Monthly Archive for December, 2011

By Sarah Cunnane, Times Higher Education

Sir Patrick Stewart, Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield

University chancellors are a mixed bag of rock stars and actors, politicians and entrepreneurs, but are they mere glad-handing figureheads or can they make a genuine difference to the institution over which they preside? Sarah Cunnane finds out.

To some, they are just “an archaism” and “powerless figureheads” without purpose; to others, they are “passionate champions” and influential lobbyists for universities at a time when such support is desperately needed. Sir Robin Biggam, former chairman of the now-defunct Independent Television Commission, maintains that a person is qualified to be one only if he or she has reached “at least” the age of 50, while the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell proclaims that they should be “seen often and heard rarely”.

The job of university chancellor, which is nearly 800 years old, is certainly peculiar. Partly it is about pomp and ceremony; as honorary head of the institution, chancellors are expected to dress – as the broadcaster and chancellor of the University of Roehampton John Simpson puts it – “in impossibly bright colours” in readiness to shake an astonishingly large number of hands on graduation day. Beyond that, the list of official duties is “laughably short”, says Matthew Moss, private secretary to the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge – and for that reason, the post is “what the incumbent makes of it”. But whatever one’s view of their importance or otherwise, the fact that 5,558 academics and graduates turned out to vote in this autumn’s election for the new Cambridge chancellor suggests that it is a role many care about.

From the former cricketer turned politician Imran Khan to actor Sheila Hancock, and the Archbishop of Canterbury to the musician Brian May, a quick scan of today’s university chancellors (see related file, right) reveals that they are a diverse group who are doing an assortment of things in the wider world. Among UK universities, around 18 per cent of ceremonial heads could be described as “celebrities”. Twenty-seven per cent come from the world of business, 26 per cent have a background in politics and 43 per cent are peers. Seven universities – including the University of London – are represented by royals. Ten honorary heads have a background in academia and 18 in the media.

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Image courtesy of the University of Huddersfield

Killian Court in front of Building 10 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 2002

By Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.

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Image:  Wolfgang Volz/laif/Redux via NYBooks.com