EACH picture of a cathedral painted by Monet, or by anyone else, tells us something about the cathedral, something about the artist, something about the particular vantage point and something about the light at that time. Monet's studies of the cathedral at Rouen capture the view at different times of the day. He explained that he was trying not to paint the cathedral so much as to capture the atmosphere, the enveloppe, through which we see the cathedral. In my inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence at Queen's University Belfast, I developed this imagery to say that we understand the cathedral (whether of law or of Northern Ireland) all the more if we have many studies from different perspectives, not just from the one angle and the one person of Monet's Rouen series. This applies also to our understanding of other phenomena, including higher education. Painting from the outside, however, can never capture the point of a cathedral or of a community such as Liverpool Hope University College. It helps to go inside, to explore the cathedral of Hope also from a variety of internal perspectives. Even then, the cathedral will remain a mystery, despite the most meticulous examination, if its purposes are not understood. A full appreciation benefits from a mixed exhibition containing the impressions of both outsiders and insiders.

In my time at Hope, we have been under such constant and intense scrutiny from the serried ranks of quangos that much is known about our performance, as judged from the viewpoints of externals. In my first year, 1995–96, our overall quality was being audited by the Higher Education Quality Council, and the Research Assessment Exercise was upon us. In the 1996–97 academic year, the University of Liverpool ran its re-accreditation exercise. The late 1990s saw subject reviews across the arts and sciences matched by Ofsted inspections of our teacher training partnerships. Then it became possible to apply for taught degree-awarding powers in the 1999–2000 academic year, following which we were assessed in 2000–01, while further subject reviews, Ofsted inspections and another Research Assessment Exercise were conducted, before receiving the powers in 2002; whereupon the cycle begins again with a University of Liverpool re-re-accreditation process in my penultimate month, June 2003.