Provost's Perspective: Welcome back to spring term 2015

A warm welcome to all students at the beginning of this spring term.

I wrote last week about events in Paris, France, but repeat here my sadness and offer UCL's sympathy and condolences to all the families who suffered as a result of the massacres of people at the Charlie Hedbo office and at the Jewish supermarket in Porte de Vincennes. 

Let me also offer our support to all our students from France as they come to terms with these tragic events.  Events are being planned for open reflection, organised by colleagues engaged in our European Institute, Global Citizenship and 'Intercultural Interaction' Grand Challenge, which as UCL students, you will be very welcome to attend. Further details in due course.

UCL's performance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014)

I suspect that towards the end of last term, you will have picked up our recent success in the REF2014, but may not know all the detail. Professor David Price has written a superb and comprehensive summary of precisely how UCL fared, and I would recommend that you take a look. 

As you will see there are many different ways of measuring our research performance, but suffice it to say that we did extremely well in this national exercise and you can be proud of being a student studying at the UK's leading university for research power (the volume of research rated world-leading or internationally excellent). 

This will inform our government funding for research from now until 2020 or so, and we thus anticipate a significant increase. Our UCL 2034 strategy is heavily focused on the relationship between our research and education and their integration, so this result will also feed directly into helping to enhance your experience as a UCL student. 

Wifi in student halls and the opening of the Cruciform Hub

Last week I attended two separate events, each of which launched and celebrated a very important development for our students.

The first of these was to thank and congratulate both Information Systems and Estates on installing Wifi into some 4,000 student rooms at our residences within just one year. You might think that access to Wifi is quite fundamental and I agree with you, but the facts were that only our newer residences had that facility as of a year ago. 

When visiting one of those halls on the Caledonian Road about this time last year with Professor Anthony Smith, Vice Provost for Education and Students, we challenged the idea that it would take three years to bring all of our residences up to the required standard. Information Systems and Estates rose to that challenge admirably and got the job done with minimal disruption, using a new technical solution. 

A huge thank you to them - I am delighted that our residential students can now enjoy Wifi access. One small footnote to the story is that following our recent merger with the IOE, we have acquired some further 400 rooms without Wifi - but they too are being prioritised for an urgent upgrade. 

The second cause for celebration was the formal opening of the new library and study facilities in the Cruciform Hub last week. To put it quite simply, these new facilities are absolutely world class and the whole development has been done in a way that is  consistent with the historic nature of the building. 

One of the reasons that it has been a great success is that the library conducted an exhaustive consultation with students, which gathered over 1,000 responses. Again, a huge thank you for your participation - we listened hard to your requirements and then created more than 400 new study spaces organised along the lines you requested. 

The plaque commemorating the opening was appropriately unveiled by Dr Deborah Gill and Professor Jane Dacre (now President of the Royal College of Physicians) as they had both been heavily involved in creating the opportunity. I was reminded of the many and varied talents of our students at the event as I listened in admiration to the UCL Medical School School providing some wonderful choral accompaniment to the event.

Our estates department have a very tough job coping with the state of repair of our ageing estate and also the very high level of demand of our expanding academic community, but they should be thanked, alongside our library staff, for the superb job they have done of the Cruciform Hub. 

All of this bodes very well for the new Student Centre - now a £65m development of further world-class facilities for the Bloomsbury campus that was discussed at our Estates Management Committee last week. If all goes well, the new Student Centre is scheduled to open for students from 2018. It will be built on the 'beach site' right next door to the Bloomsbury Theatre, our last vacant piece of land available for development on the Bloomsbury campus.

MyUCL and my communications with you

Finally, I hope you are enjoying MyUCL. We launched this newsletter at the start of the academic year in response to student feedback that you wanted a regular, coordinated email newsletter covering what is going on at UCL, including direct communications from me. 

We've been encouraged by consistently high open rates so far, and we hope it gives you a flavour of the news, events and opportunities on offer to you at UCL. However, the best way to improve the newsletter is by taking account of your feedback. We'll be conducting focus groups with you in the summer to help us improve MyUCL, but please do come back to us with your thoughts and feedback in the meantime, including to my Provost's Perspective. You'll find a feedback form at the foot of this piece to enable you to do so easily.

Along those lines, I am keen to further enhance my communication with all of you. When I first arrived, I suggested to UCLU that I would be prepared to conduct at least one open meeting specifically for students each term, with no pre-determined agenda. This was on the understanding that such an event would be organised and chaired by UCLU. 

Through this column, I am repeating that offer and simultaneously offer the services of the UCL Events Team to help organise it. I would welcome the opportunity to interact with you in such a direct way and would be prepared to try and answer any question that you may wish to ask. I'm sure that such an exchange could be 'interesting' at times, but it would also be fun and I would enjoy the intellectual exchange. Such future events will be advertised in plenty of time via MyUCL. Finally, please do enjoy your spring term 2015 at UCL.

Professor Michael Arthur

UCL President & Provost

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