Episode 47: From Collaborative Cornwall to Wonderful Wales

For the latest episode of the podcast I have the great pleasure of talking to Niamh Lamond who is Registrar and Chief Operating Officer at Swansea University. Niamh has enjoyed a long career in higher education covering several of the Celtic corners of the sector including Cornwall, Northern Ireland and South Wales. She spent a significant period in Falmouth as part of an institution which grew rapidly from a college into a university, crucially as part of the Combined Universities in Cornwall initiative which started in the late 1990s and brought significant EU resources into a region of real deprivation. Having established a strong partnership and shared services model with Exeter University and also been instrumental in opening a new campus in Penryn (on the site of a convent school) Niamh decided to join Ulster University where she also got involved in exciting major capital developments.

The move to Swansea followed and, as with Falmouth and Ulster, she feels this is a University with a really strong sense of place and community. Swansea has had some significant governance challenges in the recent past but, having spent time rebuilding confidence, is very much focused on the future now and a major organisational improvement programme.

We also discuss the major cost of living and energy crises facing universities and their staff and students. Recognising the demands which would be made of the University as an anchor institution and given the contributions made to the community during the pandemic there is nevertheless, Niamh argues, a primary obligation to ensure that the institution remains financially sustainable in order to preserve jobs and the wider economic benefits it brings to the region.

Finally we learn about Niamh's involvement in a major fundraising programme while at Ulster which included abseiling and sleeping rough as part of a campaign to generate funds to support student health and wellbeing.

[And apologies for some background noise at a number of points in the middle of this recording - start of term activities were well underway nearby.]