Organisational Structures for a Functional Campus Community

This thesis investigates and proposes a new organisational structure for making a step change improvement in the university’s campus community. The study is relevant to all students and to staff, but it is particularly concerned with international students and their social experience whilst on campus in the UK.

The University of Huddersfield data was collected from three years of the International Student Barometer and Student Barometer, where we clearly identified that there was an issue to address. I also used interviews with staff of other universities in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield to gather comparative data used and my own personal experiences of organising and taking part in many campus events whilst working as an Event Coordinator and in the Students’ Union at the University of Huddersfield.

Universities tend to be very thoughtful about the academic experience on campus, but often the social experience gets overlooked. This is a pity, as a strong campus community and a good social experience can contribute so much to supporting the academic experience. My findings show that poor cooperation and communication in the University is currently the biggest problem and is caused by the geographical and structural separation of departments, their students and activities, resulting in a dysfunctional social management structure and not cohesive campus community. The university actively supports individuals and small groups quite well, but in some ways this bottom-up approach is an obstacle to creating a strong, inclusive and more cohesive campus community. In my conclusions I point the way towards many changes in communications, structure, planning of social programmes and cooperation at the University that could improve and build a much stronger campus community from the top-down. More importantly, in order that responsibility for the campus social experience is shared by all, and so that we have a single cohesive programme, the formation of a new Active Campus Team is recommended. This team would be responsible for all social events and projects organised on the campus, whilst supporting many active sub-groups, and this would bring staff and students together into a single cohesive, functioning campus community.