Evelyn Welch has got the love for Bristol

Unlike the arrival of a new chancellor, a new vice-chancellor at the University of Bristol assumes their role with little fanfare.

There is no grand induction ceremony in the Wills Memorial Building great hall, no parade and no music. Instead, professor Evelyn Welch was quietly given a university pass and a computer in a shared office on Tyndall Avenue.

This week, she will be presiding over the first graduation ceremonies held during her new job, where she will join fellow senior academics on the great hall stage as hundreds of graduands become graduates.

If there was music and she had her her own ceremony, the university’s new USA-born VC and president says “it would probably be You’ve Got the Love or something like that”, choosing one of the best known songs released by her daughter, Florence Welch, aka Florence & The Machine.

Welch is almost certainly unique in the small world of VCs to have been backstage on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

Evelyn Welch has become the University of Bristol’s first female vice-chancellor – photo: University of Bristol

Day four of her job in Bristol saw the death of Elizabeth II, with Welch then representing the university at the funeral in Westminster Abbey by virtue of the fact that the Queen was the university’s ‘visitor’ – the ultimate arbiter of internal disputes.

The Queen was born when the university was 17 years old, which Welch says was a sign of the former monarch’s longevity but also how young the university is.

“I’m certainly hoping to build on that comparative sense of youthfulness and the energy that comes with that… We can be both proud of our heritage, critical of our heritage but also we need to remember how young we actually are.”

The unexpected start to her tenure may have put pay to any structured welcome events but Welch says that it also gave her “a really important chance to step back and look at the university’s place both in the city and also nationally”.

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Read more: Evelyn Welch to become first woman to lead University of Bristol

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Welch has more than 25 years’ experience of higher educational leadership in almost every aspect. She was previously provost at King’s College London, before that pro vice-chancellor for research and international at Queen Mary University of London, and before that pro vice-chancellor for teaching and learning at the University of Sussex.

So what attracted her to Bristol?

“There’s something about being an exceptional university in an exceptional city, and what we can do together… Bristol is small enough to be able to see change happen but it’s large enough to have every global problem you can imagine in the world.”

Welch says that one of the attractions of the role was to be at the helm of the university while it creates a new campus next to Temple Meads that she describes as being “interconnected and interwoven into our urban environment”.

She was at King’s when the university acquired five buildings that were previously part of the BBC’s Bush House to create a new business school and pedestrianising the space to create a new public realm area.

“So I have brought that experience into Bristol but the scale is much larger and the opportunity to really be a model for civic engagement is even more exciting.”

Welch adds: “I want to hear from people in Bristol what we can do, not imagine myself what I can do for them. So the most important thing I can do in my first six months here is go out and listen to community groups, listen to civic groups, listen to everything Bristol has to offer – including its music – and really hear from people who live in Bristol what they would like the university to do for them…

“We need to be the university for Bristol as well as being the university of Bristol.

“Temple Quarter is an important part of being down in the heart of what will be an expanding city of Bristol. So that’s another opportunity. But I certainly wouldn’t want to see a situation where Temple Quarter put us in the heart of Bristol and the Clifton hills remain far and isolated away.

“I think there are lots of ways in which we can work together. And I mean that not in what the university can do for the city but what the city and the university can do together.”

An artist’s impression of the new University of Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, due to be built on the site of the former Royal Mail sorting office – image: University of Bristol

Welch says that “the best bit about working in higher education is that every year you meet a group of people who genuinely believe they can change the world”.

She says: “That eradicates all the cynicism that those of us of a certain age could fall into if we just didn’t have that constant refreshing, that sense of idealism, that sense that we really can make a difference if we put all our energies working with each other. That’s fantastic.”

But young idealism comes with its challenges and Welch has arrived at the University of Bristol at a time when student welfare has never been more important.

She has six children of her own including three step-children “although I really regard them as all of my children. And I absolutely know what it feels like to send each one of them away for the first time.”

“Our number one priority is to ensure that our students are safe. We have a framework here at Bristol which partly because of some of the tragedies of the past is quite extraordinary and quite exceptional in terms of a holistic approach to student mental health.

“We do not want to have a fantastic counselling service that only comes in when you are at crisis point. We want to stop you from getting to crisis point which means thinking about our curriculum and thinking about offering activities in which alcohol isn’t at the centre of it, thinking about ways to ensure that you have somebody you feel safe to talk to 24/7.

“I have certainly found with my own family that the more you try to protect them from risk or pretend that those risks don’t exist, actually the less prepared.”

Welch with students on the Downs at the University of Bristol freshers fair – photo: University of Bristol

Welch has already gamely throw herself into the life of the university and the wider city, walking everywhere – including a wet yomp around the docks from the Harbour Inlet to an event on the SS Great Britain after discovering that the cross-harbour ferry stops running at 6.15pm.

“I love Bristol and I think it is just such an amazing city to explore, to discover, to find the things that at first look unprepossessing. It’s full of unexpected things.”

As well as the jobs that come with being VC, Welch continues to publish her own academic research, specialising in the Italian renaissance, as well as supervising a number of PHD students.

“I’m still passionate about what research can do for wider communities, in terms of recognising that really core ideas that we take for granted are relatively recent. And that things that we think are true today may actually be very challenged in five days, 50 days, 50 years, 500 years. So I absolutely see my academic work as integral to my leadership work.”

Welch says that “nobody plans to be a vice-chancellor. No-one, no academic.” But she called it “a huge privilege” to have taken up the role at the University of Bristol, with her style already noticeably more hands-on than her predecessor, Hugh Brady.

“I’m a historian so I have a huge respect for the university’s past but I have also been very involved in the creative industries so I understand how innovation works, and how it’s also important that you take risks and are willing to allow for failure. If everything always works, you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough.”

There is a building near Bristol bus station called the Dorothy Hodgkin Building, with the Nobel Prize-winning chemist was chancellor at the university from 1970 to 1988.

But Welch is under no illusion that any buildings will be named after her just yet. “We’re more likely to have a Florence Welch music venue than an Evelyn Welch building,” she laughs, heading back to her desk, her day continuing with little fanfare but with great purpose.

Main photo: Evelyn Welch

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