Vice-Chancellor's annual address: 'the case for change'

Full speech transcript:

Good morning. A very warm welcome to the new academic year and special congratulations to the proctors for this year, newly elected.

I spent quite a while deciding on my topic for this year’s address. As I imagined standing here before you in my cassock, gown and bands, looking for all the world like a 19^th century parson delivering the weekly sermon, I wanted to choose a topic that was both timely and timeless: something that speaks to our moment but also to the current shape and direction of the University. 

It was a difficult summer for this University, one in which we lost Professor Jason Arday after a stormy and vitriolic public debate. I have spent the aftermath listening and speaking with colleagues and students, and I know it has been – and is - a very challenging time for many across the University. While this is not the time to go into details about the tragedy, as we launch independent reviews and await their recommendations, I know it is on many people’s minds, and in their hearts. So I needed a topic that would meet people where they are, and also capture where the University is right now, in its long evolution and current context.

The topic I landed on finally is change. We live in a time of the most profound transformation where - every day, it seems - we are told how AI, or perhaps some other technology, will forever change the direction of humanity. While Cambridge is, as always, right at the cutting edge of technological and societal change, thanks to our brilliant people and their research, that scale of global change is not my main focus today.

Instead, I want to ask, when and how does the University of Cambridge change? When do we collectively decide to do something different or new? This University has a complicated relationship to change, which I learned as soon as I was elected to the Office of Vice Chancellor. Even before I arrived, I began to receive advice on what I should and shouldn’t say at Cambridge and in particular words I should avoid using. “Executive” was one such word, especially preceded by “Chief.” “Strategy” – very bad word, referred to as the s-word, to be avoided at all costs. And “change”: People at Cambridge don’t like change, I was told. If you must discuss it, call it something else.

Cambridge does change, of course. It hasn’t survived for 817 years by staying the same.  Moreover, in many ways, the University is all about change. A Cambridge education changes lives. Research conducted at Cambridge changes the world. Cambridge innovation changes industries. We embrace change as a measure of our effectiveness and our success. And yet, it’s also true that change can be challenging and many are sceptical of it, even when it’s clearly warranted. 

There is an interesting psychology at work here, and in my former role as a psychology professor, I would have loved to spend the next 20 minutes unpacking it. But in my current role as Vice Chancellor, I am instead going to make the case for greater openness to change at Cambridge. I think there is much we can do to solve perennial problems, expand what the University can achieve, and make people’s lives at the University better.  

Before launching into the case for change at Cambridge, let me clarify what should and shouldn’t change in an organisation like this one. Cambridge is known the world over for the vitality and longevity of its mission. This will not change. Academic excellence is central to that mission, and we remain as committed to excellence as ever. What we value, what we study, the freedom academics have to choose their own path and follow it wherever it may lead, these things are sacrosanct. But how we do things -- how we organise ourselves as a University, manage our staff, fund our operations, deploy new technologies – these things should change, as the world around us changes.

Change happens at Cambridge mainly in response to two conditions: opportunity and necessity. Opportunity and necessity are powerful narratives at this University because they are the two arguments everyone recognises as reasons for doing something different or new.

Necessity comes in many forms, and the most effective for producing change are those least open to argument. Regulatory and legal requirements are at the top of this list. Higher education is a highly regulated environment. The requirements of the Office for Students and employment law, as well as the organisations that accredit many of our courses, are constantly changing, and we must stay aligned with them to operate. These shifting external requirements have been responsible for a lot of the change seen at the University in recent decades. Legal and regulatory demands have influenced the size and shape of the administration and the growth and content of University policies. They have influenced what is taught and how it is taught in accredited courses. They have influenced the relationship between the University and the Colleges, as we both respond to the regulator. In an organisation in which many kinds of change are optional, time-insensitive, and contested, compliance demands have a significant impact on the direction of travel.

A second necessity is resources. The University operates at the edge of its resource envelope, and this makes us both vulnerable and responsive to changes in incentives. In the last few years, for example, we have seen major changes in government funding for research, with a marked shift away from funding for our PhD students and toward large grants, multi-institution grants, and grants aligned with the government’s industrial strategy.  The University has had to adapt quickly to these changes, supporting investigators to conceptualise and construct competitive proposals and seeking new funding streams, including College resources and philanthropy, to fund PhDs. This changing funding landscape is having a marked effect on the size and shape of our research enterprise.

A final necessity is organisational effectiveness, or more simply modernisation. The University needs to keep up with the times, which means modernising systems and processes, upskilling our workforce, and updating our estate. We virtually all agree on that. The challenge comes in agreeing the inevitable trade-offs that come with modernisation and then implementing the change across a complex, decentralised organisation.

On the heels of the pandemic, the University launched a suite of organisational change programmes that are now coming to fruition. The upgrade to our research operations delivered over a year ago, to positive reviews across the organisation. The upgrade to our financial systems will deliver this spring; this will be a major change, not just in how the systems work but in people’s understanding of how resources flow through the University. It will take several years to be fully implemented and longer than that to be fully absorbed. The upgrade to our HR system will follow on the financial system, and the programmes focused on professional services and the estate after that.

On the horizon, the Regent House will vote on the creation of a Chief Operating Officer position in Michaelmas term. This post has been seen as a necessity since before I came to the University, and it has taken this long to work through the governance channels. I am hopeful that we will have a COO in place by this time next year, which will enable us to move forward on other high-priority initiatives, including the creation of an environmental sustainability strategy which students and staff across the University have long asked for. The COO will also be key to the modernisation of our digital capabilities, another high-priority initiative for many in the community.

Let’s leave necessity for the moment and turn to opportunity. Opportunity at Cambridge is created by new resources and is the primary way innovative and impactful things happen. New resources come in a variety of forms:

One is philanthropy. Collegiate Cambridge has always relied heavily on philanthropy; I am reminded of that every November when I stand in Great Saint Mary’s Church and commemorate our benefactors. As University finances have become tighter, philanthropy has become ever-more important. 

Last year, the University had its best philanthropic fundraising year ever, with £300 million raised. This included some very big gifts that you probably heard about: for the new Rokos School of Government, a hugely exciting endeavour, now searching, I should say, for its inaugural Dean; for the Centre for Autism Research, which we just launched last week with donor Lisa Yang; and for the Precision Breast Cancer Institute, from Andrew Barnes, in honour of his partner Charlotte Lockhart. Those gifts made headlines. What you may not have heard as much about were all the gifts for professorships, studentships, research projects, collections, right across the University, enabling new professors, new students, new ideas, and new resources to flow into this amazing institution. The School of Arts and Humanities raised £14 million last year, their best year ever. Kettle’s Yard raised over a million through its Artists for Kettle’s Yard campaign. Across the University, we raised £29 million in student support alone. Add to that the £111 million raised by the Colleges and you get a sense of just how much philanthropy matters to the continued vitality of our academic mission.

Another source of opportunity for the University is partnerships. Cambridge is keen to partner, and many are keen to partner with us. This year, we established the single largest corporate partnership in our history: A partnership with IonQ, to create the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre and bring the UK’s most powerful quantum computer to Cambridge. This is the best kind of partnership, an opportunity to create opportunity. Through the Quantum Innovation Centre, we will enable academics and students to work with industry partners, end-users, and policy experts to use quantum technology to create ultra-secure communication networks, super-powerful computers, and accelerated drug discovery, among other advances. Because this partnership includes a collaboration with the UKRI’s Quantum programme through Innovate UK, the Centre will be a national facility, enabling researchers and early-stage companies from across the UK to access the computer. Cambridge will reap enormous benefits from being at the centre of this collaborative effort.

Partnerships are at the heart of our recent efforts to secure funding for PhD students. As our traditional sources of PhD funding have declined, we have turned to partnerships – with corporates, with donors, with Colleges – to plug the gap. AstraZeneca, for example, funded nearly 100 PhD students in the first decade of our partnership with them. The University Contribution Scheme, a joint University-College initiative, generated over £205m in philanthropic income and supported 171 PhDs in perpetuity. Trinity College stepped up to partner with the University on the Trinity Cambridge Research Studentships programme, which will fully fund 300 PhD studentships over 10 years. In a changing funding landscape, these various partnerships are keeping opportunity alive for our talented PhD students.

The University’s relationship with government around research and innovation infrastructure has also shifted into partnership mode. Specifically, the UKRI’s new funding scheme both incentivises partnerships and bridges partnership arrangements as needed to make them whole. The University has successfully drawn on UKRI funds to close the deal on the IonQ quantum partnership and to upgrade our AI supercomputer earlier this year. The University also partnered with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to develop and deploy Sunrise, the world's largest AI supercomputer dedicated exclusively to nuclear fusion power development. Other government commitments to Cambridge partnerships include £15 million toward the University’s planned Innovation Hub and start-up funding for the Manchester-Cambridge partnership through Research England.

I describe these projects in some detail because they reflect an important change, or at least evolution, in our ways of working. More than ever, we are partnering with funders, looking for alignment of goals and incentives, and being rewarded for thinking bigger and longer-term. This is what opportunity looks like in the current landscape, and the University is mastering these ways of working to continue to operate at the knowledge frontier.

In the year ahead, the University has many opportunities to pursue. We expect to reach our fundraising targets for the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital and the Cambridge Children’s Hospital. That will be a joyous day indeed, for these are both hugely ambitious and innovative projects that have been many years in the works and will bring enormous benefit to the local and national community. In addition, in partnership with the Colleges, we will continue to work toward our next fundraising campaign, which is already surfacing exciting proposals right across the Collegiate University.

I have described how Cambridge changes in response to necessity and opportunity. But what about the changes people want, the ones that are generated from the ambitions within our community: a new building to house a growing institute, for example, or sustained funding for a PhD programme, new academic staff, a new course, a new research centre? Can we produce the change people want? 

Yes, we can, often. We have three approaches to supporting these kinds of projects.

One, we can make them into opportunities by raising gifts for them. There is a tier of our fundraising operation that focuses precisely on this work. Development staff are embedded within our academic schools, and their job is to understand the schools’ priorities and develop sources of support for them. This programme of work has really come on in recent years, and has expanded to include not just philanthropy but also support from corporates, foundations, and investors. 

Two, for capital projects, we now have a programme for funding capital improvements in our estate. This programme has grown out of several years of work cataloguing and assessing our buildings, and planning for the future. The estate is a great example of where the University’s orientation toward necessity and opportunity has shown its limits. We built new buildings and fixed the ones in need of repair, but for most of our history, we did not invest in the estate and did not have a long-term plan. The result is that the University now has more buildings than it needs, many of them not fit for purpose and certainly not fit for the future. Fortunately, we have started to address this situation with the University’s first capital plan and should see savings that partially offset the costs of an improved estate. We should also see marked improvements in the environmental footprint of our estate, another critical long-term goal.

Three, for projects like new courses that advance our mission and ultimately earn income, we invest in them. The University has an investment fund, supported primarily by income from our endowment and, most significantly, from Cambridge University Press and Assessment, that we use to invest in the growth and development of the University. As well as supporting capital projects, this fund enables us to pay the upfront costs of a new or renovated course or programme that will eventually pay for itself. The fund is responsible for huge amounts of innovation in our research and teaching across the University, supporting the hiring of new academic staff to teach and research in new fields and enabling centres and institutes to mount interdisciplinary courses that departments and faculties cannot fund. It has supported new and highly successful courses in Data-Intensive Science, Global Risk and Resilience, and Planetary Science and Life in the Universe, for example, with additional courses in development.

Having established these mechanisms to support innovation and change from within the academic university, we now deploy them flexibly and in combination to maximise how much activity we can support and to direct that support to the highest-priority needs. For example, we incentivise principal investigators to write large grants with a 10% match, prioritise building projects in the capital plan that improve efficiency and attract external funding, and match-fund gifts in high-priority areas through the investment fund. Let me pause here to note just how fortunate we are to have the capacity, from both within and outside the University, to grow, innovate, and change. In a very bleak financial landscape for the vast majority of universities in the UK, Cambridge occupies a privileged position. It is what enables us to attract the best academic talent and to remain at the forefront of knowledge creation globally.

Finally, I want to address what I see as the most difficult question about change at this and any university: How do we know when the University needs to change, when the old ways are no longer supporting our mission, but in fact are holding us back?

Universities are inherently conserving organisations. They are built to last, this University in particular. They take the long view. They provide stable ground on which students and staff can grow and change. They are makers of the future but keepers of the past, again this University in particular. Cambridge is both a potent symbol and a source of continuity in the academy, in the country, and in the world. For much of its history, continuity was served by holding fast to its principles and resisting calls for change. 

Cambridge today is very much a product of that history. Over a thousand pages of Statutes and Ordinances attest to the fact that the University is strongly rooted in its past. Most universities started later and changed more, sometimes by necessity and sometimes by choice. Not Cambridge. 

Instead, there have been periodic reforms to the University’s governance, the last major one in the late 1980s. Aside from a brief attempt at reform in the early 2000s, there has not been much appetite for it since. 

Does the University need to change? Is change perhaps overdue? The strongest signal that an organisation needs to change is when things go wrong, and therefore we must take the losses, the setbacks, and heaven knows the tragedies very, very seriously. Just as humans are equipped with a negativity bias in their emotional system, organisations need to pay more attention and react more strongly to the bad news than the good. The University is committed to learning from recent negative events, and we are bringing in independent experts to facilitate that learning. We are not marking our own homework here; we want the rigour and clarity that outside experts can provide. 

Ultimately, though, how Cambridge responds to these events, what we learn from them and how we change, is up to all of us. The University prides itself on being one of the very few largely democratic, self-governing universities remaining in the world. Given current challenges to both universities and democratic governance, I think the project of maintaining that status is more vital than ever. But with it comes two major responsibilities: (1) that we ensure that our governance is robust and in keeping with modern demands for transparency, legibility, timeliness, and accountability, and (2) that we all find ways to participate in this process, as democracy requires. Let’s work together to show that Cambridge can be not just a brilliant and innovative community, but also a learning and caring one.

In closing, let me offer my warmest wishes to all of you for a fulfilling year ahead. Thank you.