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Daring to be different
How one UK university aspires to be ‘ curious , brave and bold ’.
Anthony Forster interviewed by Martin Betts
Anthony Forster of Essex University in the UK joined the HEDx podcast as our first international VC . He describes the values that drive how his university seeks to differentiate and what made it UK University of the Year in 2018 . He outlines the quite different issues of government funding for research and flow of international students , particularly from India , that UK universities are facing compared to those in Australia .
Forster also highlights the particular challenges that Brexit is bringing . And , as a university with no gender pay gap for any groups of staff and a leader committed to leading differently , he outlines a compelling case for attracting and retaining staff being as important as students .
MB : Can you tell us about the Essex story and what you think makes it a special place ? AF : I think Essex really is very special and very distinctive . We recruit our students on the basis of potential , as well as prior achievement . More than a third of our students are from families with an annual income of less than 25,000 pounds , and we in particular have a very substantial number of students who are the first in their family to go to university .
For those students , we want to offer them a research-rich environment in which they ’ re getting their education . We ’ re a campus based residential university , but importantly , we believe in living and learning . The extracurricular activities that we offer across our three campuses , whether it be sports , music , volunteering , the arts , are all as important as what goes on in the classroom . We ’ ve got a very strong people focus at Essex in a variety of different ways .
You ’ ve got this lovely portrayal of the university as a home to the curious , the brave and the bold . Do you think it ’ s an aspiration or a self-proclamation ? And what does your university do to live up to that expectation ? We say at Essex , we ’ re a university full of staff and students who are rebels with a cause . And our values come from our founding vision to be daring , more experimental , to innovate , to be a university for the real world .
Our subjects are quite distinctive combinations , whether they ’ re languages and linguistics or philosophy and art history . We want to apply our knowledge for the benefit of individuals and communities . We ’ re not an ivory tower university .
We were founded in 1964 , explicitly as a progressive university where we are prepared to stand out from the crowd to challenge convention , which we feel is in our DNA . Examples of that are our world leading work in , for example , human rights to our use of advanced statistical methods to address political , social and economic challenges .
We are very international in nature . We are ranking in the top 30 in the world for
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