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Thursday 1st December 2016 | No. 790
Opinion Poll
& European Christmas markets closer to home
Who did Durham vote most popular politician?
University looks for stability postBrexit at town hall meeting Hugo Harris Deputy News Editor
Professor Stuart Corbridge, Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University
Photograph: Durham University
Durham offers “very good value for money,” Vice-Chancellor tells Palatinate Professor Stuart Corbridge talked about the University’s relationship with the city, affordability, and Durham post-Brexit Olly Mawhinney & Ryan Gould Palatinate News Since Professor Stuart Corbridge took office as Vice-Chancellor and Warden in September 2015, Durham University been in a state of transition and transformation. With a new University Strategy set to be delivered to University Council on 13th December, of which the relocation of Queen’s Campus to Durham City forms a part, Palatinate sat down with Professor Corbridge a year on from his appointment to ask him about some of the
changes and challenges faced by the University. Professor Corbridge reflected positively on his first year at Durham, stressing the uniqueness of the collegiate system and his desire to ensure the University continues to create a “truly distinctive Durham experience” for its students. The Vice-Chancellor said his overarching vision for Durham “hasn’t changed all that much. I think we would expect any Russell Group University to have worldclass education and world-class research, and I think I was hardly the first person to come to Dur-
ham and say that we should have a world class student experience,” Corbridge said. “Although we’ve prioritised the wider student experience more than previously, I don’t think that would take many people by surprise. I think where the vision has changed is that you then have to operationalise [world-class education and research]. Through the course of the year, we had to then think, ‘Can we offer world-class research, world-class student experience, world-class education both in Durham City and at Queen’s Campus?’” Alluding to Queen’s Campus,
which is set to be repurposed as an international foundation college, Corbridge admitted that the University’s vision has also changed “in the sense that it became more focused in terms of our students in Durham, thinking more about the internationalisation of the University. “Clearly that was an evolution from where we were even ten months ago. We’re a long way involved in operationalising the vision. The plan is to take the full University Strategy to Council on 13 December—that’s fifteen months’ work,” he said. Continued on page 4
On the issue of future research funding at Durham University, senior staff maintained a positive outlook during a town-hall meeting on the implications of June’s EU referendum last week. Despite asserting in the vote’s immediate aftermath that “Brexit was not the referendum outcome that British Universities sought,” Vice-Chancellor Stuart Corbridge sought to ease student concerns when questioned about the matter by Palatinate: “I am pleased to report that we’ve had a report back from the research information services office that European partner universities are still working with us as they did before, in fact they really are being helpful to us at the moment.” Noting Durham Physics Department’s collaboration with CERN, he then added: “At the moment, we’re sending out a message of business as usual and trying to get these partnerships sorted.” As reported by The Northern Echo earlier this year, Durham stands to risk millions of pounds of future funding from the European Research Council (ERC) when the UK leaves the European Union. Since 2008, Durham has received £27 million from the ERC, which seeks to fund schemes that “cross disciplinary boundaries” and “address new and emerging fields.” The comments of Tim Burt, ProVice-Chancellor (Colleges and Student Experience), disputed these anxieties: “Over the last couple of decades there has been a steady growth of collaboration with other European universities […] I think what we will be hoping is that we can remain parts of those sort of consortia even if we were outside the EU.” “There are already European Continued on page 6