Provost’s Update: Welcome to a new academic year – making great things happen

Hello and welcome to a new academic year! There are many staff for whom August is far from the quiet month it is reputed to be, but I hope everyone was able to take a break of some sort over summer. And thank you to everyone who has worked incredibly hard over summer to support offer holders, students and colleagues in a whole variety of ways, and in particular those whose ongoing dedication keeps our campuses secure, clean and in good order every day of the year.

This year is going to be particularly special and full of opportunity, marking as it does UCL’s bicentennial year. As a community, we will be holding a range of student and staff led projects, events and campaigns, with many opportunities to get involved and be excited and inspired by our past, understand how it has shaped our present and be part of the work to build our future.

We will also be launching our biggest and most ambitious philanthropic and engagement campaign yet. This is an exciting opportunity for our university to galvanise partnerships with our donor and alumni community, and fuel significant ambition for our future global impact.

UCL has always been a place where great things can happen. We were founded on a commitment to service, to the notion that learning happens in a social context, that even our most theoretical work should be undertaken in a spirit of supporting individuals and communities to flourish. That spirit has been present throughout our history and it remains our driving force today.

I do not want to sound Pollyannaish. It is true that we are marking our 200th anniversary in an environment in which it can feel like universities are at risk of death by a thousand cuts. The mood music around international students risks a growing perception of the UK as an unwelcoming country, and proposals to put a levy on each non-UK student universities admit would be a significant cost for UCL, dwarfing the extra cost of the NI increase that we have already had to absorb within stretched budgets. Student recruitment at home and internationally remains unpredictable and stiffly competitive, and the latter in particular is sensitive to a range of geopolitical fluctuations over which we have no control.

And yet, alongside the work we need to do to manage and mitigate as far as possible the challenges we face, I do not have to work too hard to come up with a list of reasons to be cheerful. While many institutions are in deficit, UCL is maintaining its financial sustainability and we expect to be able to show one of our best years ever for research grant income, alongside record levels of consultancy income through UCLC and continued strong commercialisation income through UCLB.

We improved our NSS results, a metric that will be of growing importance, so thanks are due to everyone focused on this work, maintained our strong rankings in global tables and upheld our international profile with high levels of media coverage of our research (which have continued unabated over summer). Just last week we shared how UCL led trials are set to change the way doctors diagnose prostate cancer and transform diagnosis of Alzheimer’s through a simple blood test. Updating our brand and key narrative this year will similarly strengthen awareness of UCL’s impact around the world and help us to stand out against our competitors.

No less importantly, we have a clear prioritised plan to invest in the basics (toilets, lifts, teaching spaces, fume cupboards, etc), with around 100 toilets and 15 teaching spaces fully refurbished this summer. Meanwhile, the transformation of the Wilkins Building and the Quad, the front door to our Bloomsbury campus, is progressing well and will deliver inclusive and accessible public, learning and social spaces when it is complete in early 2026.

The bottom line, I think, is that we need to be realistic about the environment, but absolutely not in a way that limits our ambition and our appetite to keep innovating and making change happen. A challenging environment means we need to be clear about our priorities and aware of constraints, but also to be confident that, as has been the case over the past 200 years, today’s ambitions are tomorrow’s realities. Again and again in our history, we have seen how ideas generated by our research teams at UCL can change the world. As a large multidisciplinary institution with a strong ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the breadth, scale and impact of what we do here is unparalleled.

In order to meet our potential, we have to make sure we are living our values. Core to our 200 years of extraordinary impact has been our understanding that a culture of open minds and open inquiry is fundamental to academic innovation and that, conversely, consensus equals intellectual atrophy.

We are not immune to the political polarisation and divisive rhetoric that are increasingly evident in the wider world and highlighted on a daily basis in our news feeds. This creates an even greater responsibility to show that we are a kind and welcoming community. It is inevitable that issues will arise over the coming year about which members of our community hold impassioned, oppositional positions. I very much hope that we will be able to remain true to our values as a diverse, pluralist community that recognises complexity, is comfortable with difference and can navigate disagreement constructively, respectfully and without making an enemy of those who hold beliefs and opinions with which we disagree.

We have a great deal to be excited about and many reasons to feel optimistic as we start this new year. Let us start as we mean to go on, as a richly diverse community. A community that is deeply proud of that diversity, one that is open to all, welcoming to all and where everyone can contribute their talents and expertise to the amazing place that is UCL.

Yours
Michael

Dr Michael Spence
UCL President & Provost