As part of our Learning and Teaching Strategy, The University of Sheffield affirms a list of attributes and qualities to be found in the Sheffield Graduate. These goals for the best educational experience we could offer to our students included the characteristics of being 'an active citizen who respects diversity' and an educated person who is 'culturally agile and able to work in multinational settings'.
It is the University's conviction that being part of an international community is itself an education, and that when students make the most of opportunities to learn from those who are different to themselves, they gain insights they would not experience any other way. For us, diversity is an asset. We cite the number of countries on campus - over 130 at the last count - as a source of pride.
Yet it is easy to forget that our pleasure in our international community is not universal. As last week's local elections and this weekend's tabloids show, there is a sense that a tide is turning in British public opinion. In articles about schools and higher education, there are concerns about local resources and the impact of diversity on the host community. Our experience of the great benefits brought by colleagues and students from around the world is absent from this discourse, and the foreigner is all too easily seen as alien.
These thoughts played on my mind when I joined my son last week on a trip to the cinema to watch the new Star Trek movie. I enjoyed it but it also awakened in me a sense of nostalgia for an ideal which feels under threat.
To my generation, Star Trek's famous crew represented something new. Its fantastic plots and stories of undiscovered planets held the promise of a future in which national boundaries had been eroded and become long lost cultural absurdities. Watching it now, it is easy to underestimate how radical it was then. The images of interracial connection were stunningly important in 1968, and the makers of the TV series knew they were making a popular fable with political implications. I also realise that it represents a dream that seems to be moving further away from us as many blame other countries and cultures for our difficulties.
As I left the cinema, memories of my own encounters with internationalism came flooding back.
The first time I visited the House of Commons, I was in London for an admissions interview at Queen Mary College. The debate in the House was about membership of the European Union and I was moved by the thought that we were making a step towards an inter-national community and global governance.
I remember giving a speech at a European research collaboration meeting which surprised and seemed to delight the scientists there. I talked about the role of Science in building a new international community of academics whose home was not only the nation state, but Europe and indeed the world.
And what physicist could forget the burst of pride and delight last year when the Organisation Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) discovered the Higgs Boson.
The young optimist who hoped for an academia without borders is still there within me, still hoping, but feeling more threatened. I am perturbed by the apparent growth of the view that we in the United Kingdom are essentially different and need to be kept that way.
Such feelings cannot be dispelled by exhortation. It is no good responding to people's genuine concerns with accusations of bigotry alone. Politicians of all parties are afraid of losing voters, yet we need to be very sure about the visions we do have and whether they really are places of safety or simply of hiding. The role of a university is to acknowledge that people have genuine concerns and difficulties - and to work on solutions to these - but also to be a place of diversity, openness, inclusion and welcome.
As a University, we are in many ways an experimental country, one with citizens of every nation on a mission to make a difference in our world for all our home communities, wherever they may be. Ours is in this sense a moral voyage with an emphasis on innovation and putting knowledge to service. And if it isn't, we will fall far short of what we can be. And we will fail to answer questions from students and society about what a university is for at a time of change and limited resource.
Last weekend, as the country's media debated immigration, our own students put on an International Cultural Evening in Sheffield City Hall - a feast of music and dance, laughter and talent, with proceeds raised enriching needy local charities. As the tabloids focused on fears of a Romanian crime wave in inner-city London, our own Romanian Society took the award for the performance of the night for its joyful mixture of dance, irony, energy and fun. The event was hosted by our International Student Officer Fadi Dakkak, who is leading the campaign to ensure that all students - from the UK or overseas - feel the benefits of being part of a vibrant international community.
This cultural richness was increasingly visible as the week went on. At the Celebration of Enterprise Dinner which filled Firth Hall, student finalists inspired judges and guests with their superb business start-ups and concepts. Of those who were shortlisted, a large number were international students who were bringing to life concepts involving social enterprise and job creation.
And at the launch of our Insigneo Institute - a partnership between research in Medicine and Engineering and the clinical skills within the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust - we saw Professor Marco Viceconti lead a team of researchers whose names display their many nationalities, united around an ambitious goal to deliver healthcare in new, personal and life-changing ways. And of course this is just one of numerous ways in which colleagues across the University are working on international collaborations and to bring international perspectives into the educational experience.
Our University shows what an international community can and should be. A place of diversity in which talents are brought together to do good in our world. As our Union President Abdi Aziz-Suleiman says,
"We are all international... There isn't a story of a student in the 21st century that doesn't have an international element to it, and the richer stories are those with all the more international elements to them."
Some of the leaders of the future are with us at Sheffield now, and our task is to make the very most of them being amongst us. Let's learn from and teach one another about our hope for a future society typified by talent, respect and international collaboration.
<b>Professor Sir Keith Burnett
Vice-Chancellor</b>