Advice
Advice for Students
Advise for Students
Challenges & Future
Challenges & Future
Challenges & Future
Concepts and Value
Faculty
Libraries
Personal Reflections
Prinsep Street going forward
Research
Starting at SMU
Teaching & Curriculum
Teaching & Curriculum
So I suppose, I mean, there'll be their own people, and I wouldn't want to tell them how to do their job. They'll all be very experienced leaders.
And so I would say: always give yourself time to learn about an institution, learn about its values, and don't be afraid of questioning those sometimes.
Don't be afraid of making big decisions. Because, you know, the great thing about SMU is that whilst there are some core elements, the DNA of SMU, they're fairly flexible in terms of how they can be applied.
And so I would say that SMU is an innovative university, a university that's up for challenge, and a university that really wants to succeed and make impact.
And whatever you do, try and do what you do in relation to those principles.
So I think the key advice I would give, not just to SMU students but to any student studying at university, is to take advantage of the opportunities that are there.
Take advantage of the curricular opportunities and take advantage of co-curricular opportunities, and really maximize your learning and maximize the impact that the institution can make on you during your time there.
Don't just coast. Actively engage with the opportunities that the university offers, because that will have the maximum impact on you.
And then once you leave, always stay in touch and tell us how you're getting on. We always want to hear from you.
I suppose my key advice is don't waste your time here, that there are lots and lots of opportunities. And yes, you want to achieve everything you can in your studies, and we want you to excel in your studies and achieve the highest grade degree you can. But at the same time, as a University, we offer a broader education as I said, that more holistic approach to education, and whilst I appreciate every student needs to achieve an appropriate balance for them, I would very much hope that they explore the co-curricular side of the education at SMU and excel in that as well as excelling in their academic studies. So, I would encourage them whether they are a new student coming to the University or they are senior student to always think about that balance and not to get too over balanced on one or the other.
Clearly the University was established to be a focused University around a small range of social science disciplines. The immediate strength of the University is the strength of those disciplines. And my role and the role of the President and the role of the leadership team across the University is to make those the strongest they can be. Fundamentally, that reputation issue that I just referred to is addressed through creating strong, highly-regarded, reputable disciplines and recruiting high-quality students who become our alumni and ambassadors for the University. So long as we keep making the right decisions, in terms of faculty hires and in terms of students and producing the quality that we are producing at the moment, both in terms of research and teaching outcomes, the University's reputation will pick up. And I think the big advantage is that are our size and the juxtaposition and interrelationship of those disciplines means that we can create mixes and experiences for both students and faculty that other universities can't. We can combine courses and modules and allow students to flow across our schools in a much more flexible way than other universities.
The big questions in society are not going to be answered by single disciplines. They are going to be answered by disciplines coming together and either doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work. Given the size of the University, and as I said the strong interrelationship between the disciplines we have, that really gives us a competitive advantage when it comes to answering some big questions in society, and having the impact that we want to on society. So we talk about making meaningful impact. I think our size and ability to flex our multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity really enables us to have a deeper level of impact.
The other issue I will focus on is how student demands will change because students are more demanding, and so I think that our holistic and well-rounded approach to our education clearly provides a broader experience for the students. But I think at the same time, because it is not narrowly focused on the discipline, and because we have the expectation around internships and global experiences and volunteering and we are trying to develop that broader person, I think we are challenging our students—the heart of education it seems to me. When I was at Durham, we used to say to students at graduation and commencement, we used to say, “I hope you have had a challenging time.” And then we say what we mean by that is we hope that we have really pushed you, and we hope we have developed you intellectually, and we hope that we have developed those skills that we want you to develop. It seems to me that that so long as we get that challenge right, then we will address the level of student expectations.
But I think in terms of digital learning and the way that pedagogy will need to change, certainly we will have to adjust the way that we teach. We will have to move into blended, we will have to move into digital, we will have to move into online. We will have to upskill the faculty and support the faculty in terms of that shift. Our students will always be one step ahead of us because of the generational issue and so forth. But I think the two changes that I see perhaps impacting on SMU: one—greater presence and success of our education in this part of the world and its ability to compete with the traditional dominant countries. And secondly, the move to digital education, and how we will have to adjust our pedagogy and teaching techniques accordingly.
I think one of the key challenges that I think anyone in a senior management role faces is time management.
Everybody wants part of your time. And when you're a provost of a university, faculty want to meet you. Students want you to attend events. There are numerous meetings that you have to attend, internally and externally. There is constant pressure on your time.
So I think learning how to prioritize and learning how to allocate time was something that I found challenging.
I think working in Singapore is different to working in the UK. There is a different intensity to working in Singapore, I would say, to the UK, in terms of timeframes to get things done.
I think one of the big attractions to me of coming to Singapore was that you can make a difference, and you could do it quite quickly. One of the sort of downsides of that is that there's more pressure on your time.
So I think learning how to manage my time was something that I needed to address. And related to that, given I was trying to shift the culture of the university in terms of education and its research, we had numerous change management projects.
And so in relation to those change management projects, I think to do change management properly, even as provost, you need to get involved in the detail and you need to give it time.
And so one of the critical tasks for me was to always prioritize change management and to never lose an eye for the detail. Particular individuals might make a big difference to whether something's successful or fails or is partially successful. And so if I needed to go and meet them, I needed to go and talk to them, or they wanted to talk to me, it was really important to find time.
So I think time, just generally, managing all the priorities you have as a provost, and secondly, importantly, finding the time to really manage the change management projects.
And then I think the second one would be, well, I think a lot of people think that making big decisions is difficult. I would say some are easier than others.
I've never had a problem making a difficult decision, but some of them do require more thought than others. And so there are some decisions. I have no regrets in terms of any decisions that I made, but there are some decisions when you're, for instance, having to exclude a student from the university, or you're making a decision in terms of somebody's tenure, and you're having an impact on the rest of their life.
It's not something that you take lightly, and it's often not something that I took solely, but it's something that I took very, very seriously and gave a lot of thought to before I made that decision.
So I think managing my time and balancing different priorities, and sometimes some of the larger decisions, required quite a bit of thought.
So when I was listening to a number of farewell speeches, I think a common refrain was that I was the Covid Provost, and I think I'll always be known as the provost that managed the university through Covid, but also closed the university.
And you know, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about a big decision. So I'll come back to that in a minute, because that was one of the biggest decisions I had to make early in my tenure as provost.
So I remember being at an event in Chinese New Year, and everybody was talking about Covid-19 and about the possibility of this coming to Singapore, because at that time, it hadn't really come to Singapore. And I was due to go to Penang in Malaysia, and I decided that I would cancel that trip. And I called a meeting and essentially got the education team together and said, you know, if this comes to Singapore, what do we need to do?
So I think the very first thing I would say is that my view was that we had to be anticipatory and that we had to be prepared. And throughout Covid, I took the view that I had to be two weeks ahead of government policy. So I was always trying to anticipate where government policy was, so that we aligned the university and had the right policy in place, the right communication in place before we got the policy announcements at a governmental level.
So being anticipatory was critical.
I was very fortunate in that one of my predecessors had established something called the Emergency Preparedness for Teaching and Learning, which all faculty did. My recollection is that they did it after being here for a year. So not every faculty member had done that program, but essentially EPTL, as it was called, supported faculty to learn to teach online, and all faculty had to do, I think, two sessions a year online.
So we had a kind of base of training across faculty in terms of teaching online. However, we had a group of faculty who hadn't gone through that program, and then we had many adjuncts who hadn't gone through that program.
So I think the second thing was to be prepared and to prepare everyone to teach online. And so we refreshed everybody in terms of their learning. We enhanced that program. We refreshed everybody. We put everybody who wanted to redo it through it, and everybody who hadn't done it through it, including the new faculty and the adjunct faculty.
So as we went into Covid, it was very clear that online wasn't something that was going to be temporary. It was going to be something that was a bit more permanent. And we decided that we would try and teach about 40% of our programs online, and we focused mainly on our core undergraduate program and the core programs within the master's program.
So we put those large programs online first, and then we sought to learn from those and cascade that learning across the university.
And what I remember is just how people came together. So what I mean is that colleagues supported one another. There was a lot of mentoring that was going on. The IT help desk were hugely helpful in terms of helping colleagues, answering questions in relation to a whole range of issues to do with setting up computers and issues and glitches and so forth.
And then the library did this wonderful series of programs for students to help them get the best from online learning.
So as we went into it, I think being anticipatory and then kind of preparing everybody in terms of the skills that were necessary, so whether it be the teaching, whether it be the students knowing how to get the best out of that teaching, and at the same time working with IT to build the IT infrastructure so that we could hold, if necessary, all our classes online at the same time, right?
So that was something that we had to anticipate and had to have the IT infrastructure for. So building that before we went fully online was absolutely critical.
And then constant communication and just really... So, you know, one of the difficult things about being a provost is that, as I said earlier, your time is taken up with lots and lots of meetings, and you can't meet as many faculty as you want. You can't meet as many students as you want. You can't meet as many staff as you want.
So trying to really understand the temperature of the institution was really critical, so that we understood where the pressure points were, where the concerns were, and when people were ready to make a change.
So one of the things I did was that I used to monitor every day the library attendance, because it was available online, and I used to look at how many students were in the library. And it was very clear to me that as student numbers were dropping, I was also talking to deans, and I was talking to a whole range of faculty, both directly and through email, and getting a sense that we were at a tipping point and we needed to close the university.
And that's when I approached MOE, and I said, you know, we're at a tipping point. We need to close. And MOE said, that's fine. You can close. And we did it in conjunction with the other universities.
So managing Covid was, I mean, none of us had done this before, but I was very fortunate that I had the EPTL program.
So as I said, it was about trying to be anticipatory, trying to really understand what the infrastructure was that we needed to put in place, whether that be the skills infrastructure, whether that be the physical IT infrastructure, keeping an eye constantly on mood, on the temperature of the institution.
So throughout, we were doing dipstick tests of mood in different communities to see what was happening and how we could support colleagues and how we could build that sense still that people were part of a collective and part of a community, and even though they were dispersed and at home and unable to see their friends and some of their family, still, how could we maintain those relationships?
And so I think during Covid, the other thing was not... So if you talk to faculty, and if you talk to students, faculty were concerned that their teaching ratings were going to go down.
And so an early decision we made was that teaching ratings for the next term, when we went online, would be developmental. And then when we had to extend, we said, you know, still developmental, so there's no impact in terms of your performance review, because we recognize this is a huge change, and we recognize your concerns.
Students were concerned that they wouldn't get the kind of educational experience that they'd come to SMU for. What they wanted was small classrooms, and they wanted a personalized, interactive experience.
So where I think we learned, and where we did really well, was in maintaining our pedagogy through our online learning.
And so when we did surveys of the students, and we did a number of surveys of the students, and then we did a survey when we came back onto campus as well, the feedback that we got from the students was that the online learning had maintained the small group teaching and, in some ways, had actually facilitated that even more, because you could break the students into small groups online.
The recording of lectures was hugely popular because students could study at their own pace and personalize their own learning. They found that faculty were easier to contact and they could have one-to-one conversations online with faculty and teaching staff.
And despite the concerns of faculty, teaching scores across the university went up, and we as a university got our highest teaching scores in the history of the university during Covid.
So that suggests that we did something right.
So the critical thing was not to lose all that learning and all of that wonderful work that colleagues had put in during Covid.
So a key learning point really was to develop the digital learning strategy and to ensure that we embedded the good practice into our everyday teaching practice going forward.
So that meant that, you know, flipped classrooms, hybrid learning, online materials and so forth, recording lectures, all of that needed to be built into what I might call our traditional approach to learning.
And so the digital learning strategy was a big initiative and is something that we've been pushing for a number of years subsequently.
I would say what's critical is that ultimately students need to generate their own thinking, their own thoughts, their own arguments. But of course they can use a range of supporting devices to do that.
AI might be one of them. Reading books, watching videos of debates, listening to podcasts, talking to their friends — all of this is information that can help you build your thinking and so forth.
So I would say that AI plays a role in that, but shouldn't become dominant.
And the danger is that people don't want to spend the time thinking deeply and addressing the kinds of questions that faculty will raise in their courses. Deep thinking requires time, and a lot of people don't want to give it that time, so they'll go for the quick solution, won't they?
So our job is to encourage them to do the deep thinking and give it the time.
One of the attractions to me, as I said earlier, was that I felt the values were commensurate. Although Durham is different from SMU, values wise I felt there was a really strong connection, and in some respects, the things that I value were slightly greater emphasized here than they were at my previous institution. So, the values side of things hasn't surprised me because, in effect, I think it's been reinforced in the last four months or so.
What surprised me? I suppose two things have surprised me. One thing is the Ministry of Education, there is a sense of a national project, that SMU is part of the national project. Again, for me, that was a big attraction. I think what surprised me is the real sense of connectedness between the University and a range of Singapore stakeholders, both government and industry, and a real sense of ambition for the University and a wish to support us and help us in a way that I have not experienced before. A real warmness to the University and a real willingness to help and have conversations, and to understand us and to even change policy or change the way that they are interfacing with us to help us. So that has been a real kind of novel experience for me in that I have experienced an environment in which government and industry has tended to be quite distanced from universities, and you had to work very, very hard to get their attention. But here that has not been a problem.
I suppose the other issue that surprised me is that the University has developed around its undergraduate programs and has a very, very strong undergraduate offering, has been developing a postgraduate offer, but actually the two are not as connected as I thought they would be. Essentially, the University operates the postgraduate quite separately to the undergraduate. Now there are reasons for that in relation to government funding. But I think in terms of curriculum, in terms of term structure, in terms of course unit structure, in terms of student experience, there are actually crossovers that we need to enhance. And so that surprised me, that the University is almost run as two universities, one for undergraduates and one for postgraduates. It has not been as integrated as perhaps I have experienced in other universities, not simply those that I've worked in but many universities that I have visited.
My observation is, and it is interesting you asked that question today because, I have actually had two opportunities to talk through leadership development today. So, it has been a bit of a theme today. My feeling is that we are not developing the leadership pipeline as strongly as we need to, and that when you do systemic succession planning across the University, you start to see some gaps. So, I am conscious that we are not really developing our leadership, the cadres of leadership that we need, say at the school level, tier one, tier two, and so forth. So, one of the things I am looking into at the moment is how we might develop a leadership development program for different kinds of faculty and staff, so that we start to develop a pipeline. And what that would involve is maybe identifying 30 or so people across the University—not guaranteeing them a leadership role but saying that we think you have leadership potential—and then putting them through a common program over time that would get them ready for a leadership role were one to open up. So, the question I ask myself is if someone became ill or a particular incident occurred, who is the person that we could insert into that role? In some cases, there is a ready-made successor, but in other cases, there is no clear successor. But regardless, we have a very narrow pool of people that we can put into those roles, and we need to expand that. We need to diversify. So, I am very conscious that a lot of people who could step up to roles are men, and it seems to me that what we—and I am very committed to this—that what we want to do is develop a much more diverse, both from gender and race point of view, leadership structure in the University. That means identifying and developing a cadre of people who are diverse and can take on roles and then giving them opportunities to rehearse and enact that leadership going forward.
I remember saying to Shameem that at my previous university, I probably visited the main library a handful of times in the 17 years I worked there, and that's because the library just wasn't a central part of the university. It felt peripheral. It felt fundamentally a rather old-fashioned information resource, and then it had some spaces for students to study in.
It didn't feel a welcoming space that was integrated into the rest of the university.
My view of the library at SMU is quite different. The library is located at the heart of the university, and one of the things I learned through the surveys that I mentioned earlier about Covid was just how important the library was to the students, whether they be undergraduates or postgraduate students.
Just how important the library was from a kind of resource point of view, but also from a kind of social point of view, that the learning spaces were where they met their friends, and it was such an important space to them on campus.
So the fact that the library is positioned at the center of the campus and is regarded so highly by the students has meant that the library is a much more integral space and much more integrated into the life of the university.
So I mentioned that the library ran courses for students, and it runs courses at the beginning of every academic year. It runs courses to support students' integration into the university. It ran courses to support students in terms of their online learning.
So the library is more than an information resource. It's about supporting the students' learning, and it's integrated, in that respect, into our curriculum, in a way that I think other libraries are not.
I think other libraries are very passive in terms of how they perceive their role. They wait for people to walk through the door, and then they answer queries and offer services.
Whereas our library, I have found, to be much more proactive, very service-oriented. Shameem meets all new faculty. The librarians go out into the schools. They build relationships with the faculty.
And I think, as a consequence, the library has a much greater impact and imprint in the faculty community and in the student community.
Apart from that, I think it's crap.
No, no, I'm very, very fond of the libraries, you know.
Oh, I have one other thing to add. Can I add it? Just thought about it.
So one of the things that I recognized when I became Provost was that the university was located in the kind of cultural district of Singapore. We're close to the National Library, we're close to a number of museums and so forth. And so it felt that we, as a university, should play a role in that cultural hub in Singapore.
And I was very surprised to find, and delighted to find, that we had quite an extensive art collection and quite a diverse art collection as well. It was on display in the library. It was on display in different schools, but there was quite a bit that we didn't have on display.
And so the library was responsible for these collections.
I think we've been able to make a couple of positive changes whilst I've been Provost. One is we've built the collections, and we've increased the collections, and we've diversified the collections.
We've held a number of shows, and those have been open to the public, and the public can come and tour our collections as well.
So in effect, we are, in that way, part of the cultural district, but we've also built it into our curriculum, in that we've had an artist in residence, and faculty also draw on the art in terms of their teaching.
And so I think the library is a cultural resource, both for the university, but I think also for Singapore and for the Bras Basah district.
And I think that's intensified, hopefully, since I was Provost.
I think when I was answering that question, I was probably referring to the importance of values and making decisions and being a leader, being a values-led leader fundamentally.
And so I would say that during my term as provost, I think I have tried, or at least I've tried, to be a collegial person. I think I've tried to be a collaborative person, and I've also tried to be composed and calm. I've also tried to be someone who is open and accessible. That obviously has impacts on my time, which I referred to earlier.
And I've tried to be a listener and someone who is prepared to hear an argument and change their view.
So I would say that the different projects and the different policies and the different initiatives I've led, and going back to me mentioning earlier some of the difficult decisions that we've had to make, I think all of those have come from applying a set of values consistently.
And so my answer to your question is that if you spoke to my colleagues, I'd very much hope that if they identified the values in me, they would say those are Tim's values, and they would come out in all the different decisions and the discussions and the policies and so forth that we worked together on over the years I was provost.
A number of years ago, I did a leadership training course. And, you know, at that time there was this sort of, well, there still is, this idea of a leader as a kind of thrusting, macho figure. And it's not one I've ever subscribed to myself.
You kind of want to be thought of as a thrusting, strategic leader. At least that was the tenor of the course I did. And it wasn't, as I say, a leadership model that I personally believed in.
And what my colleagues say most commonly about me, just going back to Covid, is that I'm calm. It's not something I'd ever really thought about.
But, you know, I think actually when it came to Covid, being calm and considered and composed was quite a critical leadership skill. And applying those sorts of principles to the management of that, for example, was very much a kind of values-led approach, which was kind of implicit rather than explicit.
I think, first and foremost, I'll miss working with the people. We've built really strong relationships with people. We went through a lot together and became very strong and close as a consequence.
So I think I'll miss the people. I will miss attending student events. I used to go cycling with the student cycle club and loved attending the Arts Festival and the Choral Society and many other activities. Not to say I can't do that still, but probably not as frequently as I did. So I'll certainly miss that.
What else will I miss?
I suppose I'll miss developing policies and initiatives that propel the university forward. I have huge affection for the university. I want it to be successful. I want it to increase in terms of its impact on people, because I believe the university is a university that makes real impact.
One of the things that attracted me to the university was, from an educational point of view, the holistic learning, the relationship between curriculum and the co-curriculum. And we've always said as a university that we want to make meaningful impact, and as I said earlier, we want to do that in research as much as we want to do that in education.
So I still believe passionately in that, and I believe that SMU is a special place that can really drive those impacts. And so I suppose I'll miss being able to support and develop that impact going forward through policies and initiatives.
But as a faculty member now, I can make my own impacts, and that's what I plan to do.
I think one change is clearly that now I'm no longer Provost, I can reflect on myself as a leader, perhaps. And so one change is just seeing how I think I've developed as a leader over that period of time, and how SMU has enabled me, I think, to positively develop as a leader.
I think, though, that where SMU has probably had the deepest impact is that I see SMU as a sort of breakthrough university, a university that really has this potential to make considerable impact, both on students' lives, in terms of our research, but also on the sector.
And one of the things that was quite apparent to me as I was Provost was that as we innovated, other universities used to copy those innovations.
And so I think SMU has really shown me that an institution that is committed to its values and committed to a core mission to make meaningful impact, and then builds a curriculum around that and builds research programs around that, can have true transformational impact in a way that I think other institutions can't necessarily, because they haven't created that cohesion across the different elements to make that impact.
So SMU has undoubtedly impacted my leadership. But I think it's also impacted me in terms of becoming much stronger in my belief in the impact of universities, if you can align the different elements of what a university does.
And we had started an experiment a year or so ago when we refurbished Prinsep Street—this is experience with SMU—that we decided that we would create a residential living and learning community. And I think a question for the University—given where it is in its development—is to what extent do we want to have a residential experience in the University? We are a city centre-based University. There is an argument that students do not want to live in a University residence because of our location; they could just as easily live at home. But on the other hand, the residential living and learning concept, the possibilities of that and what I have seen in my previous university and how that can really enhance and broaden the development of the student, it seems to me that we need to give thought to whether or not we expand what we are doing at Prinsep Street beyond Prinsep Street. There is the possibility that the University could have a second residence, and so I am conducting a review to think through whether the University expands its residential offer, and if it does, how we need to strengthen and develop the current concept that we call the residential living and learning community.
The second shift was in relation to research.
So yes, colleagues talked to me about education. They talked mainly, as I said, about undergraduate education, but they didn't really talk a lot about research, and that was quite different to the institution I'd come from, where colleagues talked far more about research than they did about education.
It wasn't that I wanted to reverse that and create an institution that talked about research over education. Rather, I wanted to create a more balanced conversation and approach across the university.
So over the period I was Provost, we undertook a whole range of initiatives to enhance and shift our research culture. And I think one of the biggest areas in which we changed was in terms of research grant income.
And so we looked to build our centers and our institutes and our labs and apply for external funding to support them, and in the period as Provost, we were successful in winning a number of Tier 3 bids.
And I think externally, this was really important, because it meant that we were seen as a competitor to NUS and NTU in terms of research grants, and so we weren't seen as a second tier Research Institute anymore. We were seen as a sort of first tier that was competing equally with NTU and NUS.
And I think that culminated in a number of policies towards the end of my term, one of which was to reduce the teaching load for tenure track faculty so that they could focus more on their research, from four loads to three loads.
We also reduced the tenure clock period from eight years to seven years. I think that's a reflection of where we were as a university, attracting far higher quality faculty who could get through tenure quickly. That's sort of indicative of the kind of research culture that we were developing.
And then we also have a range of faculty on the term track who are also high quality researchers producing excellent outputs. And so we created open contracts to reward high performing term track faculty.
Then the third shift was in relation to impact.
So as an educational institution, we've always been an institution that has sought to apply theory to practice, and we've done that in a number of ways, and we built into our curriculum opportunities for students to do work study programs and work study courses and SMUX, which is our experiential learning pedagogy. Over 90% of students now take one of those courses at the point of graduation. So it's a popular form of learning within the university.
But when you look at our research, it was very much geared towards the academic community. It was about academic impact, rather than applied or societal impact.
So it's not that we didn't have colleagues having impact in terms of society and different forms of societal impact. It's just that we hadn't systematically collected the evidence of that impact, nor had we sort of cascaded the importance of that impact across the university.
So probably in the last year of my term as Provost, a key focus was building an impact framework for the university and starting to cascade that out and change that culture around how we focus our research.
A telephone call was the first thing. I was not thinking of it at all, if I am honest with you. But essentially an executive search consultant introduced me to the University, sent me some materials. And I am a management scholar, it is a management-focused University although it does social sciences and information systems. But the fact that it was called Singapore Management University, and I have run a business school, and I am very proud of the fact that I am a management academic—that was the initial sort of glue in a sense. And then I learned more about the strategy and the ambition of the university and got a deeper sense of its values. And so those things kind of hardened the glue.
When I came for an interview, that experience reinforced something that I had hoped would be here, which is that the University thinks deeply about its curriculum. And so I inherited a Blue Ribbon Commission on Undergraduate Studies and was very impressed by the level of thinking and the way in which it had connected with key pedagogic developments around the world and brought that together into a coherent package, and then developed a curriculum that was based on three pillars—the disciplinary curriculum, the core curriculum and the co-curriculum. And Durham professed to have a holistic approach to Education and essentially the way that was delivered was to have a disciplinary curriculum essentially and nothing else. And then what we called the wider student experience, which was located in colleges, but we did not design the interface elements. We left the two in parallel and then students designed and connected the two themselves. There was not any kind of purposeful design behind it. What I really liked at SMU was this sense of purposeful design.
So when I was appointed, I thought long and hard about what my key priorities were going to be, and obviously I had a discussion with the president around that.
And my observation was that the university, there were three areas in which we needed to rebalance the university. The first one was in education, the second one was in research, and the third one related to impact.
So in education, it was very clear to me that there was a huge commitment to education at SMU. Colleagues talked to me about education. They were very proud about education and pedagogy at SMU, but they mainly talked about undergraduate education. Very few colleagues, apart from those in the business school, talked to me about postgraduate education.
And so the first change that I enacted was to create a Vice Provost for Education. Previously, the Vice Provost was for Undergraduate Education and there was a Dean for Postgraduate Professional, so I created a Vice Provost for Education, and under him, there was an Associate Provost for Undergraduate and Associate Provost for postgraduate professional programs.
However, it seemed to me we needed to go further than just structural change, and because there was a sort of cultural issue within the university about how it approached it, undergraduate and postgraduate education were quite separate. They were separate in terms of how they were designed, the nature of the curriculum, and even the kind of pedagogic conversations that took place.
And so I created, with the President's authorization, the Blue Ribbon Commission for postgraduate education. And the key objective of that was to see how we could build a golden thread through our programs and give them an SMU imprint, not identical, but something that was similar, whether it be undergraduate, postgraduate, professional, or postgraduate research.
And so, you know, one of the outcomes of that, for example, was that there was a curriculum structure that's broadly similar across all three levels, so that whether you're an undergraduate student, a postgraduate professional student, or a postgraduate research student, you study your academic core and then you do a core university program, and you have the opportunity for an internship.
So that was pulling the DNA of the undergraduate program into the other levels, so that there was this common thread, as I said, across the three, and so we as a university were kind of able to both innovate upwards and downwards in a way that we weren't before.
That was the first shift.
Prior to becoming Provost of SMU, Timothy Clark was Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Social Sciences and Health) at Durham University, United Kingdom, where he was also Executive Lead for Computer and Information Services (CIS) and Estates and Buildings.
Professor Clark joined Durham University as Professor of Organisational Behaviour (2002-19), becoming Chair of the Board of Studies (Head of Department) at Durham University Business School (2007-10). He was appointed Dean of Graduate School and Internationalisation at Durham University (2010-12), and Dean and Deputy to Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) (2012-15). He also served as Executive Lead for Computer and Information Services (CIS) and Estates and Buildings from 2018.
Before joining Durham University, he served as a Research Fellow in International Management at the Open University and a Reader in Management at King’s College London.
Professor Clark is a past Chair (2009) and President (2011) of the British Academy of Management and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the British Academy of Management.
He was made an inaugural Academic Fellow of the International Council of Management Consultancy Institutes in 2013, and Principal Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy in 2015. He was appointed to the Register of Auditors of the Hong Kong Quality Assurance Council as an International Reviewer in 2014, and reappointed in 2016, and has been Vice-Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Training and Skills Committee.
Professor Clark was an Editor/General Editor of Journal of Management Studies (2000-2010).
