Ten years have gone by in the blink of an eye. It has been such a privilege to have been the University’s seventh Chancellor.
My relationship with the University goes back almost a century. My grandfather, Squadron Leader JD Italia, studied Commerce here in the 1920s, then my mother Yasmin graduated in English and History of Art in 1958. My being Chancellor of her beloved University has made my 88-year-old mother happier than anything else!
We have achieved so much together over the last decade. While there are too many successes to list, I love one photo which captures three successes in one moment.
It was taken on our Dubai campus – which ten years ago didn’t even exist – with two students, one holding the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games Queen’s Baton. I proposed the idea for a Dubai campus soon after I became Chancellor. Today our state-of-the-art campus has almost 2,000 brilliant students from nearly 100 countries.
I was so proud to be one of the Batonbearers for the Games; the baton visited the Dubai campus before opening the ceremonies back in Birmingham. The University played a bigger part in the games than any other university in history. The athletes’ village was at our campus, which also hosted the hockey and squash tournaments. 2.4 billion viewers around the world watched what our university and our city can achieve.
The baton itself sums up our amazing research at Birmingham. Atmospheric sensors within the baton captured data about the air quality in every country it passed through, feeding into research that will help make our air less polluted. Over the last ten years, our wide-ranging research like this has been ranked 10th best in the Russell Group, and researchers connected to Birmingham have been awarded three Nobel prizes and two Queen’s Anniversary Prizes.
Of course, the highlight has been the interaction with our wonderful students and their families, as well as our faculty and staff at the Degree Ceremonies. Over the past ten years, our student numbers have risen from 34,000 to 40,000, and we have graduated 173,000 alumni. I spoke at the Guild Awards every year and have always been inspired by our talented students and the way in which they go the extra mile, putting back into the community.
Birmingham alumni have led in times of crisis, turned personal tragedies into life-changing charity work, broken gender barriers in supreme courts, won Commonwealth and Olympic medals, Tony Awards and so much more.
As I have said to our graduates at every graduation ceremony, you are a member of the Birmingham family forever. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve our truly wonderful institution; I will be a lifelong ambassador of the University and its alumni around the world. As I pass the metaphorical baton (they wouldn’t let me keep the Commonwealth Games one!) to my successor, Dr Sandie Okoro, I wish her every success.
Read more from Lord Bilimoria online.