To celebrate the beginning of a new semester at Sussex Sasha Roseneil, Vice Chancellor, sat down with The Badger for an exclusive insight into life as Vice Chancellor and all things Sussex!
What do you think is special about students at Sussex?
It’s always risky to generalise, as students at Sussex are incredibly diverse. You come to this beautiful corner of England from all around the world – from over 120 countries, with a wide range of backgrounds, beliefs and identities. But you have a lot in common. To paraphrase the words of Professor Asa Briggs, our second Vice-Chancellor and one of the founders of the University, Sussex students have a ‘spirit and a style all of their own’. I know all this because you told us this last year, when we were developing the new university strategy – Sussex 2025 – which we will launch in May.
Watch this space – there will be more about the new strategy next term.
What steps did you take to become Vice Chancellor?
I definitely didn’t set out with a plan to become a Vice-Chancellor… For most of my time as an academic, it was pretty unimaginable that someone like me, who did the sort of unconventional (interdisciplinary, feminist, queer and psychoanalytic) research that I have done, and who had been out as a lesbian since I was 17, could ever become a Vice-Chancellor. Times have changed though – and perhaps it’s not really surprising that it was Sussex that hired me to be its Vice-Chancellor.
I have worked in universities since I was a PhD student in the late 1980s, and I started my first full time academic job back in 1991 – nearly 35 years ago. The idea that I might be a Vice-Chancellor first occurred to me during the pandemic, when I was working at UCL where I was part of the small leadership group that was steering the university through the many complicated and difficult decisions we had to make as we totally transformed how the university operated. I realised that, despite the pressure and the intensity of the work – or perhaps because of it – I was actually really enjoying the responsibility and the teamwork involved, and that I was coming up with some of the ideas that really made a difference in our decision making.
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My first ‘proper job’ was as Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds, where I worked for 16 years, and where I and a group of feminist colleagues set up the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. I left Leeds to move back to London, because my mother became disabled and I wanted and needed to be much closer to her, and I got a job at Birkbeck, University of London, where I was Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, and head of the Department of Psychosocial Studies, which I was involved in establishing. After I left Birkbeck, I took up my first executive leadership role, which was as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and from there I went to UCL, and from UCL I came to Sussex as Vice-Chancellor about two and a half years ago.
What would you like to say to students reading, moving into the new semester?
I’d say – it’s a new year, a new semester, full of new possibilities and opportunities. Every day is a new day, and even if last year, or last semester, or yesterday didn’t go quite as you would have wished, you can shape today. You have agency, and you are surrounded by people at Sussex – both staff and other students – who care, and who can and will help and support you, if you reach out to them. Try something new this week… Seize the moment, and enjoy the process.