Department of Land Economy

Professor David Howarth Head of the Department of Land Economy

The last two years have been exceptionally challenging for the Department of Land Economy. The pandemic disrupted everything – obviously teaching but also those aspects of research that depend on being able to travel. But we coped very well, learning how to use online teaching methods very quickly, successfully adapting everything from lectures to exams, and working out how to keep research going in an online world, to the extent that many of us managed to attend and to give talks to many more international conferences than we would have done otherwise. It is great to be able to travel again, but from a climate change point of view it is also great to know that much can be achieved without participating in the burning of so much aviation fuel.

Looking forward, the e ects of the pandemic will be with us for a long time, including the physical e ects of the disease itself. Long covid will be a big problem for all organisations, but I don’t think universities have yet taken on board the consequences for them of large numbers of academic sta su ering from brain fog and tiredness. More locally in Cambridge, our problems were compounded by some ill-judged decisions by the University early in the crisis, essentially to freeze hiring, that led to unacceptable increases in workloads and threatened morale.

The pandemic was not the only challenge. Brexit is also a very big problem. Access to EU research funding, which the UK government declared would continue, has become a political bargaining chip in the negotiations between the UK and the EU about the Northern Ireland Protocol. Even if those negotiations succeed, some forms of EU funding will be lost. More immediately,

Brexit has been a contributing factor in the exceptionally high level of turnover we have experienced among academic sta

And now we have inflation, the main e ect of which will be further to erode academic salaries and add to the gloom caused by the massively reduced benefits of our pensions. As a former lecturer in the Department (now in the Law Faculty) wrote in a letter to The Times, ‘The bargain o ered to those entering the academic profession a modest (public sector) salary compensated by a comfortable (public sector) retirement has been upheld only in the former respect.’

But despite all these di culties, it has been a year of massive success for the Department, most of all the very great achievement of coming first in our category, alongside our colleagues in the Department of Architecture, in the REF, the Research Excellence Framework, the once-in-seven-years exercise through which the government attempts to assess the quality of research coming out of every university department in the country. More than two thirds of our research was judged to be ‘world leading’, the best in our category, and a big increase on the last exercise, and 98% of it was assessed as of international quality or better. The achievement is one shared across all parts of the Department and is even more gratifying given that the rules and the categorisation of research the REF uses make it di cult for us to show o the full range of our work. Only four other departments in Cambridge came first in their category.

On the teaching side, if success is measured by demand for our courses, it has also been a very successful year.

Our numbers continue to grow. We have more than eleven applicants for every place in our MPhil courses and our undergraduate entry, far from falling from what everyone thought would be a peak during the pandemic, is larger than ever – 72 new students at the time of writing, although new students switching from other subjects seem to appear every couple of days. And the number of undergraduate applicants for next year (2023-24) is already up by 25% to a new record. Beyond that, in 2024, we are starting a new part-time MSt in Climate, Environment and Urban Policy, to add to our existing (and fully restored) MSt in Real Estate. We hope to see even more interest in the Department from prospective students after the launch of our new website in the New Year, supported by a new Outreach and Communications O cer who we hope will bring the wonders of the Department to a wider and more diverse audience. We are grateful to the Cambridge Land Economy Advisory Board (CLEAB) for donations that made possible both the new website and the new o cer.

The expansion of numbers will bring challenges in terms of sta -student ratios, but the problem will be partly o set by another success, raising enough money from the Hatton Trust to fund a new chair in Climate Law, the first occupant of which will appear in 2023. The new MSt will come with its own new sta – both academic and administrative – and should at least not add to the burden. The new professor will be joined by replacement chairs in Real Estate Finance

(following the retirement of Colin Lizieri) and Land Economy (following the translation of Phil Allmendinger to the Deputy Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Bath).

Partly as a result of our success in attracting more students, the Department faces a shortage of teaching space. A more significant cause, however, is that the University sold o the lecture block where most of our teaching took place, the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, to Pembroke College, which promptly demolished it. During the pandemic, when much lecturing was on line, this made little or no di erence, but since the full return of in-person teaching, roughly from January 2022, we have found ourselves being sent by the University to a variety of rooms all over the city centre, many of them not originally intended as lecture theatres and so di cult to see or hear in, and others positioned in interesting and possibly distracting places, such as behind the Eagle pub.

I see no immediate prospect of improvement in the teaching space problem soon, but we do at least hope to see some progress on the separate but related issue of our dilapidated, flooded and partially unheated o ces in Silver Street. (The Head of Department’s particular contribution to reducing carbon emissions is an o ce radiator that doesn’t work and apparently has never worked…) The University has agreed to a feasibility study of options for relocating us, including the option of a new (and with luck warm and dry) building. Let’s hope something has happened on that front before the next REF in 2028.