Reporter 17/11/99: Reports of Discussions

Reports of Discussions

Tuesday, 26 October 1999. A Discussion was held in the Council Room of the following topic of concern to the University. Under the provisions of Regulation 6 for Discussions (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 113) the Editor has omitted seven passages from the remarks made by Dr Evans; these omissions are indicated by square brackets.

The publication of a Notice by the General Board (Reporter, 1998-99, p. 587) making proposals for the promotion of University officers and short-term contract staff to unestablished posts at Professorial level, without opportunity for the Regent House to discuss the implications for career-structures in the University.

Dr A. W. F. EDWARDS (read by Mr G. P. ALLEN):

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as I shall be giving a lecture in Italy I cannot attend the Discussion but would like to contribute some brief remarks.

I am glad this Discussion has been called because already on 12 June I had written to the Registrary on a related matter, observing that 'When the Notice about procedure appeared on 12 May I was relieved to see that it did not propose the use of the words 'Professor' or 'Reader''. I reminded him of the sentence in Statute D, XIV 'No Professorship shall be established in the University except by Grace of the Regent House after publication of a Report of the General Board', and I added my view that prefixing the words 'Research' or 'Unestablished' or any other word to 'Professorship' did not avoid the Statute.

In this connection paragraph (c) is very mysterious. The University has long welcomed in its midst persons who hold Professorships from outside bodies which are entitled, or think they are entitled, to use that description, and I hope it will continue to do so. But what possible meaning can be attached to the creation by the General Board of a virtual post which carries no title, no money, no duties, and no privileges other than being exempt from the obligations of Statutes and Ordinances?

Dr D. R. J. LAMING:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the General Board's Notice (Reporter, 1998-99, p. 587) on appointments to unestablished posts at the level of Professor or Reader provides in paragraph (b) for the consideration of a single proposal for personal promotion by itself when funding has been identified for a period of not less than five years. While the General Board might argue that their Notice proposes no more in such a case than an extension of existing procedures for personal promotion to applicants in unestablished posts, the procedure is nevertheless objectionable because it will amount, in practice, to naked patronage.

Suppose that Professor X has sufficient funds at his or her disposal to support Protégé Y for five years. All the documentation for an application for personal promotion is prepared, references are sought, and two special meetings of the Faculty Promotions Committee are arranged. Suppose now that the Faculty Promotions Committee does not approve the proposal? Professor X would then finish up with a great deal of egg on his or her face. But it will never happen like that. What will happen is that Professor X will talk privately to certain influential members of the Promotions Committee about Protégé Y and it will be privately agreed, in advance, that Protégé Y deserves promotion. The Faculty Promotions Committee then meets (twice) in the role of rubber stamp. No egg falls on Professor X because the promotion is secured on his or her own standing in the Faculty, not on the research published by Protégé Y.

If Protégé Y's application for promotion is to be evaluated with respect to the same standards that are applied to established staff, two conditions need to be met:

(i) Protégé Y's application must be considered within the annual promotion round simultaneously with applications from established staff so that fair comparisons can be made; (and those comparisons would not be fair if Protégé Y's application was considered as a special item at the beginning of an otherwise routine meeting of the Committee).

(ii) The Faculty Promotions Committee must be unaware of Professor X's specific interest in Protégé Y and that Protégé Y's promotion is to be paid for from extraneous sources. There is a legal parallel here. A jury adjudicating a criminal trial is not allowed to know whether the defendant has any previous convictions lest it bias their deliberations.

The General Board 'have agreed that personal promotions should be primarily determined by the assessment of academic merit, without budgetary restriction' (Reporter, 1998-99, p. 646), so the inclusion of Protégé Y in the annual round in this way should have no effect on the promotion prospects of any other applicant. But there is still another matter needing attention. If Professor X is him- or herself a member of the Faculty Promotions Committee, he or she will come to the meeting with a private agenda.

Legal practice tells us how to deal with that problem too. The intention in a criminal trial is that the issue shall be decided on the evidence presented in court and on that evidence alone. That is possibly the intention of our own promotions procedure too because the 'Purple Booklet' states, in section 5.2, 'Faculty Promotions Committees must make their evaluations on the basis of the documentation'. That objective is secured in a court of law by excluding from the jury anyone who has any prior personal knowledge of the case. Our own practice, in contrast, is to restrict the evaluation of applications to a Committee whose members have a very great deal of personal knowledge of the applicants beyond what is contained in the documentation.

It is to be expected that the exercise of that bias in Faculty Promotions Committees will lead to some egregious anomalies of evaluation, notwithstanding that the bias is unwitting. Those anomalies are carefully protected from examination. There is an appeals procedure; but the remit of the Appeals Committee is restricted to 'an error or fault in the procedure or in the documentation or its contents or otherwise, e.g. where it is alleged that the Committee must have overlooked or misapprehended a significant fact, or where there is an allegation of a breach of natural justice or failure to follow set procedures'. ('Purple Booklet', section 7.6). Not only does this University do nothing to prevent the exercise of bias in Faculty Promotions Committees, but it sets that exercise beyond challenge.

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, existing promotions procedures are admirably even-handed as between different members of Faculty Promotions Committees rooting for their favoured candidates. That is quite a different matter, though, from being even-handed as between different candidates for promotion. Those candidates who are not anyone's favourite - and this is the majority of eligible Teaching Officers - are effectively excluded from promotion. An unbiased procedure for assessing each candidate's published research is needed as a matter of urgency.

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in the Reporter of 1996-97, p. 530, you may read that the Council and the General Board 'welcome the full participation of members of the Regent House in the discussion of University business, in particular at Discussions held in the Senate-House, which provide an opportunity for comments and suggestions to be made on matters which are currently before the Regent House'. There is assurance that 'such comments and suggestions are always taken into account by the appropriate University body'.

The 'demented alchemist' of the spring (Reporter, 1998-99, p. 377 and p. 402) was a ghost I hoped we had laid, but here he is again, with his head under his arm. Once more I am censored.

These are the things I am not allowed to tell you (see, in order, the gaps in my speeches of 12 October, Reporter, p. 119). In my speech on the implementation of pay increases I wanted to ask a question about the Vice-Chancellor's [14 words omitted]. I do not see how it can be defamatory to ask a question. Can he deny that he has admitted in my hearing that he has done so? 'One law for the Vice-Chancellor and one for me', I said. Well? I went on: 'We went through the Latin pantomime for making proctors in due form on 1 October in the Senate House with a solemn reading of the relevant portion of Statute D. Let us be consistent. If a student does not meet a deadline, tough; he must take the consequences'. I suggested that the Vice-Chancellor might get away with acting rather differently. 'An officer of the University of Cambridge signs an undertaking to obey the Statutes and Ordinances when he enters office. A Vice-Chancellor who does not do so surely ought to suffer the consequences of removal from office like anyone else [6 words omitted]'. That is no more than the raising of a serious concern in the public interest, surely?

Then they cut: [39 words omitted]

That is already in print in the Reporter (1998-99, p. 886).

'Upon the second stage Appeal Committee the General Board has put Professor Peter Clarke'. That is a fact.

'Naturally the Appeal Committee at the first stage was disinclined to find fault with his conduct as stand-in Chairman of the History Faculty Committee, because, as I put it to them squarely [16 words omitted]. That is surely fair comment, no more?

In my second speech, the one on the Professorship of Linguistics etc., they cut out my assertion, which he does not deny, that [15 words omitted].

They cut out my suggestion that Professor Blundell, Head of Biochemistry, might consider whether he ought honourably to offer his resignation as the officer responsible in our Health and Safety line-management structure for the loss of a radioisotope. That cost us a criminal prosecution and nearly £93,000 in legal fees, plus the £22,080.49 costs awarded against us in the Chelmsford Crown Court on 24 September (which we cannot get back on our indemnity insurance). I merely asked whether he was going to be invited to pay, since I was being pursued for costs of £10,000. [20 words omitted] Well I would. What is wrong with saying that?

The last cut concerns my question to the Vice-Chancellor about cronyism. [36 words omitted] I went on to ask: 'how many personal involvements he has with businesses as our Vice-Chancellor. The advisory panel for Zeus (not the god, but the business) may be found on the Web. It includes the Vice-Chancellor's name'. I asked, 'How much more of this is going on without clarification of role and interest?' and, 'Who will monitor the buy-ins for the RAE?' Surely it is in the public interest that these questions be aired. I should not have to do it twice to get them into print.

The Registrary says I should apologize to those working hard in the Old Schools for suggesting that the quality of our administration leaves something to be desired. I have thought about that hard, for I am always ready to apologize if I am accidentally unfair. It would be unfair to attack those who cannot stand up and reply for themselves here, but all those I named can do so. I do not for a moment deny the loyalty and commitment of most of our administrative staff, or that they have to work very hard and under great pressure because there are not enough of them. Yet employing more staff does not necessarily mend a dysfunctional system nor would it mean that no one would in future be guilty of carelessness. My father taught me when I was a small child, from his observations as a humble clerk, about the way in which, when you get a secretary, pretty soon she needs two secretaries and then they need secretaries too.

To today's business. I am grateful to those public-spirited enough to sign the call for this Discussion.

The failure to get our staff on to a rational, even, and explicable footing of rights and rewards goes far beyond the continuing row about promotions to senior academic offices. If readers will turn back to p. 761 of the Reporter of 1998-99, they will find a speech I made on the nature of a University office, soon after the Notice on p. 587 had been published. In it I set out a series of concerns about what we now mean by a University office, to which there has as yet been no response. This is not just nit-picking by those of us who take the Statutes and Ordinances seriously. A Notice which ought to be published this week will say that appointments are unestablished 'because the responsibilities attached to them, although they are clearly defined for the tenure of the present holders, may nevertheless be subject to revision in the future; the areas of responsibility and the duties are to some extent provisional, and the Council wish to be in a position to redefine them if this proves to be necessary in the light of experience'. But with an office you know where you are.

It is important that we do. The Statutes and Ordinances govern University officers. There is a provision in the Statutes and Ordinances to prevent unauthorized extra-mural work, at Statute D, II, 9:

The University [that is the Regent House] shall have power, or may delegate the power, to preclude a University Officer from undertaking any work outside the scope of his or her office or to limit the amount of such work.

Now making money from 'flexible friend' television screens is not, as far as I can see, within the remit of an 'office' intended to foster education, religion, learning and research. So have we delegated the authority to let officers press on with the commercial exploitation of money-making ideas in the University's time? Where is that in the Reporter? I do not seem to be able to find it. But at least there is the possibility of control of real officers. These unestablished pseudo-Professors will not be restrained by the provisions of Statute D, II, 9.

Most memorable of all were the McCanical inventions of the age, nearly all of which were kinds of progress and ...Bad Things. Amongst these were Bicycles...and Roads (invented by Lord Macadam and his son Lord Tarmac) for them to go along. Other inventions were Thermometers...which caused Temperatures..., Telegrams which cause betting, Bismarck, etc; Mackintoshes....; and the memorable line invented by Mr. Plimsoll. (1066 And All That)

I turn to some of the most insecure among those who do not hold offices. We are not addressing the situation of our numerous short-term contract scientists, whose careers are in the hands of the big leading players, some of whom it is proposed to make even bigger by giving them pseudo-Chairs. Once more we are assisting the successful and the favoured at the expense of our seed-corn among the young. I have been talking to some young scientists, here and elsewhere. It seems that we are leaking post-docs, not to industry, but right out of science and into other fields like banking and the law. That is happening, scientists of many disciplines explain to me, for a number of reasons. There is no career structure and no realistic career prospects, and that encourages the ambitious to leave science altogether. For a reasonable career structure with pension prospects they might stay in science.

They tell me that if there were more real research freedom, they might stay in science. Science Ph.D.s commonly involve the mere hiving-off to the candidate of a portion of experimental work within a larger project. One went so far as to say that there can sometimes be no individual original work, and that an original idea was likely to be gathered up by the head of the project and carried off for his own use without allowing the author the free and full use of it, or perhaps credit for it at all. The less compliant (and potentially the most original) are made angry by this.

They also resent the lack of any system for ensuring the smaller players get fair credit in publications; that the head of project who may not have done any of the experimental work but merely got the grant, appears in the position on the list which assures his own upward progression in the system; that even the application for a grant requires one to make known details of ongoing work which the referees may then steal (and get away with it). I report what I am told. These practices are by no means peculiar to Cambridge, but if we were to stop them here we should do science a great service and provide some real 'leadership'.

And what of the rewards we offer those who do stay? Post-docs tell me that they resent it when senior staff on a project (who seem to be unaccountable) split a grant so as to get two post-docs for £13,000 each instead of paying one a decent salary. They resent, after so many years of study, receiving the same salary as a school leaver. They resent having to rent a flat with Ph.D. students because they cannot afford to start to buy a home of their own. And the salary gap is growing.

I understand that a set of questions is going the rounds of UK universities. It asks what progress institutions are making in their treatment of unestablished academic staff. Are short-term contract scientists and others here informed about what is accepted good practice? That would be a beginning. Those without the requisite leverage in the system may get their careers cut short even when they are at the height of their mature success as scientists by our lack of any proper structure for the protection of unestablished staff. And here we are planning to give a favoured few their pseudo-Chairs.

(And we must reopen the question why College officers cannot be given promotions, if promotions are to include 'promotions' for unestablished staff.)

The Reporter, p. 587, makes it plain that not everyone is going to have to jump through the same hoops to get 'promoted' in future. Real officers will go one way, pseudo-Professors another, by a route which the General Board can adapt for them personally. My experience this summer shows that the University will argue in court that it has to apply the rules (23 June) and then (24 June) intervene to get them varied behind the scenes.

The Regent House is to be allowed no more debate on this topic, now that it has voted its rights away. Many of us have serious concerns that the Secretary General should have so much power over our promotions prospects. (It turns out he is unaware that book reviews are acts of critical evaluation. He thinks they just sum up the contents of a book. He said so in my hearing.)

There must be a requirement that Chairmen and Committee members are trained in the rules of natural justice (other universities do it). No one should be allowed to participate in decision-making without understanding those rules.

There must be policing of declarations of interest. Detailed guidance to Committees in this area is urgently needed.

The assessment of interdisciplinary work by a single Faculty with the aid of multidisciplinary references must stop.

It is unfair to allow references to pile up in the files of those who have to make second and third applications, since it is statistically likely that there will come to be some negative comment.

We must restore the requirement that conflicting evidence in the references be reconciled and remove the principle that any negative comment automatically disqualifies a candidate. When we cleared the files two years ago, two candidates bounded straight from Lecturer to Professor.

We must build in the core principles which inform the draft panel criteria for RAE 2001.

There must be better policing of consistency of treatment.

Candidates who show good cause must be provided with an alternative first-stage body to consider their candidature, other than the Faculty in which their posts are established.

We must revisit the appeal structure. Candidates must have a right to sufficient information to enable them to show that there has been 'an error or fault in the procedure' or that 'the Committee must have overlooked or misapprehended a significant fact'.

If the Appeal Committee are to be restricted to procedural questions they must have upon them persons with the relevant legal expertise. If they are - as at present - allowed to move to the merits, a separate Committee must be set up for each candidate.

Then let us apply the same procedures with the same rigour to the fast-track nominees.

In the Court of Appeal on 18 October I was given leave to appeal against the order for costs made against me at the County Court on 25 June.

The University wins in the courts; the court system is sound and reliable. I win; it is all the luck of the draw and who do these judges think they are anyway? I merely point out that it is not easy to get leave in the Court of Appeal, and most especially not on costs.

Lawyers tell me that this is quite an important judgement because it goes to the heart of the 'fat cat' problem that an individual student or employee cannot hope to fight a rich monster in the courts if the rich monster is allowed to spend money like this and then claw it all back.

The judgement is very critical of the University's conduct in running up so huge a bill ('a luxury they should fund themselves').

The judgement is also critical of the scale of the fees charged by Counsel, Mr. Charles Béar. It was critical of the scale of charges made by the solicitor, Clifford Chance: 'One perhaps raises an eyebrow at the very least'. It is critical of the judge in the county court.

The Appeal Court judges expect the parties to compromise or to go to mediation.

I have already paid £3,200, with the intention that the University should use it for the benefit of students in hardship over the payment of fees. That remains my wish.

I hope our new Director of Personnel has been eating well and getting plenty of sleep ready for his arrival on 1 November. He will have to address himself to a complex workplace situation.

Tuesday, 9 November 1999. A Discussion was held in the Council Room of the following Reports. Under the provisions of Regulation 6 for Discussions (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 113) the Editor has omitted five passages from the remarks made by Dr Evans; these omissions are indicated by square brackets.

The Report of the Council, dated 25 October 1999, on JIF-funded refurbishment at the Department of Chemistry (p. 83).

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Registrary, I hoped to be uncharacteristically brief today, but there have been developments. There is to be a Grace to enable the Director of Estate Management to submit a planning application. There is to be another Grace to enable the Treasurer to accept tenders for the work within the funds identified. I remember a discussion on the Council a year or two ago about the fume cupboards mentioned here, which might as well have taken place in one for all the clarity of our grasp of the issues. Has anyone taken on board the warnings in this May's National Audit Office Report on 'Procurements in the English Higher Education Sector'? I just wonder.

I have been making a practice recently of seeking to draw attention to underlying questions when I speak to a Report. Here I suggest we ought to be taking stock again, this time of building projects, procurements, and our links in general with the world where our charit-able status may be compromised. The Committee of Public Accounts produced a Report last year, 'The Management of Building Projects at English Higher Education Institutions', its Fortieth Report of 14 May 1998. It too is monitory:

'There is an urgent need for more determinate guidance to be issued by the Funding Council to institutions on the planning, management, and implementation of building projects'.¹

'We recommend that the Funding Council revise the terms of the financial memoranda between them and the institutions to reflect the requirement for institutions to comply with the elements of best practice identified in the National Audit Office Report'.²

I have asked the Treasurer to supply me with a list of the involvements of our EMBS with providing lodgements for commercial companies. The Cambridge Student of 4 November carries the story of a change of plan on that embedded Microsoft laboratory in our controversial new Computer Laboratory building. Perhaps Roger Needham, our former Pro-Vice-Chancellor, would like to give the Council an update on what went wrong and why.

What internal controls shall we create to monitor the deployment in building, procurement, and other respects, of the £68m the Government is so generously making available to us so that we may merge with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? (Yes, you did hear me aright.) 'MIT will join forces with Cambridge University to create a global research university', said the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the press conference yesterday. The coincidence that he is to make his pre-Budget speech today will not be lost on the members of the Regent House. The Sunday Times Business Section of 31 October carried one tantalizing scrap of quotation from the proposed agreement which confirms that more is intended that the mere 'collaboration' you will be promised in the misleading heading of the Notice to be published tomorrow. I cannot tell you what else is in the agreement, since I am bound by Council confidentiality. I for one have kept silent with a sense of outrage that the Regent House continued for so long and continues now to be kept in the dark at the Government's behest. Read very closely that sentence in the Notice which says that 'the Government is willing to commit up to £68m over five years against contracts for specific programmes of activity' [my italics]. The Council knew nothing of that in advance. I suspect the Treasury sprang it even on the Vice-Chancellor and senior officers. It means, unequivocally, that the Government plans to keep control of the funding of our research projects and our teaching plans for these new joint courses with MIT.

The Notice carries confirmation that I was not defaming the Vice-Chancellor in one of the passages they cut out of my speeches of 12 October. The sum identified in the Notice as having been promised by business to go with the Government money has been raised partly through conversations of the Vice-Chancellor with business contacts. The Council was not invited to approve these. It still does not know which businesses. How were they selected? It may indeed be that the Treasury 'told him to'. But I thought we rather took a pride in academic autonomy and our right to snap our fingers in the face of Governments when they press us to take decisions as a University for the political advantage of the party in power.

The Council was not notified in advance of the Press launch of this project on Monday, 8 November. The Treasury released text at 15.13 on 5 November, so there was plenty of time. Look carefully at the publicity material. It is all about the Government's triumph in its having brought MIT to Britain. Cambridge is being 'used'.

I wonder if Tony Blair and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have been quite so keen if they really understood the depth of the confusion of our controls and monitoring and management accounting systems? There is a 1998-99 Report of the Further Education Funding Council on a less Blair-favoured institution called the Isle of Wight College. No doubt we imagine ourselves to be above such audits of our administration and performance. But the Higher Education Funding Council could carry them out them too. I quote, 'Governors have not effectively overseen the College's strategic direction...there is little evidence of an informed debate by governors' [my italics].

Here, set out in all its frightful potential for the destruction of the freedom and scholarship we have held precious here for centuries, is an example of the enthusiastic and well-meaning, but imperfectly thought-through planning behind the scenes I have been complaining about in the speeches which keep being censored.

Our Vice-Chancellor told us when he entered office that his chief idea was to create links with industry. I challenge him to hold an open forum for the Regent House to come and ask him questions in public, with the press present, so that we may hear from his own lips how much he really understands of the implications of this MIT scheme. Perhaps he will even tell us which businesses are involved.

We have not delegated to the Vice-Chancellor and the senior officers authority to act on our behalf in the MIT project, as it is proposed we do to the Treasurer and the head of EMBS in this matter of the planning application. So let us think hard about what we are delegating even in this comparatively little matter before us in today's Report.

Are you happy with these Graces? I do not plan to challenge them, though others may. I am too busy responding as best I can to staff and students who approach me in difficulties because members of our academic staff have not yet had that helpful course in 'finding out about University procedures' (Reporter, p.107).

If we are going to make acts of delegation by Grace to the Treasurer and the Director of EMBS, I believe we ought to make provision to ensure that we can fulfil the obligations of the Regent House under Statute K, 9. We authorize here two acts. We are probably doing so, though Statute K, 9 is not clear, in a manner which divests us of the power to change anything done by those to whom we have delegated our powers as Governing Body. But it does not divest us of responsibility for their decisions, if they get something disastrously wrong. There is also a little puzzle in my mind, which may be a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, about the fact that Statute K, 9 allows us to delegate only to a committee and not to individuals. Incompetent though our committees are, at least they may prevent individuals acting out of sight and out of control.

I should have been able to be briefer still if I had not had to say, yet again, things which have twice been cut out of my speeches of 12 October and 26 October. Members of the Regent House will be disturbed at the repeated delays in the publication of Discussions, setting freedom of speech at risk in this University by recourse again and again to expensive 'legal opinion' from Clifford Chance, about whose rate of charge the Court of Appeal has had something to say. What are we afraid of? Is the Vice-Chancellor going to sue his own University for defamation? He can already sue me, because I have already made these speeches. The 26 October speeches (and not only mine) are now likely to be held over until after the next Council meeting, in late November. The Council are, in practice, now taking powers to decide what will be published in the Reporter, potentially from your speeches as well as mine. That will make a great deal easier their task of responding to remarks made in Discussions. But this speech needs to be in the Reporter rather rapidly. Is its publication going to be delayed into December or January?

One of the suppressed points in my sliced-up speech on the implementation of pay increases I have already touched on.

I went on, 'An officer of the University of Cambridge signs an undertaking to obey the Statutes and Ordinances when he enters office'. I speculated whether a Vice-Chancellor who does not do so ought not to suffer the consequences of removal from office like anyone else. [7 words omitted] (Perhaps they will publish it if I make it more hypothetical.)

Then they cut my attempt to position a question-mark over the conduct of the Promotions Appeal Committee, with special reference to what I said in an earlier (and already published) speech about Professor Peter Clarke's [27 words omitted]. The Appeal Committee was chaired by Professor Mirrlees, knowing Professor Clarke was to be on the Appeal Committee at the next stage. I probably do not need to draw any inference. Let us see if they will publish the point like that.

In my second speech, the one on the Professorship of Linguistics, etc., they cut out something which allows me to plead promissory estoppel on this tedious business about the costs. Since I shall be pleading promissory estoppel in the Court of Appeal, perhaps they will now let that see the light of day.

They cut out my suggestion that Professor Blundell, Head of Biochemistry, might consider whether he ought honourably to offer his resignation as the officer responsible in our Health and Safety line-management structure for the loss of a radioisotope. That cost us a criminal prosecution and nearly £93,000 in legal fees, plus the £22,080.49 costs awarded against us in the Chelmsford Crown Court on 24 September (which we cannot get back on our indemnity insurance). I just asked whether he was going to be invited to pay, since I was being pursued for costs of £10,000.

The last cut concerns a question to the Vice-Chancellor. [30 words omitted] There may even be examples on that list of sources of the business funding for the MIT project. Surely we are entitled to know? It is an obvious Nolan- and Neill-Committee issue. I went on to point out that the advisory panel for Zeus (not the god, but the business) may be found on the Web, with the Vice-Chancellor's name on it. [23 words omitted] I will put a word at the end of this speech all by itself, which must in no way be connected with this twice-deleted passage.

Members of the Regent House, they will not silence me, though the waters are growing increasingly choppy. Be vigilant and insist on greater transparency and accountability in the running of the University, out of love for the great things it exists for, or at least out of self-interest. I am sorry not to have been able to be as brief as I promised.

And now for that word. [3 words omitted]

¹ Committee of Public Accounts, 'The Management of Building Projects at English Higher Education Institutions', Fortieth Report, 14 May 1998, pp. v-vi.

² ibid., p. vii and paragraph 47.

The Report of the General Board, dated 6 October 1999, on the establishment of a Professorship of Physical Geography and a Professorship of Human Geography (p. 85).

Professor A. D. CLIFF:

Registrary, my name is Professor Cliff and I speak as Head of the Department of Geography. On behalf of the staff of the Department, I welcome these proposals by the General Board which will enable the Department to advance its teaching and research in new and fruitful directions. Both these Professorships are designed to enable the Department to develop interdisciplinary teaching and research with cognate disciplines in the University. This trend is to be seen in many departments and it reflects the encouragement given to interdisciplinary work by government, research councils, and this University alike. The changes are also intended to bring the Department broadly into line with its UK competitor departments of Geography in terms of the number of its established Professorships. Accordingly, I commend the proposals to the Regent House.

No remarks were made on the following Report:

The Report of the General Board, dated 6 October 1999, on the establishment of a Professorship of Public Health Medicine (p. 86).

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