Hello everyone it's Friday the 3rd of April
and I'm just coming towards the end of my third week
of our new normal, for most of us, of working remotely
and working from home. I'm really pleased, first of all, to have the opportunity to
thank all of you for the tremendous speed and effectiveness
that both staff and students showed in shifting to this new mode of working.
It really has been a huge individual and collective effort and
it's to a great credit as a university community
that this has been undertaken so well. Of course there are aspects of this new
way of working which are uncomfortable and unusual. In my own case
I miss lots of things about the 'old normal'
not least the open sessions in Foresterhill and Old Aberdeen,
the opportunity to visit the Schools and to have conversations
and discussions, the chance to walk across campus between buildings
and just have casual conversations and chats and catch-ups
with colleagues that I meet along the way.
This is undoubtedly a very difficult time for Higher Education
across the world and most importantly, we don't know when our students will be
able to rejoin us on campus. But it's really important that
we all try to keep a sense of perspective and a sense of
hope and I was helped this week in my own
sense of perspective and sense of hope when I received a
letter from the granddaughter of one of my
predecessors. George Adam Smith was Principal of the University at the
time of the First World War, during which he
lost two of his three sons to military action.
He was also Principal of the University during the great
economic depression in the 1930s - so it's important for all of us to
remember that despite the undoubted deep troubles that we face,
previous generations have also undergone periods of tremendous difficulty and
that their burden was at least as great as the one that we face today.
As we look forward, it's important to remember that during these periods of
difficulty the University not only went on to
survive but to thrive and to flourish and I'm
sure the same will be true for us in the years ahead once we get through
the current crisis. So we have a lot of work to do in the
next couple of years but every reason to be confident
that we'll do that well and come out of it at the other end
in good shape. Now, I mentioned earlier that
one of the things I miss about our current situation
- in our current situation - is the conversations
and the catch-ups with people across the campus
so i have a small suggestion to replicate, albeit virtually,
some of that experience because I'm setting up
from four to five every Friday afternoon a chance to have a conversation and a
catch-up if you'd like to do that. So if you're
interested in having a discussion about how the
University is now, how the world is now, how we could set
the University and the world to rights then please get
in touch with
principalpa@abdn.ac.uk
and i look forward then to having a
conversation with you in small groups so that we're able to
have a proper discussion. For now please look forward to the long
weekend that we're about to have. This is an
opportunity to take care of yourselves and to offer
support to your friends and family so we all
come out of this in good shape. Thank you. Bye for now.