Mike Hart's Discursive CV

My early life

I was born on 11th May, 1945, three days after the ending of World War II and lived my early life in Levisham, a small village in North Yorkshire. My mother, sister, grandmother and I moved to Harrogate when I was about three or four and I attended St. Robert's Primary School until the age of eleven. When aged about 9, the family moved to Beckwithshaw, a small village, or rather hamlet, 2½ miles from Harrogate and we lived in the School Flat, normally reserved for the use of the village teacher. This flat only had one bedroom and I subsequently discovered that it was part of a move to make us 'statutorily overcrowded' so that we could qualify for a Council House in shorter than the normal time! I studied for the 11+ examination by the aid of paraffin light, the village not being electrified in the mid 1950's although electricity did arrive half way through our stay there. I enjoyed a 'Swallows and Amazons' like existence tramping over the local fields and moors with 'the Vicarage children' into whose company I was soon absorbed.

Secondary Schooling

My mother wanted to train to be a teacher and so at the age of 11, the family was de facto dispersed as my mother went to Fenham teacher training college in Newcastle, my sister attended the Bar Convent in York and I was despatched to be a boarder at a Salesian direct grant grammar school (Thornleigh College, Bolton) which had a boarding unit for 40 boarders. The journey to Bolton was quite complex involving a train from Starbeck (Harrogate) into Harrogate, thence to Leeds High Holbeck Station where I caught an LMS train to Rochdale and yet another to Bolton. Then I had a bus-ride for a couple of miles and a half-mile walk to school - all at the age of 11! I understand that mine was the first West Riding County Council scholarship ever to be transferred out of the county, owing to the intercession of the Bishop of Leeds, Bishop (later Cardinal) Heenan. At Thornleigh, I received an excellent musical education and was part of the School choir and orchestra (which, at that time, boasted two of its members as members of the National Schools Orchestra). When I was aged 14, my mother had started teaching in Harrogate and I attended the school I would normally have attended from the age of 11 (St. Michael's College, Leeds). At St. Michael's I acquired eight 'O'-levels but after spending two weeks in the sixth form (one in the science sixth, one in the arts sixth) left school for financial reasons.

Working Life

I had started working at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, originally washing dishes as a Saturday job at the age of 16 but gradually worked my way through the stratified structure of the catering industry - washing dishes 2s 6d (12.5p) an hour, washing silver 3s. 0d (15p) an hour, washing glasses for the bar 4s 0d.(20p) an hour and finally becoming a cocktail barman 5s.0d (25p) an hour. I carried on working at the Old Swan for several years, it being a financial life-line to me. I started my first full-time job at Skanda Wallpaper Co. Ltd., Harrogate on 1st January, 1962, at wages of £3 17s. 6d a week (£201.50 a year) but survived a serious illness shortly thereafter (but my employer decided to dispense with my services, nonetheless). I secured a job in the scientific civil service at the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (part of the Department for Scientific and Industrial Research) in Boston Spa, Yorkshire, as a scientific assistant. Here I worked for two years firstly working in the Acquisitions Section (securing periodical literature by purchase or exchange from the every country in the world) and then in the quaintly named Machine Recording section (nowadays, we would call this an ITCS section). We used punched cards on ancient IBM machines (designed in the late 1940's) to generate library records, the machines being 'programmed' by means of a plug board (a spaghetti mass of wires designed to control the output of the card-operated printer). This was good fun and from this I acquired an early taste for programming. At the same time I acquired a GCE 'A'-level in English Literature after 3 weeks of study (grade D) and entered the Civil Service Open Competition to attempt to gain entry to the Foreign Office. In these competitions, every candidate was listed in order of performance from top to bottom - I came 77th out of 6,085 candidates as a result of which I could enter a new civil service post in the Central Office of Information, London, in September 1964.

My heart sank when I learnt on my first day that I was to be allocated to the Reference Library - but this was we would nowadays call an Information Centre and provided information services to the rest of Whitehall. It was a very stimulating year in which many events were happening such as the 700th anniversary of Simon de Montfort's Parliament in 1265 and the death of Winston Churchill which aroused world-wide media interest. I earned £600 a year by this stage (approximately £50 a month) but I was sending £10 a month home to support my mother and was desperately hard up. Lunch consisted of ½lb broken biscuits and one or two small South African apples which cost me about 9d or 10p (about 4p). I was living in a London Hostals Association hostal (provided for young civil servants) and eventually became the secretary of the Sports and Social Organisation for the whole of the group, writing a monthly magazine and organising quizzes, football matches and the like. Knowing that I needed to get to university somehow, I decided to study Logic (a short syllabus!) and Economics (because I was so short of money) using the Wolsey Hall College correspondence notes. These cost me £20-00, I believe but at the end of the year I had acquired a Grade A in Economics and a Grade B in Logic, as a result of which I went to Manchester University in October, 1965, to read social sciences.

University Life

At Manchester University, I had been awarded a full grant for an independent student (£113 a term)  which gave me more purchasing power than I had as a full-time civil servant working in Central London. I met Meg who was to become my wife and life-long partner - we organised pyjama parties and the like until we outgrew them. At the end of the first year, it was evident that I was not a natural economist (3rd) or economic historian (3rd as well) but I did acquire a 1st in Government and a 1st in Sociology. I decided to read Sociology, which I considered to be the more intellectually exciting option. Meg and I had married in September, 1967 and our son, Martin was born in 1968, the year we both graduated (both with an Upper Second). From Manchester, I went 'down the road' to Salford University and read a course in the Sociology of Science, graduating in 1969.

Professional Life

My first professional position was with Elizabeth Gaskell College of Education where I worked for two years from 1969-1971 but always felt that I really wanted to work in the newly developing polytechnics. I secured a position in the School of Business and Management at Leicester Polytechnic as a Lecturer Grade II but was appointed a Senior Lecturer after 3 years and a Principal Lecturer after a further two years. In 1973, I suffered a bizarre accident at the Polytechnic when a 'hung-over' student's boyfriend ran me over, together with two of my students. As the car hit me first, both of my legs were severely broken (and technically speaking, I remain 10% disabled). We secured £2,000 in compensation after a five year legal battle, the driver of the car having 'done a runner' to Florida. £1,400 was repaid to the Polytechnic (as coming round from the anaesthetic after the operation, I signed a form to compensate the Polytechnic for any recovery of salary) leaving us with a net £600!

Professionally, I was the Course Leader for the BA(Hons) in Social Sciences which I took through two validations before handing over to a colleague (who subsequently died) after eight years. From an interest in Research Methods, I came to teach first research methods, and then statistics and finally BASIC. From this I taught myself Fortran, 6502 assembly code (for CBM machines), 8086 assembly code (for IBM PCs) and finally, Pascal - writing MicroStats (a scaled down MINITAB) and TurboStats (a scaled down SPSS) in Turbo Pascal. In the 1970's I had been an Open University tutor for several courses and a team-leader for OU Summer Schools on various university campuses (York, Nottingham, Cardiff, Warwick). I have been fortunate to have had two spells teaching abroad. The first was in 1990 when I taught IT to Public Administration students in the Complutense University of Madrid (the 'Cambridge' of Spain) and in 1995, teaching similar courses on the De Montfort University MBA programme in Jakarta, Indonesia.

I had been invited by a part-time Health Studies student to act as a consultant to assist Leicester General Hospital implement the requirements of the Patient's Charter with respect to out-patient clinics. From this experience, an early paper appeared in October 1992 and a further seven papers were written over the next two years. In 1994, De Montfort University (the successor to Leicester Polytechnic) allowed candidates to submit a series of published papers for a PhD and I made application to be allowed to submit by this route in January, 1995. By March,1997, the numbers of papers had risen to fifteen and the supporting documentation to 52,000 words and I was awarded a PhD in May, 1997. The PhD was gained entirely by 'part-time' study being squeezed between normal teaching commitments.

In late 1995, Meg, my wife, had to retire from her post as Placement Manager at De Montfort University. Upon acquiring a PhD in 1997 and now being a 'one-income' family, we could explore other opportunities and I applied successfully for the post of Professor of Business and Informatics at King Alfred's, Winchester.

Life at the University of Winchester (formerly King Alfred's College, Winchester)

I took up post on 1st October, 1997 and the first priority was to get a full-time Business Studies Degree. This was written and went through all of its stages by the following March and recruited some two dozen students the following September. In 1998-99, the BA Business Administration (BAMBA) degree and the Combined Hons. Degree in Business were revalidated but not without some traumas 'en route'. In 1999, a degree in Public Services Management followed with an accompanying HND in the same year. The following year, 2000-2001, saw the results of an interesting initiative between King Alfred's and Hampshire County Council with a Certificate in Information Services Management being written to cater for the needs of the 'para-information' professionals identified within the region - this is believed to be the first course of its type in the country. In 2001, the Quality Assessment exercise resulted in a score of 22 which, at the time, was the highest QAA score the college had ever received. I retired from my full-time position in October, 2002, in order to concentrate upon writing and research rather than teaching. In the period 2002-2006, some 25 papers have been written (or co-authored with colleagues) usually for presentation at international conferences. Together with a colleague, David Rush, I have been participating in the QUBE [Quality in Business Education] research project in which Winchester is one of a consortium of six universities. We have also been awarded a Higher Education Academy award of 30k to undertake research into 'Strategies for generating 'transformative quality' at sub-institutional level' to be undertaken from 2006-2007. An MSc in Business Management was written and successfully validated in the Spring of 2007.

In the course of my teaching career, I have 'processed' the following: