Public must feel institution belongs to them says vice chancellor who swapped South Africa for freezing UK

John Roberts Education Correspondent

THE new head of Hull University wants to improve the health, education and quality of life of people living in the city as part of his vision for getting local residents to feel the institution belongs to them.

Professor Calie Pistorius wants the university to become a symbol for the city in the same way as Hull’s football and rugby teams. He has travelled more than 5,000 miles from South Africa to take up the post as vice chancellor at a time when the country’s higher education sector is braced for major cuts in Government funding.

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He told the Yorkshire Post the university was now planning for “all scenarios” in readiness for March when it discovers how its budget will be affected.

Ministers have announced three separate sets of cuts approaching 1bn from the higher education sector as the Government attempts to control the country’s massive national debt.

Prof Pistorius said he did not yet know if the university would suffer job losses as a result of cuts from the Higher Education Funding Council.

However he said the institution would look to deal with any drop in funding by maximising revenue from the private sector through research and development and professional training.

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Prof Pistorius joined Hull University from the University of Pretoria where he was vice chancellor for eight years. A career switch to Hull University meant swapping the sunshine of South Africa for one of the coldest British winters on record while his two children are now learning French and Spanish in their language lessons instead of Zulu and Afrikaans.

But despite the many differences between his old life in South Africa and his new one in Hull, Prof Pistorius believes the key to what makes a university successful remains the same. He said: “I want the university to be an anchor institution for the city.

“If we could get people to feel about the university the same way they do about Hull City then we would really be getting somewhere. I want us to be known not as the University of Hull, or Hull University but as Hull’s University.”

Prof Pistorius wants to encourage both prospective students and residents from the city to visit the campus and feel it belongs to them. He also hopes the university can help to raise standard’s in the city’s secondary schools, which were ranked the second worst in the country earlier this month, by getting pupils to aspire to higher education.

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He said: “A university must look to achieve great outcomes and not just focus on its interim outputs. Our outputs are the number of students who graduate and the amount of research we publish.

“But the outcomes we should look at are : Do we impact on prosperity in the city? Do we improve the quality of life of people living in the city? A university cannot do this alone but it can make a major contribution.”

He said his ambition was to create “institutes or vehicles” which would allow the university to pull together research from across different departments and faculties in areas such as health and the environment.

Prof Pistorius said Hull University has a strong reputation for the quality of its research, teaching and student experience, was financially stable and well placed for the future.

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He also believes the institution’s campus in Scarborough has an important role as the only higher education provider in North Yorkshire, outside of York. He said: “A satellite campus can be an innovation hub. It might be a challenge in terms of managing the two sites but it also offers the chance to develop new models for teaching and new ways of interacting with the local community and companies.”