The General Council Paper A: Report by the Principal
The University has a very special and dynamic relationship with its history and heritage, one that informs today and shapes tomorrow. On 8 October this year, two events brought this reality into sharp relief.
The first was the official naming of our new £90 million learning and teaching facility. We are calling it the James McCune Smith Building after the first African American to receive a medical degree, graduating from the University with an MD in 1837. Denied access to medical training in America, he found a home in Glasgow and went on to lead a distinguished life and career in the States.
This announcement came after the University published a comprehensive report in September entitled Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow. Written by colleagues Professor Simon Newman and Dr Stephen Mullen, it detailed the institution’s historical links with racial slavery. The study acknowledges that while the University played a leading role in the abolitionist movement, we also received significant financial support from people whose wealth at least in part was derived from slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Importantly, the report presents a programme of reparative justice, which includes the creation of a centre for the study of slavery and a memorial or tribute at the University in the name of the enslaved. The University is also working with the University of the West Indies (UWI) and hopes to sign a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen academic collaboration between the two institutions. This, for me, was an important example of the University facing up to difficult issues from the past and transforming them into something positive for the future. It’s not about denying or changing the past; it’s about working for a better future for humanity as a World Changing University.
The second event involved the laying of a foundation stone by the leader of Glasgow City Council (GCC), Councillor Susan Aitken, to mark 150 years to the day since the original foundation stone was laid at the iconic Gilbert Scott Building on 8 October 1868. Today’s foundation stone was laid at the site of the new James McCune Smith hub. Once again, this timeline, these contrasting sites, put into sharp relief the way in which the University has continued to evolve, transforming the physical and intellectual landscape while staying true to its foundations – one of them being our commitment to learning.
The James McCune Smith Learning Hub will be a specialist learning and teaching facility, offering state-of-the-art flexible learning spaces and technology-enabled teaching resources for over 2,500 students. As the first new build of our £1bn campus development, representing the largest expansion of the University’s estate since we moved to Gilmorehill, it is a statement of the priority and importance we give to learning and teaching and to the student experience.
That same message is repeated again and again through a range of activities. Our own annual Learning & Teaching conference, which is designed to share good teaching practice and the latest innovations in effective teaching, has been growing in stature and attracted 400 delegates this year.
We’ve made great efforts to recognise and reward teaching, providing parity of esteem for teaching even within a research-intensive environment; modernised our promotions processes and recognised the many outstanding contributions of our colleagues through our annual Teaching Excellence Awards and the student-led Teaching Awards.
We were proud hosts in July this year for the inaugural Times Higher world summit for teaching, which addressed the theme Teaching in Higher Education: the evolution of excellence.
It was no accident, either, that it was the leader of GCC who laid the stone, for if our civic status and partnership with the city defines our past, it also defines us today and, in tremendously exciting ways, for the future. We have signed a historic Memorandum of Understanding between Glasgow City Council and the FE/HE institutions in the city which sets out the way in which GCC and the universities and colleges can collaborate to build an “inclusive, equitable city, fostering innovation and creativity,” one “which benefits the people of Glasgow and industry and academia.”
Our campus development is driving the creation of clusters for innovation and industrial engagement. In partnership with the city, we are taking forward new and ambitious plans to expand our base in nanofabrication, quantum technologies and photonics at a new Clyde Waterfront Innovation Campus in Govan. We have a thriving network of companies clustered around QuantIC, one of the UK’s four Quantum Technology Hubs, funded by UKRI, with 30 formal industrial partners and engagements with a total of 70 companies.
Our Clinical Innovation Zone at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital – the largest hospital campus in Europe – is growing, and plays host to successful companies, attracted to Scotland from as far afield as California, to capitalise on Scotland’s world-leading ecosystem in precision medicine, an industry projected to be worth $134bn by 2025. The University was delighted that Professor Dame Anna Dominiczak co-chaired a major summit hosted by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in September, as she set out her government’s ambition that Scotland will lead the world in the field.
In addition to all this, we are planning a Glasgow University Innovation Zone which will aim to develop existing and emergent sectors in the UK such as FinTech, and digital chemistry.
Taken together, these new and emerging technologies have the potential to be to Glasgow’s 21st-century economy and identity what shipbuilding and heavy industry were in the 19th and 20th centuries. The University, as ever, will be at the heart of this transformation.
The next meetings of the General Council take place on Thursday 24 January 2019 and Monday 17 June 2019 in the Senate Room, Main Building at 6pm for 6.30pm.
