Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

A Discussion was held in the Senate-House. Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Steve Young was presiding, with the Registrary’s Deputy, two Deputy Proctors, and six other persons present.

The following Reports were discussed:

Report of the Council, dated 14 January 2013, on General Admission to Degrees (Reporter, 6293, 2012–13, p. 307).

No remarks were made on this Report.

Report of the General Board, dated 9 January 2013, on the re-establishment of a Professorship of Pure Mathematics (Reporter, 6293, 2012–13, p. 309).

No remarks were made on this Report.

First-stage Report of the Council, dated 21 January 2013, on the alteration and refurbishment of the Arup Building on the New Museums Site (Reporter, 6294, 2012–13 p. 323).

Professor Peter Robinson (Computer Laboratory) (read by Professor Neil Dodgson):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, my Department, the Computer Laboratory, was one of the original three occupants of the Arup Building. We moved out a decade ago. Our space was never permanently reassigned, presumably with an eye to the day when Materials Science would also move. Materials Science are now about to decamp to West Cambridge, leaving just a third of the building occupied, by Zoology.

I note that other buildings on the New Museums Site will shortly be vacated, as the University Computing Service and Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB) also move out to West Cambridge. This will provide a rare opportunity to reconsider use of a significant proportion of the Site.

In the past, the Council has helpfully published its Master Plans for developments on the Sidgwick Site, in West Cambridge, North West Cambridge, and the Old Press/Mill Lane Site. These were considered by the Regent House, and provide the context in which later work is placed.

Given the considerable scope for redevelopment on the New Museums Site, it would be helpful if the Council could also publish the University’s Master Plan for the redevelopment of the New Museums Site (and, if available, other central sites) so that the Regent House can better understand how this proposed refurbishment fits into the overall strategic plan for the Site.

Professor Neil Dodgson (Computer Laboratory):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, this afternoon we have two Reports on buildings: the refurbishment of the 1970s Arup Building in the City centre and the construction of a new Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB) building in West Cambridge. We are fortunate that the projects cost almost exactly the same amount, £60m, because this allows the Regent House to appreciate the cost of maintaining and upgrading our existing estate compared with the cost of new buildings. In this case, the cost is double per usable square metre. That is, the Arup refurbishment costs just under £12,000 per usable square metre, while the CEB new building is considerably cheaper at just under £6,000 per usable square metre.1

Despite the huge cost, it is clear that something must be done about the Arup Building. This Report says that the Arup Building ‘suffers from a number of significant problems typical of buildings of its era and style’. This is an elegant understatement. One of the Council’s previous Reports, in December 1998,2 described it as being ‘below the standard reasonable for a leading academic Department’, particularly drawing attention to the way in which the tall, narrow towers ‘severely inhibit communication’, are ‘inflexible’, and ‘cannot be easily adapted to new research needs’. In addition to those problems, the shape of the building means that it makes poor use of the available volume. One can easily imagine how much extra floor space would have been available to the University had Sir Philip Dowson designed a boring box rather than the exciting lead-and-glass upside-down-ziggurat-on-legs. I am delighted to hear that the building is to be upgraded and that some of the unused volume is to be walled-in and used more effectively.

However, given the poor state of the existing building and given the high cost of the refurbishment, please could the Council inform the Regent House whether consideration was given to demolishing the Arup Building and constructing something appropriate from scratch.

Dr Fiona Russell (Faculty of Biology):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I would simply like to ask if the Council could inform the Regent House whether the University has received a plan for dealing with the Babbage Lecture Theatre during the building works such that students are not disadvantaged?

Mr Ben Harris (University Computing Service) (read by Mr M. Bruce Beckles):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, my name is Ben Harris, and I’m a Computer Officer in the University Computing Service (UCS). For the last three months, I’ve been among those working on the Service’s plans for vacating our server room in the Arup Building this summer. This will be a complex process, moving well over a hundred servers to new homes over the course of two months. I was told that we needed to move out to allow the Arup Building to be refurbished for occupation by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, so I was surprised to see this Report describing the Service’s hurried vacation of Arup as presenting an opportunity for that refurbishment rather than being an unfortunate prerequisite. Indeed, I was surprised to see a Report proposing this refurbishment at all, since within the Service it has been treated as an immutable fact for months. I can’t speak for the entire Service, but I suspect many of us would be very happy to discover that this was all a terrible misunderstanding and there was no hurry for us to get out at all.

If this refurbishment had come a little later, it would have been much better timed. Last July, the Council proposed the construction of a new Data Centre in West Cambridge, which would house the Computing Service equipment currently housed in Arup. This was approved by the University. In December, the Council stated that the Arup Building needed to be vacated in 2013, while the Data Centre would be completed in 2014 (Reporter, 6288, 2012–13 p. 193). As a result, the Service is currently planning to move equipment from Arup into various temporary accommodation this year and then, assuming the proposed Data Centre gets built, into that a year or two later. This is obviously rather inefficient compared with making a single move after the Data Centre is finished. Could the Council explain why it is necessary for the UCS server room to be vacated this year rather than next? Does the expected cost of £59.6m include the cost of temporarily accommodating the UCS’s servers until the Data Centre is built?

Mr Julian King (University Computing Service) (read by Mr M. Bruce Beckles):

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am Julian King, an elected member of the Information Systems and Strategy Syndicate and an employee of the University Computing Service (UCS). I am here today in my capacity as server room manager for the University Computing Service.

It would be easy to imagine that this Report was in some way connected to the IT Review (Reporter, 2012–13, 6282, p. 57). It is important to appreciate that it is in no way connected. Despite this being the first the Regent House has heard of them, these plans have been evolving for around five years, long before the IT Review was even launched.

In Paragraph 4, the Report talks about the exodus from the Arup Building and, with regards to the University Computing Service and High Performance Computing Service machine rooms, is distressingly misleading. Neither server rooms are being moved to more appropriate space; they are temporarily and at significant expense moving to less appropriate spaces and at very short notice. The West Cambridge Data Centre, expected to be the eventual location for both server rooms, will be completed around a year after it is needed. It seems that the push for quickly constructing a new data centre has been mistimed thanks to the exodus from the Arup Building recently being brought forward by a year.

As a result of this poor planning and timetabling millions of pounds will be wasted. Millions on top of any money that would have naturally been spent. This expense doesn’t include the cost of moving again in two years' time. Neither does it include the cost of delayed or cancelled projects as a result of the workload imposed in moving a massive amount of central University infrastructure with undue haste. Furthermore, it doesn’t include the risk to the University which is quite significant. Naturally as much as possible is being done to mitigate this risk by the UCS, but this is not a simple office move as some people appear to believe.

Virtually every aspect of the service that the UCS offers risks being affected. There is little point me endeavouring to enumerate them all, but I would like to highlight some of the examples of services which will affect almost any use of a computer within the University:

•the University’s JANET connection which is currently our only route onto the internet;

•the internal network connection connecting departments to each other and, for example, to other services such as CUFS (Cambridge University Finance System);

•the University’s email system, which could affect not only all incoming and outgoing email, but also Hermes with its 40,000 or more users;

•the Raven Service, which would affect access to almost any other service which was authenticated, such as many e-journals, and also including CHRIS, CamTools, Lookup, Lapwing, and many others;

•the University phone system – all desk phones in the University are controlled by UCS infrastructure;

•Lapwing, the wireless network across most of the University, could be affected.

The Council should be deeply concerned that the University is about to be exposed to these enormous risks, let alone that the decision to endure them appears to have been made before the Stage one Report has made it to the Regent House. They should be concerned at the wasted money resulting from the apparent lack of consideration by those making the plans. I would urge them to investigate, ideally before August through to October, when any or all of these services might be affected if not everything goes to plan. I would also urge them to be prepared to take control if either the builders refurbishing the Arup Building wish to move their timetable forward or if the unthinkable happens and builders that are refurbishing the Roger Needham Building and who only get to start work in April don’t meet their timetable.

Second-stage Report of the Council, dated 21 January 2013, on the construction of a new building for the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at West Cambridge (Reporter, 6294, 2012–13 p. 325).

No remarks were made on this Report.