put on lectures about Brunel as an engineer and about engineering in general. But Brunel was also the son of a migrant and we have also developed a series of public lectures later this year to discuss migration and diversity in a community at the beginning of the 21st century. That was done quite deliberately because we believed there were very unsettling prouncements about this being made in many parts of the society and that it was important publicly to address the issue.
In summary, universities and their communities are now inextricably linked, to each other’s benefit. Ensuring the health and successful future of our communities is a central ambition for a university and a major part of its activity. I hope I have shown that the sector is committed to this and is doing it in a myriad of ways – many of which remain largely unknown or at least largely uncelebrated.