Sir David Watson Memorial Lecture

Professor Stuart Laing, presenting a memorial lecture, said Sir David held the history of community engagement paramount “firstly because of the requirement to be able to hold present day university leaders to account should they turn away from or disavow the original purposes of their institutions”.

He quoted from one of Sir David’s books: “University leaders can be extraordinarily ignorant (or perhaps just tactically amnesiac) about what their institutions were originally put there to do...”

Stuart Laing, former Deputy Vice-Chancellor and now Professor Emeritus at the university, presented “The precious path of learning, community-university engagement: past, present and future” at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, Brighton, on 19 October.

The evening was hosted by the University of Brighton’s award-winning Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP), which has supported scores of partnership projects over the past 12 years. Each year hundreds of academics, students and community partners work together to produce benefits for the community whilst enriching teaching and research. CUPP now supports other universities in the UK and across the world to develop similar initiatives in their own contexts.

Professor Stuart Laing

Professor Sir David Watson

Sir David created CUPP during his tenure as the university’s Vice-Chancellor and he wrote a number of books and key articles on the emergence and management of ‘engaged’ universities.

Sir David, Vice-Chancellor between 1990 and 2005, left the University of Brighton to become Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education in London before joining the University of Oxford in 2010 as Principal of Green Templeton College and Professor of Higher Education. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Brighton in 2006.

Professor Laing said institutions often regard university-community engagement as something that would be “quite a nice thing to do if only there were any time or resources left over from the core business”.

Professor Laing said: “Sir David showed, time and again, that the history of a great many institutions across many nations and continents, demonstrated that civic and community engagement was, from the moment of their origins, for them, absolutely, core business.”

In memory of Sir David, the University of Brighton is launching an international awards scheme to recognise achievements by community and university partners working together to build a ‘healthier, just, and sustainable community’.

The scheme, the first of its kind, will accept nominations for the work of community-university partnerships from anywhere in the world.

The ‘Professor Sir David Watson Award for Community-University Partnerships’ will acknowledge Sir David’s leadership in community university engagement and social responsibility in higher education. It is supported by an international group of networks and leaders in the field, including the Talloires Network, a global network of community-engaged universities that Sir David helped to build and lead, and Professors Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon, the UNESCO co-chairs for Community Based Research.

For information about making a donation to the award fund, please contact Philanthropy and Alumni Engagement by emailing giving@brighton.ac.uk.