Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 6 March 2012

A Discussion was held in the Senate-House. Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Jeremy Sanders was presiding, with the Registrary’s Deputy, the Senior Proctor, a Deputy Proctor, and three other persons present.

The following Reports were discussed:

Report of the General Board, dated 8 February 2012, on the establishment of a Professorship of Sustainable Reaction Engineering (Reporter, 2011–12, p. 456)

No remarks were made on this Report.

Report of the General Board, dated 8 February 2012, on the establishment of Professorships of Politics, Engineering and Genetics (Reporter, 2011–12, p. 457)

Dr C. J. O’Kane (Head of the Department of Genetics):

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in 1912, the Balfour Professorship of Genetics was established in Cambridge – to my knowledge, the first Chair in Genetics anywhere in the world. In the hundred years since then, Genetics has changed the way we do biology, and even the way we see ourselves as humans. The contribution of Cambridge geneticists to this has been substantial – and so we will have much to celebrate at our centenary symposium on 7 September this year.

However, this is also a time for looking forward. Genetics continues to contribute enormously to biology, for example as a result of the current ten-fold increase in the capacity of DNA sequencing every 18 months. I enthusiastically welcome the establishment of this Professorship, as an investment in the future of Genetics in Cambridge, and in the power of Genetics to advance our understanding of biology.

Professor G. R. Evans (Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History) (read by the Senior Proctor):

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, those who are old enough in academe to remember the New Blood appointments of a generation ago, the last time there was serious Government financial cutback in higher education, will also recall that they had the effect of unbalancing provision. As far as I can remember, it was a requirement that the appointee, normally a young academic just getting started, must be able to offer something ‘new’. The something new, however interesting in itself, was not necessarily always in proportion to the needs of a Department, however glad it might be to get an extra academic.

The stated purpose of the unusual device proposed in this Report is ‘to enhance Departmental research profiles in anticipation of the REF’. The upgrading of the Office in Sustainable Reaction Engineering which is the subject of another Report today seems directed at the same objective.

These proposals will bring in strands of academic provision at a senior level which can be expected to affect the balance of the respective Departments for many years beyond 2015. It is true that in essence they merely bring forward replacements on the expected retirement of three current office holders (depending on the outcome of the forthcoming vote about academic retirement age, naturally), and that the cost to the University is merely the overlap cost of paying for two Professors instead of one for a year or two. However, making appointments with long-term implications to ‘beat the system’ when national higher education policy is so unstable and fast-changing seems to raise profound implications for policy-making in the University of Cambridge.