strategy

What an incredible two days we've just lived through, many people more intensely than me. When - if ever - were such events last seen in a British University? Here's what was happening yesterday. And here's what's happening today.

This afternoon I attended an emergency meeting of Glasgow UCU. Originally called to respond to the consultation process it wound up also commenting on the extraordinary events of the previous 36 or so hours. Although rather an aside to the key issues, there was some discussion of the now-closed Research Club, former occupant of the Hetherington House (now the site of the student occupation); and here's the connection to the specific territory of this blog.

Susan Stuart pointed out that mature students particularly found the Hetherington Research Club a friendly, useful place, congenial, easier for them to be in than the Unions. I also know this was the case, that many former DACE students, from Access and other programmes, made the Research Club their headquarters. Reasons aren't hard to guess. First, they were among grown-ups. Second, they were in the sort of place many of them imagined when they started making their way to University: a place where you can have all sorts of conversation on all sorts of subjects with all sorts of people, where drunken nonsense rubs shoulders with intense debate, where most people value ideas and are happy to talk about them. A supportive environment, multi-disciplinary, research-led ... in fact with all the attributes highlighted in the University's strategic plan; surely thus a core resource for the University to realise its aims.