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“The utilitarian view of universities takes away from their role of creativity”

— Photo: V. V. Krishnan

Alison Richard, the 344th Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge, says: “There is so much opportunity here and there is a great fit between Cambridge and India.”

Cambridge’s first full-time woman Vice-Chancellor had some misgivings about accepting what must surely be one of the most prestigious jobs in academia. She told me: “When Cambridge asked me to throw my hat into the ring, I was extremely reluctant to do so. I had already been working as an academic administrator for eight and a half years at Yale and I am a committed anthropologist with a great passion for teaching and research.” But four and a half years into her term as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge she has what can only be called infectious enthusiasm for her job. Certainly her enthusiasm infected me.

“I miss my research,” she tells me, “but I have the extraordinary interesting opportunity of sitting in the midst of one of the world’s great universities surrounded by outstanding people of enormous talent thinking about all manner of fascinating things.” But each year she does drop the role of Vice-Chancellor and returns to Madagascar for two weeks where she has done some of her most exciting research into the behaviour of primates. She is more than willing to share this enthusiasm for them with me, explaining that more than two-thirds of mammals live solitary lives, which raises two questions — what are the advantages of sociality and how do societies configure themselves. Those questions have led Alison Richard to the study of our nearest relations, the primates, and there is a wide variety of them in Madagascar. Her husband is an archaeologist but neither of their daughters has chosen to be an academic.

For all her enthusiasm, Alison Richard did not have a burning ambition to be an academic and even more strangely doesn’t seem certain whether she has chosen the right career. The daughter of a businessman who married at the late age of sixty, she was the first member of her family to go to university. She tells me: “I’d love to say I had a concrete ambition but it’s not true. I am still deciding what I want to do when I grow up, I think. One thing just led to another. ” But she goes on to say: “At every step I have been totally consumed and interested by what I have been doing.’

As Vice-Chancellor, she is Cambridge’s principal academic and administrative officer but Alison Richard prefers to be called an academic leader rather than an administrator. She is leading Cambridge towards the celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of its foundation next year, having launched a campaign to raise one billion pounds by then. One of her ambitions is to ensure that the university increases its endowment sufficiently to insure that all students who have the ability to come to Cambridge can do so regardless of their family background.

What about the criticism often made that Cambridge and Oxford do take family background into account by taking a disproportionate number of students from private fee-paying schools? The Vice-Chancellor maintains that is a misunderstanding of the problem. She blames the inadequacy of many of the state schools for not producing students who can come up to the Cambridge entrance level. At the same time, she feels there are very good state school students who fear they might not be able to cope with Cambridge’s academic standards. She believes the University needs to “get those students to raise their own self-confidence and aspirations.”

Alison Richard wants Cambridge’s student body to be diverse and cosmopolitan, and this is one reason for what is only her second visit to India, and her first as Vice-Chancellor. “We live in a world which is increasingly interconnected,” she explains. “Most of our students are going to live and work across cultures. So we must take increasingly seriously the educational responsibility for producing citizens who can live and work like that. That means having a cosmopolitan and diverse student body so we are interested in attracting some of the most talented students from around the world, including of course India where there is so much talent.”

I tell the Vice-Chancellor that only last week I met students from IITs all over India at a festival in Mumbai and everyone I talked to hoped to study as postgraduates in America. The most common reason they gave was that it was cheaper. But Alison Richard thinks this is often a misapprehension. She points out that the Cambridge Trust has assisted a thousand Indian students over the last twenty-five years and one hundred and thirty are currently studying with bursaries. But she admits that Cambridge doesn’t provide as much financial assistance as the major American Universities and one of the aims of the fund-raising campaign is to match America. Nevertheless she feels the comparison between American universities and Cambridge is often exaggerated and that more needs to be done to get the word out about the scholarships which are available. She says: “I keep coming on circumstances where American universities have done a much better job of communicating a positive and upbeat message. We haven’t communicated as well as we should and the message has not been as positive and upbeat as it should be.”

It has always seemed to me that there is a danger that foreign universities attempting to attract Indian students will appear patronising, or even condescending — giving the impression that they offer a superior education to anything available in India. The Vice-Chancellor vigorously denies that. “I have come to India to strengthen Cambridge’s partnerships with Indian universities,” she tells me firmly and goes on to point out: “more and more major challenges are not amenable to solutions or study by individual academics or even academics in a single community working in isolation. They require international collaboration. Energy sustainability, religious and cultural conflicts, work on these and other subjects has to cross cultural and national boundaries. So I am coming to India to celebrate the partnerships we have and to continue to build them. There is so much opportunity here and I think there is a great fit between Cambridge and India.”

The Vice-Chancellor has also come here to announce a major new link with India. In order to celebrate the centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru’s arrival at Trinity College Cambridge to study natural sciences, the university is launching the “Jawaharlal Nehru Professorship of Indian Business and Enterprise.” This chair has been endowed by the Government of India and there is also to be a Cambridge Centre for Indian Business, established as a result of a contribution by the BP group.

So how does Alison Richard see the future of Cambridge and indeed of universities around the world? Well, first of all, she believes “the role of universities has never been more important than it is today.” But she is worried about what she calls the utilitarian view of universities — the view that they have to be useful for the creation of economic wealth. “My own deep, deep, belief is that the creation of cultural wealth and cultural insights is every bit as important as contributions to economic wealth that we make. That utilitarian view of universities takes away from their deep role of creativity in society.”

When I suggest that many students nowadays seem to have a utilitarian view of universities, opting for subjects that will bring them the fattest pay packets rather than the richest cultural reward, the Vice-Chancellor is less worried. She points out that in 1974 half the students at Cambridge were studying arts, humanities, or social sciences and the percentage is the same today. And that she insists is not because Cambridge imposes a quota system to insure the balance of subjects or lowers its standards to admit students in those subjects. “We get extraordinarily strong applicants,” she says.

But Alison Richard does believe there could be something of a utilitarian problem with academic staff. “I am not suggesting that anyone should be encouraged to come into academia to become rich. They won’t anyhow. But we should be able to make a decent living and if we don’t ensure that, students will vote with their feet.” She is particularly concerned about the remuneration of young academics who are at that stage in life when they are buying a house and bringing up a family. It’s the post-graduates and the lecturers that Britain is losing to America but at the senior level Cambridge at least is gaining as many academics from America as it is losing.

When I left Cambridge at the end of the fifties, colleges made little effort to encourage us to remain in touch with them or to ask us to offer any financial support. Alison Richards thinks that was because I went to Cambridge in the days of the welfare state when it was believed that everything, including higher education, would be provided by the state. She tells me: “It was a loss to the University not to have taken advantage of the extraordinary community of students and I would like to think a loss to all of you not to have been more engaged with your university.”

I assure the Vice-Chancellor all that has changed now and my college certainly keeps in touch with me. She believes that relations with alumni are far more important for the university than just getting them to contribute to the fund-raising campaign, which she says is “just one thing alumni can do for us and probably not the most important. You are our best advocates, you connect us to the real world.”

I wonder whether to ask the almost inevitable question — whether being the first woman Vice-Chancellor has caused any difficulties for her — but I decide against it. For someone so assured and at home in her job, that is clearly an irrelevance, and I don’t want to end the interview with a crushing reply, so I ask instead whether she has any regrets about coming back to the University where she took her first degree after so many years in the lusher pastures of American academia. I get a gentle rebuke: “I wouldn’t have come back from America if I didn’t have a passionate and profound belief in the greatness of this university and its capacity to be able to continue to play a vital and important role in the world. Nothing in the last four and a half years since I’ve been back has changed my mind.”

The Vice-Chancellor hopes her visit will strengthen the ties with India and build a partnership that will enlarge the role both Cambridge and its Indian partners play in the world.

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