Looking ahead

A particular image of SMU that many people will draw in is the jumping student. But sooner or later, that student comes back to earth, gravity prevails. You can’t beat gravity. And the move to the second trimester is bringing the student back to earth. That is, a lot of that “jumping-ness” has been promise and excitement and aspiration, but by now we have three years of work experience by students. So if we had shown eight years ago, a student jumping to a whole new career because they’ve come to SMU, we now know whether that was in fact an accurate representation or whether we were gilding that lily a bit. So that’s what I mean about the jumping student coming back to earth. Now we’re in a much more realistic period for assessment by people outside. People are aware of us, but we’re not in the rankings and there’s a reason for that because we haven’t had certain qualifications for a long enough period of time. But they see the headlines: NUS and NTU in the top 35 whatever it was, at that time’s Higher Education, the Financial Times’ ranking. So, we’re now in that second period, which at its worst will be the doldrums, but at its best would be the period when you change the sails. But it's one or the other. I don’t believe it’ll be the first but it's certainly is not a steady continuum on the way through. I think it's very fortunate we’ve got a new president for this next phase. The previous president was absolutely fit for the purpose of that trimester. Now there is a new trimester. And it’s going to be much more of a challenge, I think, in working through the scepticism that’s going to come in about—are we as good as we say we are with that jumping student? How we work our way through that will then determine the third trimester which in some respects, at its best, would be the golden age of the university. There will be other periods that are wonderful as well. But it's that third trimester of development, if you avoid the doldrums and get the sail change right, that takes you to that the third stage and that would be a PhD programme where people clamour to get in, international exchanges in recognition.