Teaching-PEur

John Venables: Physics with European Studies

Introduction and Summary

In October 1977, Valerie Scholes arrived in Sussex to study a new degree: Physics with European Studies (PEur).

This was to be a 4-year degree, with the third year spent abroad, studying her subject (Physics) in her chosen language (German). Thus the Science and European Studies program had it's first student.

As of 1987-1988, we had more than 130 students in similar 4-year courses in Chemistry (CEur, from 1978 with David Walton), Mathematics, and Mathematics with Statistics (MEur and MSEur, from 1979, with James Hirschfeld) and Biology (BEur, from 1979 with several faculty). Engineering was added later. At the same time, we had 43 exchange science students from continental Europe studying at Sussex, making a total of 173 students involved. This was not counting the long-running Swedish exchange scheme started and run by Dennis Hamilton.

This important development came about in an interesting way, and I plan to write about this topic based on articles and internal Sussex Reports [1, 2] that I wrote with David Walton, David Smith (Chemistry) and James Hirschfeld (Mathematics) in the late 1980's. In my Professorial Lecture [3], I was able to highlight both my Electron Microscopy group research and the Science and European Studies program. These two topics are much more connected than might at first appear, and were a perfect example of the interaction between research and teaching, involving Exchange schemes with European Universities where Sussex faculty were well-known through research collaboration.  

It will be excellent if early PEur students in particular can describe their experiences and recollections of an exciting period in their lives, and I look forward to being in contact, and to reading anything they wish to contribute.

References

1. Scientists and Good Europeans, in University of Sussex Annual Report 1988, pages 14-15 (John Venables)

2. The First ten years of BScEur. Internal University of Sussex Report (1988) 1-25 (J.A. Venables, J.D. Smith and J.W.P. Hirschfeld).

3. Internationalism in Science. Professorial Lecture, University of Sussex (22nd June 1992) 1-22 (J.A. Venables)

Origins and Early Days

In 1975, there was a Referendum on continued British membership of the European Community. My wife Delia and I were heavily involved on the "Yes" side. As you may recall, the Great British Public did indeed say yes, rather more out of inertia that we were already in the EEC than of conviction that we should be there, an ambivalence that continues to this day. As a minor bye-product of this event, I wrote an open letter to my Sussex colleagues, dated 11 February 1975. I suggested that since we were likely to be involved with Europe somewhat more than we had been, I would like to make some suitable initiatives, had talked to relevant Deans, was setting up a small working party, etc, and asked the Science Faculty for suggestions and help.

In the event, two of my four suggestions came good, namely 2) to 'set up schemes with specific European Universities for Sussex to take European students in science to do one year of their studies here, either of an exchange or one-way basis' and 3) to 'institute a 4-year degree in Science with European Studies at Sussex in which the 3rd year would be spent at a European University, as in the year abroad scheme in the School of European Studies'.

I went on to suggest that the necessary exchanges should be pursued with those universities where we had strong research links, and that as we travelled for research purposes, which universities were interested in principle. As I remarked only half in jest, a key element of success in the university system is getting your agenda onto someone else's budget. What was involved was merely to stay an extra day to explore possibilities with the local administration. Since we already knew, via research, some of their best people on first name terms, the rest was easy.

The above remarks were made in 1992 [all taken from reference 3]. Of course, I don't know whether we could get away with such informal arrangements in 2011, and I'll leave that for others to comment on. My own contacts that we used for PEur initially were with the Ruhr Universität in Bochum, Germany and Université Aix-Marseille II (Luminy Campus) in Marseille, France. ä