Across the pond

While I was away from Dorset I was taken to task by an ex-student of City University’s Department of Journalism for my critique of this year’s Xcity magazine. The comment disputes the implication of my article that the students were too lazy to do the work necessary to track down where the hundreds of ex-City international students are now. His/her argument was that there were so many gaps in the international lists that it was impossible to track them down.

On re-reading my own post I can see that it might seem I was implying this. That was not my intention.

It has been a real concern for several years now that the gaps in the international records were a blight on the all-important listings. The international records contrast with the records for most of the home students, where the detailed job records of students as far back as 1977 are nearly 100 per cent complete.

What I should have made clear in my post was that omitting ALL the international student records is not a satisfactory solution to this problem. It means that the many international records which were up to date, thanks to the efforts of both staff and students over many years, are not now included and will not be updated. That is a wasting the efforts of past students, and it is not in the interests of the Department which wants to keep in touch with all its ex-students.

A satisfactory solution can only be found by management action. The present situation, which happened more or less accidentally over the years (and it was partly my fault) is that the bulk of the work on maintaining the student records is done by the periodical students. In other words, by thirty-odd students out of a total student body of several hundreds.

In my view the best solution is to re-instate the international records next year. And for the staff to ensure that students from all courses next year are caused to take part in tracking down where ex-students from their own course are now. Those efforts should be concentrated on up-dating the records of those ex-students for whom we already have pretty full records.

That would take care of my most trenchant criticism in my post, which was that this year’s Xcity records, got the student records of two of the most prominent home ex-students; William Lewis,  an ex-periodical student, who was made editor of The Daily Telegraph last year, and James Harding, who was made editor of The Times this January.

Maintaining these records is now a huge task. It needs the help of all the students. And it needs the help of all the staff at the proofing stage, when the directors of all the courses should be required to check the listing for all their ex-students. I can save them a bit of time by telling them that Dermot Murnaghan has moved from the BBC to Sky News, in case they have not noticed.