Emma Evolves

At the core of our mission is the desire to open new frontiers in teaching, learning and research to help build a better world. We approach this by admitting and nurturing brilliant students, Fellows, and researchers in a community that we believe has an impact well beyond the college's walls. Our Governing Body has endorsed a framework to guide us through the next few years, called Emma Evolves. Its aim is simple but ambitious: to ensure that Emmanuel remains in the vanguard of collegiate Cambridge in identifying and tackling the great challenges faced by humanity.

The lessons of the recent past and present experience have starkly highlighted some of the many challenges before us. Whether preventing future pandemics, alleviating climate change, or adjusting to political or economic upheaval, the role of academia and academic communities has never been more important. And while we want to help find solutions to these problems, we must acknowledge that they also have an impact closer to home. Emmanuel is not immune to external turbulence. Sections of our community might be directly affected by conflict or political turmoil, economic pressures have led to a growing gap between fee income and the cost of our incredible education and research, and we all have a duty to try to live in a more sustainable manner.

Emma Evolves is about the world and our role in it, a move towards a resilient future in which academic excellence and our contribution to humanity is sustained and vital. We believe that these initiatives will ensure that Emmanuel and its community remain at the forefront of life and learning in Cambridge, and we will focus on three key areas to help us on this journey.

Our personal approach to the journeys of individuals

We will build a college community from which no talented thinker is excluded, ensuring that new and different academic perspectives underpin academic rigour, and contribute to meeting the interests of the wider public. We will rethink our approach to supporting our students financially and with their wellbeing, while preparing them for the world they will inhabit.

Fostering the generation and impact of new knowledge

We will remove objects that stand in the way of attracting outstanding Fellows and their full participation in college life, ensuring the long–term excellence of our teaching and research. We will ensure that Fellows, students, and staff are all enabled to reach their full potential, with an original approach to training and support for all members of our community. We will establish research forums that reflect global expertise in the college and intentionally increase the interdisciplinary serendipity that leads to new thinking and approaches. We will strengthen research impact by building local partnerships to the benefit of our immediate communities. We will develop our new enterprise programme to meet a growing hunger to understand more clearly the art of problem–finding and achieving impact, changing societal norms for the better.

Reshaping our facilities for the future world

We will transform the infrastructure of our learning and meeting spaces to maximise the potential advances in technology, AI, and opportunities for global collaboration. We will develop the new facilities that are needed to underpin our ambitions for the wellbeing of our community. We will leverage our academic community to develop novel and repeatable solutions to the carbon and energy–related challenges that our eclectic, historic mix of buildings and spaces present.