Challenges & Future

Clearly the University was established to be a focused University around a small range of social science disciplines. The immediate strength of the University is the strength of those disciplines. And my role and the role of the President and the role of the leadership team across the University is to make those the strongest they can be. Fundamentally, that reputation issue that I just referred to is addressed through creating strong, highly-regarded, reputable disciplines and recruiting high-quality students who become our alumni and ambassadors for the University. So long as we keep making the right decisions, in terms of faculty hires and in terms of students and producing the quality that we are producing at the moment, both in terms of research and teaching outcomes, the University's reputation will pick up. And I think the big advantage is that are our size and the juxtaposition and interrelationship of those disciplines means that we can create mixes and experiences for both students and faculty that other universities can't. We can combine courses and modules and allow students to flow across our schools in a much more flexible way than other universities.

The big questions in society are not going to be answered by single disciplines. They are going to be answered by disciplines coming together and either doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work. Given the size of the University, and as I said the strong interrelationship between the disciplines we have, that really gives us a competitive advantage when it comes to answering some big questions in society, and having the impact that we want to on society. So we talk about making meaningful impact. I think our size and ability to flex our multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity really enables us to have a deeper level of impact.