A quarter-century of academia: lectureship, professorship, scholarship, leadership

Today is my 25th anniversary of becoming an academic and discovering my vocation. On 19th June 1995 I joined UMIST (now part of the University of Manchester) as a young lecturer in Chemical Engineering, immediately teaching on short courses related to cereal process engineering and discovering the buzz I got, and still get, from teaching; then over time appreciating ever more the power of chemical engineering as “the broadest of the engineering disciplines” and a fantastic education.

As it happens I was not a chemical engineer by first degree, having come from a food engineering background in New Zealand, which had led to a PhD on The Aeration of Bread Dough during Mixing in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Professor Colin Webb was setting up the new Satake Centre for Grain Process Engineering in UMIST and looking for people with both a cereals and a chemical engineering background, for which my PhD and industrial experience just fitted the bill. (I remember Colin’s own 25-year anniversary occurring on 1st October 2004, the very day UMIST disappeared into the new University of Manchester; somehow the University overlooked commemorating this service milestone!)  Establishing the Satake Centre and becoming knowledgeable about cereals (the origin of civilisation and still the engine of the global food supply and of the emerging biorefinery sector) was rewarding both intellectually and professionally, while our unique perspectives on cereal processing from a chemical engineering context allowed us to make some unique contributions to research in both food and non-food uses of cereals.

Turning myself into a “proper” chemical engineer* was facilitated by teaching Heat Transfer (also important in food processing in diverse ways), which led in time to Process Design and Integration (such an elegant subject) and, along with Fluid Flow, to Transport Phenomena more generally (also elegant and powerful), with my years as Examinations Officer also giving me a fuller perspective on chemical engineering as an academic discipline and education. Precisely because I was not a chemical engineer by first degree, I perhaps gave more thought to the nature of chemical engineering than might someone who had been educated within the discipline, refining my thinking through extensive reading, writing and conversations with colleagues. 

(*Note that chemical engineering is both an academic discipline and a profession with, one hopes, respectful interdependence between the two. Originating around the end of the 19th century as little more than a blend of chemistry and mechanical engineering, the first unifying paradigm of unit operations was formulated by professionals in the chemical industry, most notably George E Davis in the UK and Arthur D Little in the USA, giving direction and distinctiveness to academic programmes in this new discipline.  Over time academics have contributed similarly powerful conceptions of transport phenomena, molecular engineering and process systems engineering, giving increasing coherence and identity to the discipline and profession.)

After 19 years in Manchester, the move to the University of Huddersfield in 2014 to lead the introduction of chemical engineering programmes gave an opportunity to translate my long contemplation of chemical engineering into a vision for the new programmes. Receiving the 2017 IChemE Hutchison Medal for a paper describing the approach we have taken was an encouraging endorsement of this vision. Becoming a Fellow of the IChemE (before the move to Huddersfield), being awarded its Hanson, Morton and Davidson Medals, and serving on the Global Awards judging panel, as a journal editor and as an accreditation assessor, makes me feel (despite much still to learn) that my transition to Professor of Chemical Engineering is justified.

Equally important has been the transition towards becoming a “true” academic. Academia, at its best, contributes uniquely to society in terms of stretching our collective understanding and empowerment; the world is a better place for having set aside some of its population to discover, apply, curate, integrate and convey knowledge to its fullest possible extent, best captured in the concept of “Scholarship” (a concept richer than research or teaching or even the two together). I am privileged to be an academic, but I know I am not even now the scholar I would wish to be. However, of my respectable number of publications, those I value most are not the most highly cited ones, but rather the papers and book chapters that forced me to synthesise and integrate knowledge and ideas – many of these have had very few citations, but I learned such a lot from writing them. A book chapter on flour milling alerted me to its decisive influences down the centuries of history (including Socrates’ observation that “No man qualifies as a statesman who is ignorant of the problems of wheat”); another on the history of aerated foods consolidated and extended my knowledge about bubbles in bread (a thing “both ordinary and extraordinary” of which “no food before or after has exerted such mastery over men”); a paper describing a book-reading activity I introduced in Manchester educated me about the power of reading (and the even greater power of writing); articles espousing a vision for integrated biorefineries and their synergies with food processing clarified my thoughts on this research avenue and the directions I have pursued; a chapter on assessment arose from my passion for “the single most important thing we do in universities” and for the defining characteristic of an academic – academic judgement – which I have tried to develop and nurture in myself and others; and editorials on scholarship and transcendence engaged me with thinkers on these elements of academia and humanity.

These are things I did – research I undertook, papers and articles I wrote, conferences I organised, courses I designed and taught. They cover a breadth that suits my big-picture inclinations (although regrettably this has been at the expense of focus), as well as aligning with the broad nature of chemical engineering. This breadth helps with the perspective needed in my current role and influences the type of chemical engineer we aim to produce in Huddersfield, able to appreciate systems and work with interconnections across a broad scope of understanding.  But more importantly, they are also the ways through which I have become the academic I now am.

“I am” and “I do” – the two shortest sentences in the English language! My definition of scholarship is based on the interaction between who I am and what I do – how who I am dictates what I am able to do, and how what I do nurtures and develops who I am, in a virtuous cycle:

“Scholarship: the interaction between a scholar and their scholarly outputs that nurtures their intellect and hence their capacity to produce work of ever greater intellectual merit and value.”

As I tell my students, the word “intellectual” literally means “able to read between the lines”, as does the word “intelligent”. An intelligent person is someone able to see beyond the obvious, to have insight and perception that extend beyond what is perceived to its significance and its wider connections with the world. As William Blake says in Proverbs of Hell “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees”. A scholar contemplates this significance and connectedness to the limits of his or her ability, and in so doing, expands their own limits and empowers both scholarly and societal communities.

Incidentally, my favourite book of all time (which could not be further from chemical engineering!) is Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, which taught me what intellectual means, and which displays levels of scholarship that I can only gaze on with awe.

Along with scholarship (and friendship and citizenship and interrelationships), leadership is another -ship I have contemplated long before and since the move to Huddersfield, having been blessed in my time with excellent leadership and having seen and suffered the effects of appalling leadership and management. Achieving Chartered Manager status last year through the University’s initiative with the Chartered Management Institute, and being a finalist this year for the CMI Chartered Manager of the Year, are outworkings of my commitment to try to lead well in my current role, modest as it is – to aim to follow even in this small context Myra and Shelley’s call (from The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham) to those:

who sense the pressing need in today’s world for inspired leadership;

who rise to its high calling and are willing to carry its weight;

who are determined to deepen and expand their capacities and effectiveness.

It intrigues me that the Latin root of “education” is “educere – to lead out”, from “dux – leader”. Leadership and education are at heart the same thing – drawing out the best from people. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown found herself putting leadership and education together in the same chapter, to her own surprise. She defines a leader as “anyone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes”, and says “I realised that teachers and school administrators are leaders [and] executives, managers and supervisors are teachers [and] how the struggles of our education system and the challenges we face in our workplaces mirror each other.”  

But as Brown and many others warn, even lower level leadership is discomforting and stretching and humbling. And therein lies its additional power – for refining character in the fires of hard experience, personal limits and messy human interactions. In trying to lead and educate oneself and then others, and sometimes succeeding, and often failing or falling short, and confronting relentless inadequacies and agonising limitations, and always learning, the resulting scars and triumphs populate one’s own CV of “daring greatly”.

Leadership exacts a price. But on the other hand, you have to spend your life on something. The rewards of education and of leadership are to see others flourish. My ambition in my scholarship and leadership is to leave a legacy of chemical engineering in Huddersfield that enables our academics and graduates to flourish in their intellectual, professional and personal lives, and for that flourishing of ideas and people to multiply outwards to wider good influence.

Lecturer, professor, scholar, leader – I am nowhere near the best at any of these things. But I am uniquely me, and am trying to become the best me I can be, within my own small corner of the world; then to spend myself on those ideas and people I uniquely can influence and, I hope, bless, that they too might be a blessing.

I suspect I have only ten or so more years of formal academic scholarship and leadership in which to push contemplations of connectedness to my limits and to clarify visions, enable pathways and nurture talent. In my remaining time as an academic, I hope I can become even more the person I wish to be, and help others become who they too wish to be. In the meantime, this piece is dedicated to current, former and future colleagues and students, and even more to my family, my greatest blessing and spur to growth since I started that lectureship all those years ago.

Professor Grant Campbell

19th June 2020