Q&A: Uni vice chancellor Nigel Thrift

**How the year has gone in terms of students and student experience: **
“I just want to say that the University is extremely attentive, as you might imagine, to the student experience – it always has been but even more so in the current circumstances. That means we’re trying to put in a lot of things at once, some of those have come online already so we have – the Leamington space, we have the Rootes Grid coming up, the new gym, a whole series of things which will appear this year.”

**When you joined the University, one of the things you said you wanted to get Warwick into the top 50 of the World rankings. We’ve just gone down this year to 58. How do you plan to move back up it? **
“The danger in saying things like that is there is always a league table that doesn’t have you there and there’s a league table that does. There’s remarkably little that we can do, except to keep plugging on. But what is absolutely evident, is that the University has been improving in quite strong ways. We went down in the QS league table from 50 to 58 on the basis of a small, tiny change in our student-staff ratio, that’s it. The only thing that changed in the six indicators they used. But then the Times Higher Education, which we’ve had more than a few difficulties with, we went up 33 places this year. So that gives you some sense of the issues with league tables. In the national league tables we’re firmly in the top 10.

**Warwick received rather poor scores in the National Student Survey regarding feedback on work, and the SU are claiming a victory in getting a four-week feedback time. Is that your version of events and why do you think Warwick is scoring so low? **
“The first thing I want to say is the University did a little less well, from 88 to 87. But actually it did rather well on some of the scores – learning resources and these kinds of things – but the problem we’ve got is feedback and assessment. I don’t talk in terms of victories and battles because that’s not the relationship we think we have with the students. What we have tried to do is move towards having more satisfactory assessment and feedback scores. Why are we doing that? Because that’s clearly what students want. The new Student Community Charter is about us saying we will get four-week turn around for assessed work. Of course, in some cases people will be doing it quicker than that. But there are issues around that no doubt, and we [have] to think as well about some of the things around personal development. Though often it turns out that we are doing a lot of the things that students don’t think about as personal development.”

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The Alan Milburn Report recommended that universities should do more to enable the students from lower economic backgrounds to have a fair chance of getting in to University. This University has said that it already does enough to ensure these students have an equal chance of getting in. Can you explain more fully and comment on the report more generally?**
When you said this University has said it’s doing enough, I’m not sure that’s the phrase we used. What we said is we’re doing a lot towards widening participation, and that is fact. We can give you the facts and figures and reel them off because they’re pretty straightforward in terms of bursaries etc. What Millburn was actually more worried about I think were things like deferential intervention entrance to university. This University takes the view that though we’re investigating the use of contextual data. At this point in time what we think is the most important thing to do is to try and ensure students from those backgrounds get good A level results.

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Are there any more plans to either bring other international universities to Warwick on to the campus or to expand Warwick further afield? **
“Not immediately, but it is not a secret that Warwick and Monash would like to think that at some in the future a third partner might be invited in but we’re not in a rush to do it. We want to get this partnership working well. It’s really the first of its kind in the world and so we’re having to work very hard at it. You come across large numbers of difficulties you have to work through to make large institutions from different countries work together as closely as our two institutions are. Of course, we have other partnerships overseas with NYU in New York and Toronto and others. That again is something that is important to us because it links us up in North America which is an area of the world this University has less to do with than it should.

**Another campaign from the SU is increasing contact hours. With some students experiencing just six hours of contact time with academic staff isn’t it unreasonable for students to pay £9,000 fees for such little time?**
We’ve been through and all I can say is we’ve looked through on a departmental level, I’ve seen the figures for that, the lowest I saw was 7.9. I’m not saying there aren’t individual courses that might do lower than that, but certainly if you look through most of them are above 10 and in the faculty of science most of them are above 15. So before we go any farther, I’d be a bit careful about giving the idea that somehow there are lots of lots of courses within the University that are running at six hours because there aren’t. We’re pretty well on the Russell Group average for contact hours.

**The SU has a drive to try and review hidden course costs, such as books; what is your view on this?**
We’re working closely with the SU, we take the point, though we don’t necessarily agree with everything. At the moment there are some things that are not hidden, because you soon find out about them, but we are trying to put together a policy with the Union on course costs. It’s a bit like the Student Charter; we’ll make sure people know what is going on. Also, different departments do different things and we’ll make sure there’s a rational policy between departments.

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We hear a lot about research-led teaching at Warwick. Is it always the case that a good researcher makes a good teacher? **
We do a lot to promote research-led teaching. We expect academics to be good researchers, we expect them to be good teachers and I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive by any means. More to the point, it also means that you are getting up-to-date teaching, and think about sicence: every year so many things change. You can decide what you want; you can go to a university which gives you some sense of that, or you can go to a university that gives you a real sense of that, where it’s the teachers who are doing it. I would prefer to be at a university at the cutting edge.

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Should the University be more transparent about where their money goes?**
The University is actually quite financially transparent because it has to be, but it’s also worth saying that universities are entities in which there is always going to be transfer of resources going on, otherwise you wouldn’t have a university. If all you did was put all the money that comes to this department into this department, some departments would not survive. That’s something we have to be careful about.

**Another campaign from the SU is increasing contact hours. With some students experiencing just six hours of contact time with academic staff, isn’t it unreasonable for students to pay £9,000 fees for such little time?**
Yeah, except I cant think, all I can say is – we’ve been through and all I can say is we’ve looked through on a departmental level, I’ve seen the figures for that, the lowest I saw was 7.9. im not saying there aren’t individual courses that might do lower than that, but certainly if you look through most of them are above 10 and in the faculty of science most of them are above 15. So before we go any farther I’d be a bit careful about giving the idea that somehow there are lots of lots of courses within the University that are running at six hours because there aren’t.

**There are currently little to no loan systems for postgraduate study but the government is looking in to this. Would you welcome this, and considering there is no cap on what universities can charge for postgraduate study isn’t Warwick’s another pricing people cannot afford without taking on further study?**
Yes I welcome this, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. If anything, I suspect the government is already slightly concerned about the amount of money it looks like it will be paying for the student loan scheme. The idea that it’s then going to pay out more for postgraduates on top of that seems enthusiastic. But why wouldn’t we want a loan scheme? There might be a European loan scheme for postgraduates, but I suspect it will be for a limited number if that happens. Going on from that, there is a real concern that British students who have a certain amount of debt of a kind will think right it’s going to be very difficult to do postgraduate courses. We really don’t know how that’s going to play out. That’s why there’s been three studies recently and we’ll wait to see what happens. In the meanttime we will keep thinking about things.

**The license of the London Metropolitan University to sponsor students from outside the EU has been revoked. What impact do you think this has on the presence of international students at all universities?** I have written a blog about this. I’ve got concerns mainly about London universities, interestingly. We’ve already seen and know that some press in the world can’t tell the difference between universities with London in the title. They find that quite challenging in fact. The result is all London universities are in danger of having the same issue attached to them and we have to be very careful about that. More generally, I think there’s every reason why a government should be able to enforce a particular kind of immigration policy, and it would be difficult to find a country in the world that didn’t do that. At the same time this particular immigration policy, I don’t think is one which is particularly sensible and it’s going to cause universities difficulties but we don’t know how much. So for example, this last year our overseas numbers didn’t go down at all, in fact a very tiny increase. So we can’t tell at the moment but we’re concerned that there may be an impact. There has been in other universities in the UK, but it is the universities that are less well known that are having the biggest impacts. We’ll have to see what happens, frankly your guess is as good as mine, it’s very difficult to know that but we’re clearly prepared.

**You mentioned the new grid in Leamington and the Rootes grid that will open later this year, does the University have any more plans to open further grids or does it think we will have sufficient spaces?** We don’t have any immediate plans at the moment but that doesn’t mean we won’t have. But the Rootes grid is going to be big, and it’s there, in effect, to take pressure of the library amongst other things. We know the library especially around exam time has become congested. Of course, it’s no accident that we’re trying to make sure that it’s built in time for the examination period. We will wait and see, one of the things we need to see is how well these spaces are used. If they’re used very well, and there is clearly demand then we will think about building more. But as any sensible person would, you build some, you look and see if it’s being used well, if it then looks like there’s even more demand we will consider what else we can do.”

**You have mentioned that global connections are an important part of the University’s future and as such travel must be an important part of your role. But when students hear the figures they might think that it’s a lot of money, how would you explain why that is necessary to students?** “Let me start with the scale of the issue. This is a University with a turnover currently of about £440 million, 5,000 members of staff and 23,000 students. It’s a very big institution, it’s not possible to run an institution like this without international travel. It’s just not possible. Secondly, this is an institution that has real international ambitions, you’ve seen some of those coming out over the last year for example in New York and Melbourne. Monash requires quite a lot of travel by itself.
But there are other things on the list, for instance ministerial visits, these kinds of things. Going on from that, one of the reasons why we’re trying to do this is to put in place a better student experience, because we think, in the future, most students will routinely want international experience as part of their degrees so we have to solve the conundrum of how to actually do that. No university has solved this so far, but one of the reasons we’re taking such big steps is to try and make sure we can solve it. So this will also have, of course, direct student benefit, one way or the other. Seen that way, the figure may seem large, but I’m not sure it really is.”

**You’ve been here since 2006, what are the major changes you’ve seen?**
We will have doubled the number of postgraduate research students by 2015 and we have built up links with other universities.