Many universities over the past 15 or so years have been converging on South-East Asia to recruit international students. I hold the senior management portfolio for international student recruitment at Oxford Brookes University, and this week I am visiting India.

I am part-way through a tour of the country hosting alumni events and holding meetings with our agents, potential students, and academic partners. Last night, we ran a very successful alumni event in Mumbai on the south-west coast of India. The team I’m travelling with are now getting into a groove, becoming increasingly confident about journeying half-way round the globe to meet up with our graduates and to establish alumni chapters. It’s all part and parcel of a high-level university strategy, which senior colleagues and myself drew up at the end of last year. To date we’ve held events in the US, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Nigeria, South Africa and India. With 130,000 graduates out there and an External Relations Office that is now running a CRM database with contact details for almost half of these people, the university is well placed to make significant progress over the coming years.

In India, we’ve already held events this week in Chennai and Mumbai, and I am now in Delhi for the final event. The format is best explained by looking at what happened last night in Mumbai. After initial contact with alums is made by distance using the CRM and social media sites, we then set up an event in a good location in country (usually a luxury hotel) and make the commitment for a member of the university’s senior management team to be present along with a member of our External Relations department. This week, we are also fortunate to have the Head of our India office available as well. The evening is run like a seminar so that we can actively involve the alums in an active discussion. We’re interested to hear about what they have been up to since graduating, and also about how they could help us with a number of strategic objectives, which include recruiting future students, offering mentoring to existing students and helping us engage in more high-quality academic partnerships with other universities.

In Mumbai, the two hours of talk with snacks and drinks went very fast. It’s fascinating to hear and share the stories of your alumni. Every event is slightly different, but last night’s was as engaging as ever. The alums came from the disciplines of Architecture, Physiotherapy, Motorsport Engineering, Urban Design, Planning, Business, and Project Management for the Built Environment. They had all engaged in postgraduate study with the university, and without exception, everybody present wanted to re-engage meaningfully with their alma mater.

First off though, I hosted a discussion about what had made their time in Oxford so special. The list included: the location of this English city steeped in history; courses that were vocational and explored their subject in great depth and included ‘real world’ live project work; the warmth with which they were welcomed into the university; the quality of the teaching; the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world; and the competitive pricing of the course fees taken into consideration alongside the good reputation of the university. They also told us what could be better with our offer: working harder to ensure that the qualifications could be officially recognised in India as well as in the UK; lobbying the British government to re-instate longer term post-study visas; and providing an alumni ‘cushion’ back in India to help graduates negotiate their return into thei home job market.

This morning I have been meeting agents to discuss how we can work together better to enable good students to come and study in Oxford. I sat in on interviews with a stream of potential Indian students, in one particular agent’s central Delhi offices. It was good to be reassured about the rigour of the operation but also about the tenor of the interview process. My private meetings later with the agents are fascinating, because we tend to dance around the commercial aspect of the student recruitment process. It’s business and agents work on commission. Crudely, they receive a fee for every student they ‘land’, and this fee comes directly from the university. In India, Oxford Brookes uses a small number of agents who process a large proportion of our students from this country. We also have our own university office in Northern India which is becoming increasingly important to us.

Unfortunately, a number of universities have been stung (and potential students disadvantaged) by corrupt practices in the sector. Student recruitment offers considerable financial returns, especially in a growing market, and therefore has attracted some rogue practitioners. All of the agents Inspeak to remind me that the UK is doing itself no favours. Because the government has introduced a significant tightening up of immigration compliance and monitoring, other countries (particularly Australia, Canada and New Zealand) are stealing a march on us. The UK still remains a key destination of choice for a university education, but the agents feel we are perversely undermining our reputation by making it difficult and expensive for international students to study here. So it is important that I oversee a recruitment process that doesn’t endanger our future ability to recruit students from overseas. After all, our ‘highly trusted’ status is built upon open honest partnership work with recruiters. But, we are also going to have be much more innovative in our recruitment methods in the future if we wish to continue to be an internationalised university, and country.

It can be very easy to lose sight of the importance of a university education, whilst dryly honing student recruitment processes. Therefore, it was uplifting this afternoon to meet up with one of Oxford Brookes’ postgraduate Architecture alums, who now runs an architectural practice in Delhi. Over tea, I sat and listened to him recounting his formative experiences in Oxford over six years ago. He received (or more accurately participated in) a radical learning environment where his entire belief system had been stripped down and re-evaluated. Reflecting, whilst sipping Assam tea in a hotel restaurant, he constantly tripped over his words as he excitedly explained why this experience was so important to him. The hour I spend there is worth more than any amount of time I could devote to articulating our brand, and I know his tutors will be thankful for his positive recommendation of their academic endeavours.

Meanwhile, outside, the noise of the city doesn’t abate. The heat of the afternoon sun keeps beating down, and my desire to go for a walk and make photographs gets stronger. In case you may be interested I am posting up these photographs on my Twitter feed at @pinman. A good colleague and friend of mine has been bemoaning my lack of activity on social media to drive traffic to this blog. In my defence I have offered the excuse that India is full-on and I simply don’t have the personal bandwidth at the moment to engage in a digital marketing campaign. Mind you, everyone’s a critic these days. My brother-in-law has messaged me to point out that he wasn’t sure what to make of the mix of personal reveal and what he refers as my Brookes Lite promotion. Even my wife has texted me to point out the typos. But, I’m being overly defensive. The blog has been welcomed by my friends, family and higher education colleagues. Over 350 people logged onto the WordPress site in the first four days. Not a bad beginning.

Tomorrow is my day of rest, but I’ll be back online on Monday.

Today, I would like to share with you the text of a commencement address I delivered recently at a graduation ceremony in Southern England. It’s littered with reflections on my life and attempts to offer up 10 lessons learned.

Principal, Chair of Governors, College staff, parents, friends, partners, siblings, children and most of all graduands.

Thank you for inviting me here today to deliver what in the US is described as a commencement speech.
At the outset let us be clear of my purpose here. I am a man in a wizard’s gown from out of town. I am here to impart wisdom born out of life experience. I will tell you my story to illustrate the twists and turns that life can take. I will tell you tales that emphasise the role of hard work, the application of specialist knowledge, the importance of supportive friends and family, and the need for self-belief laced with big dollops of good luck. My narrative will be made up of a series of episodes. Real and imagined life moments. Part comedy, part tragedy. Meantime, your responsibility as the audience is to listen avidly, hanging on my every word, as you imbibe the relevance of this life told. You will taste the subtleties of my voice, roll with the metaphors, and squeeze every last drop of meaning out of my speech. Finally satiated, with a combination of anecdote, analysis and philosophical insight, you will yell at me to stop. ‘’No more.” The lessons will have been learnt, and you will leave the building better people than when you arrived. Departing into the late summer air, safe in the knowledge that you have indeed witnessed the future through a stranger’s eyes. Of course, it might not quite work out like this.

Let us now jump in the time machine. It is 1981 – almost 35 years ago – and I am you, I am 22 and I am graduating from college. I am clasping tightly to my chest the degree certificate that will tell the world of my worth. I am listening to a man in a wizard’s gown from out of town. See, we are so familiar, you and me. But all of this is a lie – a fabrication, an untruth. A construct to make a point. I’m not like you, you see, because I didn’t turn up for my own graduation. I was too busy with other stuff. I was editing the Students’ Union magazine, which I had started and named after The Jam top 20 hit of that year. I was a journalist in waiting? I had important things to say. In my defence, the young man you can see in front of you is headstrong, opinionated and in love with his life. There are so many new things happening to him that he is tripping up over the possibilities. And he certainly has no time to consider the thoughts of his parents who may well have wished to see him graduate. Sorry, Mom. Sorry Dad. As it turned out the magazine didn’t run for long and certainly was no passport to Fleet Street.

Life Lesson No. 1: YOU CAN LEARN A LOT FROM FAILURE.

I’d already cottoned on to this lesson during my teens. I was brought up in a part of Birmingham where the data (studied in retrospect) suggested I was unlikely to lead a life of consequence. As a kid I was blissfully unaware that I was living in an area with one of the lowest progression rates to university. I dreamed of being really good at something. I dreamed a lot – subconsciously wanting to escape the suburbs. I wanted to be a great cricketer. By practising over and over, hour after hour, in all weathers, I became a very good swing bowler. Cricket for me was a heady mix of science and psychology. I became obsessed with how that small ball would react to changing air pressure, the grass we were playing upon, and be affected by the ritualistic shining of the red leather on my white trousers. The psychology was all about an exploitation of the confidence and fears of batsmen faced with me delivering the ball towards them at speeds approaching 80 mph.

Let’s set the controls of the time machine to June 15th 1978. It’s a day very much like today. Perfect swing bowIing weather.I have been chosen to play for a Warwickshire, Schools Xl, and I am on the brink of breaking into County Cricket.and I am opening the bowling with Gladstone Small, who later went on to open the bowling for Warwickshire and England. At the end of the match however I will bow out. I realise I don’t want to devote the rest of my life to one sport. Also (a major disincentive at the time) professional cricket is so poorly paid with very little sign of today’s opportunities for commercial sponsorship. I also sense a certain unfairness in life. The entire team besides myself and Gladstone have come from prestigious English public schools. Oh, and self-critically, I doubt I am good enough to succeed.

Life lesson No. 2: SELF-KNOWLEDGE GOOD. TOO MUCH SELF-DOUBT, BAD.

At College I went off to study on one of the UK’s first Media courses. No mention of Mickey Mouse degrees back then. Like you, I learnt so much about so many things whilst studying. Most of it not on the curriculum. For me, this extra-curricula activity included getting heavily involved in student politics and getting elected as President of the Students Union. At that time I was consciously choosing the slacker approach to life. I was putting off going to work. I didn’t want to conform. I didn’t want to meet my destiny. Not quite yet. What actually happened though was somewhat different.

Life lesson No.3 : PLAN TO BE IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME. BUT SOMETIMES IT’S JUST A CASE OF LUCK.

The College I was studying at announced it wanted to close down our campus, and I found myself being (reluctantly) thrust into the spotlight as the person who was going to stop the closure. To cut a long story short, I had an intensive period of learning about campaigning and influencing. I learnt how to exploit people’s dreams and people’s fears. I learnt how to distance myself from radicals involved in risky direct action, whilst exploiting the outcomes of their strength of feeling. I learnt to be non-judgmental, so that I could have dialogue with people I didn’t like, and appeared to have little in common with.

My cinematic moment was a packed County Hall for voting on the college closure. As I peered down from the circular balcony, I could see that every county councillor had a copy of the orange briefing document we had delivered by hand to their home address. If the vote was won or lost I had instructed all of our people in the public gallery to silently release torn up council papers into the council gallery below. The vote went our way and a mute ticker tape shower confounded expectations of noisy students behaving badly.

Life lesson No. 4: SURPRISE PEOPLE.

I have since headed up many campaigns and been successful in grouping individuals and groups with different agendas behind one objective. And I have achieved this without being duplicitous. Over the years I’ve heard so many times people around me lamenting that only brash pushy people get on. People who are ruthless in their networking. It’s true, they do, but they also burn spectacularly as they abruptly re-enter our orbit after a fall. My advice (rooted in a belief in karma) is that what goes around comes around. If you’re in it for the long game, treat people as you would like them to treat you.

Life lesson No. 5: BE HONEST, BE TRUTHFUL, BE STRAIGHT WITH PEOPLE. DON’T BE BRASH, NEVER BULLYING. INSTEAD BE GENEROUS AND POLITE.

So, let’s get back in the time machine and shoot over to 1990. As I stare at myself sitting in a room editing a film with a friend, all I can see is the ponytail I am proudly sporting. Why did I grow my hair so long? The young man I am working alngside has convinced me to work for nothing. Quite a feat. By this time I have a career as a television producer/director. I have begun to make a series of documentary films about mental health issues. It’s a fulfilling and well paid career. It’s freelance. It’s my own business, and is in equal parts liberating and daunting. I’ve found a way of not conforming to getting a 9 to 5 job with a regular pay cheque. But here I am working for free and I’m not sure why. I am about to find out why. We are putting the finishing touches to a short feature film which will win all kinds of awards worldwide and kickstart the film directing career of the other man in the room. He is David Yates, and in 2013 he completed production the last of the four Harry Potter films as director.

Life lesson No. 6: SIGNIFICANCE ALWAYS COMES LATER.

When I relate these stories to my eldest daughter she rather cruelly reminds me that these are miserable tales of what might have being, of missed opportunity. ‘You could have opened the bowling for England, and you could have become the wealthiest film director in England. But you didn’t.’ She may have a point.

I have had a career that has moved around. I have in-depth subject knowledge, but I also have knowledge and experience of many other related and unrelated parts of life. In my early years as a TV Producer/Director I was unusual, because I was multi-skilled. I could shoot film and edit it. My peers couldn’t. The Television industry was a heavily unionised closed shop, where there was strict delineation of who was allowed to do what job. My generation changed all that – for better or worse.

Life lesson No. 7: YOU NEED TO NETWORK. AND YOUR APPROACH TO LIFE OUGHT TO BE T-SHAPED.

Depth and breadth. Depth and breadth. Be an expert on something, but ensure you can communicate and get on with people who have different interests, skills and experiences.

Suddenly, it is New Year’s Eve 1999 and the fireworks are going off all around the world to mark the new Millennium. A time of great optimism. A bit like the London 2012 Olympics celebrations writ large. I have missed most of the lead up to the day because I am deeply buried in what will become the last of my television and film projects shot over time. I am completing the final interviews with people who have been incarcerated in secure psychiatric institutions for over 30 years. They are about to be ‘released’ into the community and I’m there to record their stories of life in these buildings. These self-same buildings will be converted over the coming years into gated communities of a different kind. Luxury flats. Gates once used to keep people in, will now be re-purposed to keep people out. As I register the level of fear expressed by these institutionalised patients, I am so so aware of:

Life lesson No. 8: NOTHING STAYS THE SAME AS WE LIVE IN A STATE OF CONSTANT FLUX.
You are I’m sure aware that it’s likely you’ll have over five careers in the course of your lifetime. So, maybe I’m not so dissimilar to you after all? Around this time – in the early 2000s, I am also beginning to film stories with young people serving long custodial sentences for having committed murder. I learnt a lot about myself and humankind in those long days behind bars. I’ll always remember the relief I felt at the end of each day as I made my way out from behind five sets of locked doors and accompanying security checks. I was often asked by friends and colleagues if it was a depressing episode in my life. My response would be the same now as it was then. It was a time of great learning for me. The golden thread woven through all of the stories I recorded was of the importance of education in society. These were young people with poor experiences of school. None of them had progressed into tertiary education, and neither had any of their families.

Life lesson No. 8: EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT. CONTINUING EDUCATION MORE SO.

It’s no great surprise that today I am working in a university. Notice that I purposely don’t use the phrase ‘ended up working in a university’. It’ll also be no surprise that a life viewed through a mirror and magnifying glass is easier to make sense of than it sometimes does whilst you are in the middle of living it. I am marked by the moments I have held up for scrutiny today. You, similarly, will be marked by the events that you make happen, and others that happen to you in the future.

Life lesson No. 9: MAKE YOURSELF OPEN AND READY TO EMBRACE CHANGE.

Your instinct at times will be to clam up and fight against things which take you out of your comfort zone. That way your comfort zone remains small and leaves you poorly equipped to exploit new experiences. Remember, the significance of strength in depth and breadth. What you know and have experience of will be what employers are interested in. But more and more, how you are able to communicate that to others, and involve them in innovating new products, services, processes and networks will be the thing that keeps you in work and enjoying the journey.

What you see here in front of you today is an endlessly positive person. I have found that in all walks of life we want to be around positive people. I love working with friends and colleagues who provide solutions to problems. It’s relatively easy to critique. Less easy to fix things. So the final advice I have to offer is:

Life lesson No. 10: REAPPROPRIATE AND RECYCLE THE NEGATIVE INTO SOMETHING POSITIVE.
POSITIVITY IS A REAL TURN-ON.

It just leaves me to congratulate you all on your achievements to date. Enjoy the moment of graduating in these superb surroundings. Be gracious to acknowledge the efforts of others in this room who have helped you along the way. And most of all, be very Un-British today. Take the compliments and the praise heaped on you, don’t shift around and fidget awkwardly, and say to yourself, “Yeh, I did that. I’m good, me. What’s up next?’

Thank you for listening.

Today, I am reflecting on the university’s aspiration to create a worldwide network of alumni chapters over the coming years.

I am sat now in Mumbai checking the final details of the second of our latest series of Oxford Brookes University alumni events in India. Last night, we successfully hosted the inaugural event for our Chennai alumni chapter, when graduates of the university’s courses from over the past 30 years met up together in the city’s most luxurious 5* green hotel. To say that I can be continually surprised by these type of events is an understatement. You never really know what to expect, and most of this disconnect is probably down to the weak relationships that many UK universities have with their alumni. Most of us now in the sector realise this as a mistake of the past, and we’re working hard to repair the damage and put in place sustainable engagement mechanisms for the future.

If I focus down on the detail of last night’s event in Chennai, I may be able to explain some of the issues facing us. Back in Oxford we have a newly reconfigured Alumni Engagement and Development office. It’s populated by good people who use a variety of media to drive attendance at these meetings in far-flung parts of the world. The locations are those we have strategically opted to focus on for future international student recruitment. Our intention is to open local offices in each of these regions so as to have people on the ground who can act as outreach teams. Operating besides these will be our alumni chapters made up of committed graduates of Oxford Brookes University. To give you an idea of scale, the university has about 130,000 graduates out there in the wider world. Currently, we only have active communication with a relatively small percentage of these people, but we do have a live database with contact details for about 25% of this figure. The use of social media applications like LinkedIn and Facebook and a dedicated CRM mean that we are fast re-connecting with many more of these ‘friends of the university’.

Yesterday, I was privileged to sit amongst a group of alums and engage in a conversation of ideas. These were graduates going back over a quarter of a century. They weren’t fresh-faced and recently graduated innocents. These were men and women with a phenomenal amount of life experience, able to reflect knowingly on their years out in the real world (how I dislike that term). One man talked about how he has adapted his university experiences of designing sustainable buildings at the Oxford School of Architecture to be able to set up his own practice in a different culture and accompanying professional standards. Another explained how his academic grounding in Public Health has been expanded to embrace cutting-edge research in the field of Health Informatics. Working with colleagues around the world he is designing innovative healthcare products and services.

Because we are in India we also got to discussing the inevitable elephant in the room – the UK government’s seeming obsession with stopping Indian students getting work there. Ordinary people in India express their sadness about these developments, and speak about the special relationship between our two countries. Throughout the evening we touched upon the measures which need to be invoked to encourage the next generation of highly motivated students from India to our shores. Competitive costing of postgraduate programmes, post-study visas, professional placements and internships, plus teaching and research partnerships between UK and India institutions. Of course, the Indian government’s inability to move the Foreign Education Providers Bill through parliament also faced criticism. After all, this is an initiative that The Times of India was reporting in 2010 as close to getting the nod from Cabinet.

In many ways the event yesterday evening took the form of an academic seminar where we all respectfully expressed our differences of opinion whilst marvelling at how much we shared collective memories of our time in Oxford. Most impressive though was the dedication and commitment that these alums showed to developing the Chennai alumni chapter, and helping with the recruitment of new students to the university. I sat quietly istening to Law graduates fondly recalling their times sat researching historical texts in the many libraries in Oxford, then launching into a very current argument about intellectual property law in the age of the Internet. We even had the luxury of a couple of university professors and a retired Dean to pepper the dialogue with searching questions and challenging hypotheses. All life was there, and the two hours went quickly. We ended with the obligatory group photographs, exchanges of business cards and contact details and then everyone walked off separately and in small groups to reflect on their coming together. I left the room safe in the knowledge that this will become one of our strongest alumni chapters.

Most of today has been taken up travelling by plane and taxi over to the west coast city of Mumbai. As I gaze out now from my hotel window at the sun setting over the city skyline, I’m reminded how much confidence there is in this country’s future. The sky scraping buildings make a lie of the evident poverty. But better writers than me have pointed out the many contradictions of India. I have their books with me to provide the contextual details. The metaphorical and literal weightiness of these tomes cheered up the Jet Airways counter staff earlier today at the airport as my love of reading cost me dear yet again. I had breached the 15kg allowed baggage limit.

I have always enjoyed travelling on planes, but internal flights in India tend to be a bit hit and miss. Today, I had been folded into the row of ‘toilet seats’ at the rear of the aircraft (so-called because of their proximity to the on-board washrooms). I’m a tall man who needs legroom and that was in short supply today. However, the short-comings of the airline couldn’t hold a candle up to the experience of taking a taxi ride from Mumbai’s international airport to the hotel. I say ‘taxi’ but in fact, this being 2016, it was an Uber moment. The private car travel sensation sweeping the world has reached this part of South-East Asia only recently. You make a call using the app and the nearest private car ownero comes to collect you and take you at highly competitive rates to your desired destination. Unfortunately, we were attended to by a rather frightened young man who drove his car like he’d that morning passed his driving test. After reversing into a concrete pillar in the airport car park he then proceeded to bump into two other vehicles whilst travelling in the opposite direction to where we needed to head. We abandoned this mode of transport after 20 minutes and placed ourself in the care of a seasoned Mumbai taxi driver, who looked me in the eyes and uttered the immortal line, “don’t worry, I will get you to your hotel safely.” He did.

Tomorrow, besides hosting the Mumbai alumni chapter meeting at the Hotel Marine Plaza, I will also be carrying out business meetings with the leading agents we use here to recruit students. With a bit good fortune I am hoping I will as well get the opportunity to engage in a little photography, which I’ll be able to share with you on these blog pages.

Once again I am asking myself questions about the compatibility of the worlds of work and education.

Despite all my best intentions I am significantly defined by my occupation. My identity is wrapped up in what I do on a daily basis at work. I am the son of a workaholic and have very early childhood memories of my dad arriving home from work exhausted – he was a technical maintenance manager at the huge Dunlop tyre factory in Birmingham, UK. But despite his tiredness, he would very often quickly eat his dinner, his pager would go off and he would be straight back out of the door to answer some desperately urgent request for help at the plant. I always vowed I would not be like him. In fact, I said as much to a careers adviser at school when I was eighteen whilst preparing for the unwelcome demands of adulthood. My dad was present at that meeting, and it must really have hurt him to hear his first son say those words. In my defence I was young and outspoken and tactless. Not much of a defence, I know.

I am thinking about the relationship between work and education a lot these days. I am currently in Chennai, the largest city in the south of India. (Mumbai is larger but I don’t count it as being in the south. DIscuss.). I am doing some work out here building up the presence of my employer, Oxford Brookes University, by hosting a series of alumni events and holding partnership meetings with other higher education institutions and businesses in three major cities. As a university that sees itself as global it is only fitting that we have chosen strategically to re-energise and integrate more fully our intenational operations regarding student recruitment, partnership and alumni relations. My current Indian tour is only one leg of significant senior level activity in other corners of the world – including China, Malaysia, Singapore, North America, Africa and Northern Europe.

I have now worked in the university sector for over 20 years. Longer than my first (or second?) career in film and television. My university career has consisted of a number of senior level appointments at former polytechnics and at a specialist art and design institution. As such, I am marked by my experiences in both good and bad ways. My first appointments at Bournemouth University were very formative. When I arrived there to work full-time in the mid-1990s I had never received a salary cheque, or more correctly a BACS payment for work in my life. I had only worked freelance as a film and television director, producer and editor. The move to ‘a real job’ was always going to be disruptive in more ways than one.

Every day in Bournemouth I walked past the university’s mission statement, which in a very corporate manner was spelt out on a plaque in the newly constructed atrium. I can’t recall the exact wording but its essence could be distilled to reflect a commitment to vocational education. On reflection, it was an institution in transition. Only recently it had changed its name and status three times in as many years, moving from being an institution of higher education, to a polytechnic, to finally achieving full university status. The period was a time of great change – the higher education gold rush. I recall the haste of some of the decisions taken at that moment. In particular, the rush for student numbers and a resulting first year undergraduate cohort bigger than the size of the rest of the university population. Rightly or wrongly, these were strategic decisions brought about by the political and economic environment the university was operating within.

Back then, to be a university was the ultimate goal. It still is for all manner of educational institutions that I visit around the world. But my time at Bournemouth University also taught me something about the pitfalls of what you lose about your previous identity whilst you are in great haste trying on the new clothes. Wanting to be ‘a pre-eminent vocational institution’ (see, I remember more about that plaque than I cared to let on) wasn’t such a terrible aspiration. However, the newly acquired ceremonial aspects of the university status and the responsibilities of tradition weighed heavily on everyone. To be fair to everyone who worked there at that time, it was also a wonderfully exciting period of my life. Disruptive episodes work like that, don’t they? Myself and my colleagues working within the highly devolved Bournemouth Media School at that time were filled with a desire to be the best at what we did – preparing work-ready graduates for the newly evolving creative industries sector. We were in the right place at the right time.

The university I work at now, Oxford Brookes University, was also a polytechnic and had been for twenty odd years before becoming a university in 1992. I joined the university in 2011 to become a member of their senior management team and lead on the necessary academic restructuring and estates development that would bring the institution up to speed with the competition in the sector. Interestingly, my observations from that time would be that I walked into a place where there was an inner confidence about being a university that I had never experienced at Bournemouth, and the academic portfolio reflected that self-belief. In some ways it shouldn’t have been like that at all. Oxford is home to one of the most pre-eminent academic institutions in the world, marking out the city for some as the intellectual capital of the West. Discuss. Given the context, Oxford Brookes University could have been scurrying about in the shadows of the other university in the city. But, far from it, it had marked itself out as ‘the UK’s best modern university’.

In a world of instant ubiquitous data analytics, the moniker ‘best’ is ironically easy to pin on and just as easy to lose. The UK’s best modern university medal has been self-awarded by at least three other institutions in the past three years, and with good reason. In particular, it has been incredibly personally satisfying to see the progress made by Coventry University in recent times (believe me, as a Brummie those words should be difficult to express). Coventry is now home to an institution with very high levels of student satisfaction and pride and confidence. The senior team there has also seemingly cracked the fundamentals of good partnership work both locally and globally. I have been closely monitoring how they operationalise international student recruitment and believe me they have have a lot to teach the rest of us in the university sector. All of this success is also, importantly, wrapped up in the comfort blanket of good financial performance. I see for the first time they will be posting turnover that has broken through the £300m barrier. Their ultimate challenge though will be to successfully don the robes of serious academic intent over the coming years. Their recent decision to announce a huge financial commitment into their research portfolio is just what you would expect from the new contender. No lack of self-confidence and belief. I admire that.

At Oxford Brookes University – incidentally, the happiest place I have ever worked – we continue our ‘refresh’ at pace. The completion of the £135m multi award-winning John Henry Brookes building in 2014 set the bar for student-centred learning in the UK HE sector. Banish those memories of university atriums built in the 1990s with echoes of international hotel chains. The quality of build I am witnessing in Oxford is breathtaking. The university’s guiding principles are littered with words like ‘bold, ‘confident’, ‘creative’, ‘enterprising’ and so there is a lot to deliver on, but a £150m rolling programme of estate investment is very quickly placing the excellent pedagogic work there in a 21st century housing.

When I talk about Oxford whilst travelling around the world I obviously please my audiences by dwelling on the history of the place. The medieval buildings after all make the perfect backdrop to modern day selfies. But if you are in South-East Asia, the prospective students and their parents want also to hear about that elusive relationship with the world of work, and in a league table driven world their over-riding ambition is to join an ambitious university which can ‘guarantee’ future success in the workplace. We therefore shouldn’t be taken by surprise when everyone’s attention is once again focused on the metrics of vocational excellence. In a moment I am transported back to that day I first idly glanced up at the plaque spelling out the university mission statement.

After tonight’s alumni event at one of Chennai’s most luxurious hotels, I will be flying over to Mumbai on the south-west coast of India, to engage in a similar programme of activity with friends and colleagues. Then we will be moving on to the capital of India, New Delhi. My intention is continue writing this blog every day. Part reflection, part observational documentary.

After diligently using Twitter for almost ten years and acquiring a writing style marked out by its use of 140-character bursts, I’ve decided to revisit the idea of a blog. Ironically, for me this represents a move into long-form writing. The catalyst for the change of heart, or extension to my repetoire? A two-week university tour of duty to a country I love, India. More specifically, as Pro Vice Chancellor at Oxford Brookes University holding the senior management portfolio for intenational student recruitment, I will be hosting alumni events over the coming fortnight in Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.

I have always enjoyed writing and have engaged in most of the available forms over the years. Banging out a word count to order has been a big part of my adult life. Writing whilst travelling though has a special place in my working life. It’s part diary, part observational documentary. Passing through places and past people forces you desperately to hold your gaze and attempt to make sense of things quickly. Being an outsider in a foreign unfamiliar country, of course, is tourism, pure and simple. In my previous life as a documentary film and television director I tended to avoid these kind of engagements, preferring the work produced over time, from inside communities. I tended to be disparaging towards those filmmakers or journalists ‘just passing through’.

India is not an unfamiliar place to me. I have visited the country fairly regularly over the years and have friends in the UK who moved there from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. My wife, Debbie Fionn Barr, has been rehearsal director for a Bharat Natyam dance company all of the time we’ve been together (over 20 years) and she’s now a full-time research student at Coventry University completing her PhD focusing on this classical Indian dance form. By way of evidencing my love of the country, I can also profess to be fairly proficient in the kitchen at preparing South Indian cuisine. All that said, my love of India goes much deeper than this list of encounters with a country’s culture and people. But more of that later.

Today, after 17 hours of travel from Oxfordshire via Dubai, I am holed up in a hotel in the centre of Chennai. As an aside, this city has many aspects to it of interest to the visitor, but one thing it lacks is a defined centre. Like so much of India, the city presents intself as a maelstrom of chaotic activity. There is very little left of what urban design may have been undertaken hundreds of years ago. The ITC Grand Chola is where we will host our latest alumni event in south-east Asia tomorrow night (Tuesday 18 October). I will be joined by our External Relations Director, Alison Bond and the manager of our India office, Gaurav Sharma, later this evening as we all converge on Chennai from different parts of the world.

It is a particularly exciting and challenging time for international student recruitment and engagement at the moment. Challenging because of the British governments conflation of two very separate issues – immigration and universities’ global engagement. If we don’t want to make it difficult for UK universities to continue to be world market leaders, then we really should decouple the recruitment of international students from the contentious issue of immigration targets. Again, more later.

Oxford Brookes University is in a very good place regards the diversity and richness of its student body and staffing profile. Listed in the world’s Top 200 Most International Universities in 2016 and attracting large numbers of highly qualified, talented postgraduate students from over 120 countries, the University is fortunate to be based in a city that many commentators regard as the intellectual capital of the world – Oxford. The University has always attracted large numbers of students from Asia, and in particular, India, China and Malaysia. Almost 18% of our student population are from outside the UK, so with a view to protecting and building on this profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace, we have decided on a strategy that sees us bringing together our alumni activity with our international student recruitment operation. This means that students holding offers to study at the university can meet up ‘in country’ with members of our alumni network. Over the past 6 months we have been working on events in China and Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, India, North America and across Africa. Even without Brexit we had decided to focus our efforts outside Europe.

I have always focussed my ideas about global education on seeking out cultural similarity, rather than difference between national and peoples. I recently was engaged in presenting some scholarships to international students and found myself recalling one particular story from a project I had led in West Africa just after 9/11. At the time I was bringing together my Filmmaking career with the British Council’s desire to engage more meaningfully with the developing world. I had assembled filmmakers, media academics and students from five West African countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria) to work with their UK counterparts on ‘Storyline’s. The aim of the project was to make a series of short student films about cultural semblance with African students partnering with UK students. FIlms were made home and away, so to speak.

The recent awards ceremony (and its attendant duty to make a speech) sparked a memory of a moment in time in Senegal fourteen years ago. Filmmakers deal in the currency of moments so I make no excuses for using narrative in my second (or third?) career in university leadership and management. Anyway, the slice in time involved a young student from the south of England who was a promising filmmaker but as of yet hadn’t found his voice. It was a particularly hot day in Dakar, the capital city, and we were doing some test shoots. The young man was obviously struggling because, as he confided in me, he couldn’t find any African women carrying water pots on their heads. Despite the awkwardness of the conversation, I used his line as a way of engaging everyone in a seminar and workshop about visual cliche. We were in one of West Africa’s most vibrant cities, and looking for the cliche (a rural one at that) was causing him to not see the obvious all around him.

As I boarded my connecting flight to Chennai from Dubai last night I witnessed another moment of cultural universality, played out with me as unwitting participant. In a packed plane, a young family of two adults and four children had decided to requisition six seats together and then re-direct the seat ‘owners’ to other parts of the plane. These weren’t particularly wealthy or privileged people, but they were very forceful in their behaviour. Almost immediately, I was reminded of the middle-class parents of children at my daughter’s primary school in West Oxfordshire who arrive early at every school concert and occupy all the best seats in the house using their coats and bags. Both sets of ‘occupiers’ see their action as their right. Different cultures, same beliefs.

Enough for now.

The photograph accompanying the blog post? We live in a world where young people photograph everything they eat. Don’t get me started on the problematic territory that this sub-genre enters. But in the spirit of youthful endeavour (I’m very old), this was the first meal I consumed on Indian soil this time round. A South Indian breakfast, and one of my particular favourites from around the world. If you knew me well you’d have been treated to this in my kitchen at home all those thousands of kilometres away in England.