From Salford
From the Vice-Chancellor
Our changing world I recently hosted a reception for our alumni at Joule House, a building we’ve acquired that was once the home of James Prescott Joule. He carried out some of his most important experiments in the basement here in the mid-nineteenth century, giving his name to the standard unit of energy and helping to shape modern Physics. One and a half centuries later, we’re part of the global frontier in digital technology, working alongside the BBC’s research and development division at our new MediaCity campus, pushing terabytes of data across the globe almost instantaneously. Joule would have approved.
O
ne of our guests described how Salford had changed in his lifetime. Coming to our city to read Engineering in 1970, he remembered smog so dense that, sometimes, he had difficulty seeing his
own feet as he walked from the campus to his digs in Pendelton. Today, we are working to ambitious targets to reduce our carbon emissions, rewarded by a great result in the Green League of British universities earlier this year. Walking along the banks of the Irwell this summer with a long-time local resident, we saw a pair of otters swimming in clear water.
Dramatic changes are also taking place in the ways in which future students will be funded. From next year, we will no longer receive the block teaching grant that has previously covered more than half of our teaching costs. Instead, each student will receive a loan intended to cover the full costs of their university education. There has been a good deal of misinformation about this new system in the press. Some have asserted that we will be getting more than twice as much for each student we teach; we will not, because the new
loan amounts will barely compensate for the block grants, capital funding and earmarked support that the government will take away. The new system has been compared to mortgage or credit card debt; in reality, this is a form of graduate tax, with repayment after earnings exceed £21,000 per year and as a proportion of income, not as a proportion of the balance in the loan
account.There will be no up-front payments and, after thirty years, any remaining balance in a graduate’s loan account will be written off. Given this, and the generous bursary support we will be providing, there is no reason why a prospective student, appropriately qualified and with the determination necessary to succeed, should not attend our university in the years to come.
Given our changing world, and the approach of our fiftieth anniversary as a chartered university in 2017, we thought it appropriate to freshen up our image. Our new brand is sharp and contemporary, and expresses our pride in Salford and our ever-growing role at the inner core of our city region. Along with our sister universities and our partners in Further Education, we contribute to the dynamism of research, innovation, learning and public life in the city that is home to Europe’s largest student population. We welcome students from our doorstep communities and from over one hundred countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and China. And we value our lifetime association with every one of our graduates, whether from the closing years of L.S.Lowry’s industrial Salford or from our brand new digital studios at MediaCity.
Vice-Chancellor Prof Martin Hall Alumni Magazine 2011 3
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