Author: Evelyn Welch

Dear colleagues and students,

I am writing to update you on our commitment as a university to combatting division and hate in all its forms. This follows a number of events in Bristol which have caused considerable concern, leaving members of our University community feeling frightened, vulnerable and unsafe.

The University has recently signed a joint statement with Bristol City Council, other universities, colleges and faith leaders reaffirming our determination to stamp out abusive behaviour and intimidation on our streets. The key message is that we are stronger when we are together, everyone belongs and everyone is welcome. The values of compassion, unity and respect are ones we can all share and aspire to, regardless of background or circumstance.

We are proud of the diversity of our staff and students and the role they play in making Bristol a vibrant, diverse city with a strong love of community and an independent spirit. This unique identity is one of our city’s greatest strengths.

Everyone is, and should feel, welcome at the University of Bristol. We are a University of Sanctuary, proudly international in our outlook, and we have a strong sense of responsibility as a global institution to secure free speech and freedom from harassment and abuse. Free speech must be lawful; there is no protection within the law for abusive speech that incites violence, harassment or discrimination.

It’s been distressing to hear that a number of our Asian, Black and Jewish students have experienced racist or antisemitic abuse and physical attacks on Bristol’s streets.

We have also seen a totally unacceptable protest on campus, which included attempts to restrict free speech by silencing a guest speaker through violence. While we might not agree with different viewpoints or approaches, everyone needs to feel safe at the University of Bristol.

While these experiences may not have been instigated by our staff or students, nor do they reflect the culture on campus, they are shocking and unacceptable. As a university, we are committed to challenging such behaviour. Our Freedom of Speech Code of Practice sets out the University’s position on free speech and academic freedom, as well as institutional neutrality, while our approach to respectful disagreements outlines what we expect from members of our University community to make sure that conversations can continue in a mutually respectful environment.

We have the following reporting tools and resources in place so that we can all work together to make everyone feel welcome:

For students

• Support and advice for students on staying safe and reporting unacceptable behaviour is available on our website.

For staff

• If you have any urgent concerns about racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic or other forms of harassment or unacceptable behaviour by a member of the public, please report it to the Police or, if the incident happened on campus, to Security Services. Our Acceptable Behaviour Policy outlines how to raise complaints about students or colleagues. We can assure you we will take it extremely seriously.
• If you want to help, we encourage you to consider taking our active bystander training. It is enormously helpful to know how to respond and support someone who has experienced abuse or harassment.
• A range of wellbeing support is available to colleagues. Please see our Wellbeing SharePoint site.

Bristol is, and always will be, a place that celebrates the diversity of perspectives, experiences and views. We will not allow this to be ruined by a small number of people who want to divide us. Thank you for your help in ensuring we remain a compassionate and caring community for all.

Best wishes,

Evelyn

Professor Evelyn Welch
Vice-Chancellor and President
University of Bristol

Dear colleagues,

Welcome to 2025 and the start of a new year. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break and have returned to work feeling well rested and energised for the year ahead. I spent much of the holiday with a new-born granddaughter and her exhausted but delighted parents, so I know that for some of you, the holidays may have been very busy indeed!

This week is Preparation Week, a brand-new moment in the academic year where both staff and students have dedicated time to get on top of things before teaching begins. For those students who are on campus, a whole host of events and activities are taking place, and all services are open as usual. For our academic staff, it’s a time to complete marking and prepare for Teaching Block 2. I once again want to thank those staff who worked tirelessly in the lead up to the Christmas break, and continue to do so, in response to SAY changes.

Planning is now well underway for our January Graduations as around 3,000 students don their caps and step into their gowns to celebrate the significant milestone in their lives. It’s always a pleasure to see students come together with their families, friends and members of staff to mark their achievements. A big thank you to all the staff who make these events happen.

The health, wellbeing and success of our students is our utmost priority, and I’m delighted that our students can now benefit from our improved student wellbeing services, with the introduction of a self-booking form, an increase in specialist mental health provision, a new dedicated Sexual Violence team and improved internal processes. These changes mark a major step to making it quicker and easier for students to access the support they need, when they need it.

During our October All-Staff Assembly, we told you about our current financial situation, which is stable but not growing, and our confidence in the University of Bristol’s future. We also called on you to ‘Act now’ to ensure that we remain financially resilient going forward. I’d like us all to start the year with this fresh in our minds. We, like many other universities in the UK and worldwide, will need to be proactive in our response to the challenges – thinking creatively, adjusting our behaviours and contributing to finding solutions to help to safeguard our own future and that of generations to come.

Our next All-Staff Assembly will take place on Tuesday 11 February, when my team and I will provide more updates about the external financial environment and our own position. There will be other opportunities to meet with us and ask questions throughout the year at our one-to-one surgery sessions. Please do engage with these opportunities so we can hear directly from you, what’s going well and where we can improve.

I’m excited to see what this year brings and look forward to working with you all as we continue our mission to make a positive impact locally, nationally, and globally.

Thank you,

Evelyn

Dear colleagues,

As we approach the spring break, I wanted to thank you all for your extraordinary efforts this term. It’s been an incredibly busy time and we’ve achieved a great deal together.

I’ve recorded a short video message, in which I celebrate our many recent successes, including the award of nine Centres for Doctoral Training, progress on the Reparative Futures programme, our new logo, and the outstanding response from you all to the Our Voices Matter, the 2024 Staff Experience Survey, with over 4,000 responses.

Elsewhere, work continues on the University Structures 2030 programme; on our transition from six faculties to three, ensuring our Professional Services are the best they can be under the Professional Services Transformation Programme, and preparing colleagues for the new structure of the academic year.

Under the Structure of the Academic Year project (SAY), we are looking in detail at key areas including assessment, international students and the start of the 2024/25 academic year. I am very grateful to all colleagues who are carefully planning how we transition from the current structure to the new one which will mean compressed time in August for many teams.

As we look ahead to our final term, I’m looking forward to this year’s Bristol Teaching Awards and celebrating our shortlisted nominees and their incredible efforts. We also look forward to welcoming our new Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement, Professor Michele Acuto, in early June. Meanwhile, the search for our next Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation is well underway.

Finally, the next ‘In Conversation’ event will take place on Wednesday 8 May at Langford Campus, hosted by Professor Jeremy Tavaré, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean for the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. I hope many of you can join us; more details to follow soon. And as always, if there is anything you would like to discuss with me personally, do please book a slot at my next surgery on Monday 22 April.

On a more sombre note, I am acutely aware that this is a very hard time for many, and I would like to express the importance of looking after one another. The continuing Israel-Gaza conflict is being felt across the world, and it’s important more than ever that we stand together as a community and uphold our shared values of mutual respect, care, compassion and inclusivity.

For now, the spring holiday is a perfect opportunity to take some time out, rest and reflect on the past few months. I particularly love this time of year, with our campus in bloom and the promise of warmer and lighter days in the air.

For colleagues observing the holy month of Ramadan, I wish you Ramadan Mubarak! And my best wishes for colleagues celebrating Easter this weekend and Passover next month.

Thank you again for your hard work, and a huge thank you to our brilliant colleagues who will be working over the closure days – the University could not function without you, and I hope you manage to take your own break very soon.

Best wishes

Evelyn

Professor Evelyn Welch

Vice-Chancellor and President

The year’s International Women’s Day theme is #inspireinclusion. I find this exciting and challenging because it is a reminder that, while we have done so much to increase women’s representation, it is not evenly distributed. I am acutely aware that women of colour, women with disabilities and trans women have had fewer opportunities to demonstrate their leadership skills than white women like myself.  

As a leader, I’m very conscious of my responsibility to inspire others as well as to acknowledge those who have inspired me. I want to ensure we nurture a culture where everyone feels they belong and can fulfil their potential. International Women’s Day provides an important opportunity for us all to consider these questions and reflect on the journey we have undertaken towards fostering a more inclusive and equal world.  

This day has always been an excellent way to recognise the significant achievements of women, but we must also use it to highlight continued inequities and barriers that prevent women from feeling seen, heard, valued, and empowered to fully participate. 

Let’s start with the positives.  

I’m proud to lead a university that was the first in England to admit women on the same basis as men. Our fifth Chancellor, Dorothy Hodgkin, was the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize. More recently, our former Chancellor, Baroness Hale, made history by becoming the first female President of the Supreme Court.   

I’m pleased the University continues to make progress in reducing our gender pay gap. We’ve seen a reduction in both median and mean gender pay gap metrics. The median gender pay gap of 10.6% in men’s favour is below national average and has reduced by 5.6% since our first report in 2017, while the mean gender pay gap in men’s favour of 14.4% is below sector average. This has reduced by 6.7% in the same period.   

Elsewhere, 34% of our professors are now women, compared to just 13% in 2013. The success rate for female applications in our latest round of promotions was 85% (compared to 72% for male applicants) and University Executive Board is currently evenly split, male and female.   

Our excellent staff networks, including the Women’s Staff Network, serve as catalysts for change, providing a platform to share experiences, amplify voices, raise awareness, provide mentoring and advocate for the rights and recognition of women. 

We offer a range of fantastic programmes to support women’s progression, such as the Female Leadership Initiative and the Bristol Women’s Mentoring scheme, and the University’s broader progress to advance gender equality was recognised last year with a highly commended institutional Athena Swan Silver award. This comes alongside the increasing number of faculties and schools achieving their own Athena Swan Awards. 

When we look at our efforts to enhance the diversity of our enterprise and entrepreneurship activities, I’m pleased that women made up 49% of our SETsquared Bristol companies’ founders or C-Suite execs last year – far higher than the UK average of 15%. As a research-intensive university, we can all take pride in the fact that our research is actively informing and shaping the outside world, providing an evidence base for public policy and practice. For example, the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme, commonly known as ‘Clare’s law’, gives people the right to find out about an individual’s prior domestic violence offences and was a direct result of work done by Professor Marianne Hester and her team at the Centre for Gender and Violence Research. Likewise, we can celebrate academics like Professor Roberta Guerrina, whose work examines the politics of gender in the EU, and Dr Sumita Mukherjee’s exploration of the role of Indian women in the global suffrage movement.

But we still have a way to go…

While there are many positives to point to, and more to come, we also need to be clear about how much more work there is still to do, particularly to be truly inspired and inspiring in terms of our approach to inclusion. As we see greater gender parity, we need to ensure that we are similarly supportive of colleagues from global majority backgrounds. This is something I and my senior executive colleagues are determined to address here at Bristol.  

We are, for example, bringing onboard HR-Rewired, who specialise in supporting racial equity and are partnering with 100 Black Women Professors NOW – a pioneering systemic change programme aiming to increase the number of Black women in the academic pipeline. This is only the start of a very determined programme to ensure the success of all our staff of colour, male and female, at the University of Bristol.   

Every day belongs to women 

Finally, by coming together on International Women’s Day, we reaffirm our collective commitment to dismantling barriers to equality and inclusion, and creating an environment where every individual can thrive. But I am clear that every day, not just one day of the year, belongs to women around the world.  

Dear colleagues

Welcome back to the start of a new year. I hope that you all had an enjoyable and restful break and are feeling ready for the term ahead. I would particularly like to thank colleagues who worked during the holiday to support students, keep key facilities open, and our buildings and grounds safe. I myself had a wonderful holiday season, cooking for friends and family, getting out into the countryside, and braving what seemed like non-stop rain.

I am excited to be back at work, knowing that we have much to look forward to this year, as well as some challenges ahead. Let me start by congratulating Professor Sir John Iredale who was knighted in the New Year Honours and Professor Ronald Hutton who was awarded a CBE. Read our media release for the full story, which also includes details of honours bestowed on University alumni and a former member of staff. I am exceedingly proud of the achievements of our current community and our alumni and former colleagues.

2024 will see us progress the delivery of our Temple Quarter campus and the Isambard-AI supercomputer. We will continue to develop the new academic and professional service structures to ensure we remain agile and effective. We will also take our Silver Teaching Excellence Framework award and build toward Gold. A list of further key updates can be found below.

2024 is also very likely to see a General as well as local elections. We will do our utmost to make sure that all political parties understand how important universities are for creating opportunity, both locally as well as nationally and internationally. With inflation still in place, and no sign of any change to domestic fees, we will want to navigate the coming year with some caution to ensure we remain financially resilient, whichever party comes to power in the future.

Staff voice

When I started this role eighteen months ago, I promised that the listening never stops. I and the senior team know how important it is to remain connected to your day-to-day experiences of working at the University of Bristol. This term, we’ll be launching our Staff Experience Survey, which will run for a month from the end of February. Please take time to complete it. We will take the results seriously and let you know what we will do differently because of what we have heard. We are keen to find out what you think about our strategy, how you feel about our organisation and our approach to blended working. We are also going to ensure that your views feed into our continued work to be a truly inclusive institution.

Sharing your views with us — through surveys, online spaces, such as the Thanks and Recognition Wall, and in-person events, like the US2030 Staff Voice workshops — is critical if we are to continue to be a great place to work. I hope you’ll take up all engagement opportunities, including my VC surgeries and the In Conversation events. You can also find out more about other ways to get involved on the Staff Engagement SharePoint site. If you have other ideas about the on-going development of the University, then I’d be delighted to hear more. Please email vc-team@bristol.ac.uk.

• My next VC surgeries are running on 18 January, from 10 am — please book a slot here. These are almost full up, but you can also book available slots on 14 February, from 9 am.
• Our next In Conversation is taking place in the afternoon of 19 February with Professor Phil Taylor, Pro Vice-Chancellor Research Enterprise. Please hold the date for what will be an exciting conversation about research, enterprise and innovation.

Key updates

• Thank you to everyone who attended a Staff Voice workshop before Christmas. The outcomes of these will be shared soon. In the meantime, we have updated our FAQs in response to your questions about the University Structures 2030 programme.
• Please note the changes to the structure of the academic year, particularly that the start of Welcome Week 2024 will be 9 September 2024. This Wednesday (10 January) you will receive an email with further updates that you need to know about the programme, so please keep an eye on your in-boxes.
• The Reparative Futures programme is now in its mobilisation phase. Colleagues are working to update the University logo and we will provide further information later this term.
• We know that recent UK Government announcements aimed at reducing legal migration to the UK will have a significant impact on universities, our international colleagues and students, and wider family members. I want to assure you that we will continue to collaborate with sector bodies and more widely, to lobby the UK Government on the impact of the changes. The Staff Immigration Team is available to assist staff.
• 2023 was a defining year for the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus (TQEC). From the opening of the new Bristol Dental School to work on the TQ Research Hub, all is captured in this summary review, including updates on the exciting projects lined up for 2024.
• A reminder that support is available for staff and students affected by the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine.

Thanks to you all for the difference that you make to our University. I look forward to meeting many of you during 2024.

With best wishes

Evelyn

Professor Evelyn Welch
Vice-Chancellor and President
University of Bristol

Dear colleagues

As we near the end of 2023, I want to say a huge thank you and congratulations to you all for your amazing work this year. It has been a year of many triumphs, despite challenging times for the sector and the University. My team and I are very proud of how you have responded and of everything we have achieved together.

My Executive Group and I wish you all a very restful and enjoyable seasonal break and look forward to what is ahead in 2024.

With warm wishes and season’s greetings from us all.

Evelyn

Professor Evelyn Welch
Vice-Chancellor and President
University of Bristol

This is an open letter from our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Evelyn Welch, addressing the outcomes of the renaming consultation and following actions.

Over the past three years, we have been examining the University of Bristol’s history, and the potential links of our founders and their wealth to the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people.

Following an initial report from a group of historians and other colleagues, the ‘Legacies of Slavery’ report, this summer we concluded a consultation with staff, students, alumni and our wider community about how to represent our history including whether it was appropriate to have major buildings named after these individuals. Nearly 4,000 people responded to our survey and hundreds more attended in-person sessions. Along with members of our Board of Trustees and our Senior team, I personally attended several powerful and impactful events that were led by local Bristol communities of African and Caribbean descent.

Throughout, whether in writing or during these meetings, I heard many distressing stories from those who had experienced racism and racist behaviours while engaging with, working at, or studying at the University of Bristol. What began as a consultation on our history and building renaming became a powerful channel for people to expose the challenges they have been facing. It also gave people the opportunity to voice their frustrations with the pace of our progress and raise concerns about our commitment to racial equity.

My message today, therefore, begins with an apology. I am deeply sorry for these damaging and hurtful experiences which continue to the present day, and I apologise to everyone impacted by those injustices. We aspire to be an inclusive institution and we must do better.

I also want to share what future-facing actions and commitments we are going to take.

To begin, I want to explain in more detail the relationship between the University and the three families and figures that are most closely involved in our history; Wills, Fry and Colston.

Edward Colston was a seventeenth-century slave trader. Famously, his statue was toppled into the docks during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The University received no funding from Colston, who died nearly 200 years before we were founded, but his personal emblem – the dolphin – still forms part of our crest and our modern logo.

The Wills and Fry families provided substantial funding in the early 20th century which enabled the University to be founded. The families did not own or traffic in enslaved people but the products that their predecessors, during the eighteenth and up to the second part of the nineteenth century dealt in, such as tobacco, sugar and cocoa were undoubtedly connected to enslaved labour. But the past is rarely straight-forward. Indeed, in the case of the Fry family, many members were staunch abolitionists.

The complexity of this history is reflected in the mixed and polarised feedback we received throughout the consultation process (we have made the consultation and engagement report available so you can see the results for yourself). But what is unequivocal, is that all respondents felt that it was crucial to acknowledge and explain our past, and to invest in co-creating solutions to address the educational, economic and health inequalities that we face today.

We have listened. I am, therefore, announcing today that we will be committing to a ten-year, £10 million reparative futures investment programme. The names of key buildings, including those of Wills and Fry will be retained and explained in the proper context. The programme will seek to present the complexities of our past in new ways. We will invest in initiatives and projects that will make a tangible contribution to addressing the racial injustice and inequality that our communities, in Bristol and beyond, face every day.

Importantly, it will look to secure the future of some of the significant initiatives that are ongoing and have already received support over the last few years. It will also ensure we take a more holistic and consistent approach to how we invest and govern our commitments to racial equity and justice as a university. We will appoint accountability partners and experts from our ethnically diverse communities to guide our decision-making and hold us to account going forward. We will create a community fund for proposals from local groups to work with University of Bristol colleagues on initiatives that collaboratively tackle educational, health, and economic inequalities.

We will also be replacing the Colston dolphin insignia from our University of Bristol logo which was designed in 2003. As I explained, Colston was not a donor to the University and had no relationship with the institution or its predecessors. We had already removed Colston’s name from one of our student residences and I feel it is therefore appropriate to remove this symbol, too. The sun symbol of the Wills family and the horse emblem of the Fry family will remain reflecting the wider decision around retaining building names.

I know that some of these decisions will not please everybody – but I believe we must tell our history in an honest, open and transparent way, while at the same time putting our full weight behind substantive action to address the broader issues of systemic racism and inequality here in Bristol and beyond.

The process that has led to these decisions has taken a long time. For some, it has been an imperfect process and may have felt at times that we were dragging our feet or avoiding difficult decisions. I want to reassure you that this was not the case and I share the frustration that it has taken a long time to reach this point. I am confident that we have reached the right balance between proactively addressing our history and being transparent and honest about our past.

But just because the consultation is closed does not mean the debate comes to an end. Indeed, the one place where we should be able to disagree and debate these issues is here, at one of the great global universities. We are an evidence-based institution and fully committed to freedom of speech. This means that continued discussion is welcome as we think carefully about how we describe the full picture of our past, how we represent it, and what we can learn from it. History matters to all of us, particularly when it impacts on current assumptions and practices.

We will of course keep you all updated on the programmes, the initiatives we will be undertaking and how to get involved in our Reparative Futures work. My thanks to the programme team who have led us through this conversation and thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to engage with us and share their views on this complex issue. For more information, see what action we are taking  or if you’d like to comment further, please contact reparative-futures@bristol.ac.uk.

Read the University’s Annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Report highlighting work to deliver equitable outcomes for our students and staff.