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Domus Seminar April 2016Tim Gardam, Principal

I am afraid what follows is not going to be a seminar in any true sense of the word. When Dr Harrisasked me if I would like to give the Domus Seminar in my final weeks here, I said I would do my bestbut the best I could do would be to ruminate aloud about my time in Oxford and St Anne’s. So thiswill be more public therapy than anything and certainly not the taut argument and presentation ofdata that a seminar should demonstrate. Perhaps like the mural of The Ship on the dining hall it willappear as a daub close up, but take shape from a distance.

This brings me to my title; "The Beaver, The Ship and the Boojum: Reflections from the outside-in onOxford and what St Anne's adds to it.”

What, you may be wondering, does this mean? Well I thought I knew when I concocted it, but havingtried to write it, I am not now so sure. When I told David I might struggle to find an argumentsuitable to the occasion, he suggested, “Perhaps you could try to work something up around A Shipor something else that suggests St Anne’s”. That gave me my starting point. For there are of coursetwo emblems that define this College: The Ship and the Beaver.

The Ship is because of Ship Street where St Anne’s as the Society of Home Students had its firstcommon room,

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As you see with no pool table, opposite what is now Russell and Bromley; it was an apposite symbol,one of my predecessors said, because the early college floated around different parts of Oxford withno land of its own.

The Ship crowns the weather vane on the Hall,

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and is the subject of that alarming mural by Stefan Knapp outside. The mural might unkindly be saidto represent any Oxford college’s strategic intent in that, though most people can just about makeout this mural as a ship, few can agree in what direction it is meant to be sailing.As for Beavers, they were the original emblem of the Society of Home Students;

they are carved into our iconography over the doors of Hartland House,

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and are the essential accoutrement of any JCR Freshers Week welcome.

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We have about 500 beavers today in the Development Office; I always carry a few around with mefor a well-timed gift of a beaver has produced a handsome donation on more than one occasion.However, the original choice of the Beaver reflects the rather high minded precepts of the originalSociety of Home Students which asserted that its students, not being part of a conventional College,were distinguished both by their sense of common purpose and by their independence:

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The Fellows even produced a Beaver calendar. As one put it, “The Beaver lives in communities; (buthe - (note the he) - returns to sleep in his own little lodge, remaining at heart a Home Student”. Andconcluded: “there are certain beavers whose natural instinct it is to serve others”. St Anne’s evenestablished the Beaver Club, a mission in a poor district of South London with youth clubs and adrop-in shelter for old people and tramps. It was last active in 1940 recruiting undergraduates towork in shelters in The Blitz.

Now the only other place that I can think of where a beaver and a ship are brought together in oneplace in Oxford besides St Anne’s is in the mind of a Professor of Mathematics – Charles Dodgson orLewis Carroll, who is of course also associated with St Anne’s.

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Annie Rogers, memorialised in our Founders Grace, was one of the doughty campaigners for degreesfor women at the beginning of the last century. As a child, she was one of the young girls Carrollbefriended.

A photograph that hangs in 27 Banbury was taken by Lewis Carroll of Annie Rogers as Queen Eleanorin a play when she was around 8.

There are no Beavers in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. In the latter it is a boat not a shipin which the owl and the pussycat went to sea, with no beaver on board.

However, a Beaver and a Ship are central to The Hunting of the Snark, a poem with a cast ofcharacters and plot that members of Governing Body might find have some resemblance to life inOxford. For a start there is a lot of description and discussion, but not a lot of decision.

The poem begins as the crew lands from the ship, in search of the Snark, after a long voyage whichhas been engulfed in confusion. This is a dangerous project due to the uncertainty over the type ofSnark being pursued and the possibility of it being a Boojum.

“For then,You will softly and suddenly vanish awayAnd never be met with again”.

The Ship is captained by a Bellman. The Bellman, it seems to me, bears a passing resemblance to aCollege Principal; at least in his having the strategic acumen necessary to gain the confidence of aGoverning Body.

“He had brought a large map representing the seaWithout the least vestige of landAnd the crew were much pleased when they found it to beA map they could all understand.”

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The Bellman’s map exhibits Oxford’s innate conviction in its own exceptionalism; never accepting wemight do things the way others do:

“What’s the good of Mercators’ North Poles and EquatorsTropics, zones and Meridian line?”

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply“They are merely conventional signs.”

And, in operational terms the Ship has a further resemblance to Oxford, as anyone here who haswhiled away the time in Wellington Square committees will understand, summed up in a line towhich Lewis Carroll drew especial attention in his Preface:

“Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes”

That line is the most succinct description of the decision making process between the Colleges andthe Divisions that I know.

However - and this is the important bit - the Ship has one special advantage:

because on board, as you may recall:

“There was also a beaver that paced on the deckOr would sit making lace in the bowAnd had often (the Bellman said), saved them from wreckThough none of the sailors knew how.”

The Bellman is a great defender of the beaver but also is deeply reliant upon him. For, without theBeaver, the Ship is heading for the rocks. That, from my close reading of this seminal text, is theessential lesson for St Anne’s.

And as for the significance of Boojums, they are instrumental to the final destiny of all Principals asyou will see.

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So, now that we have disposed of the title I can begin.

Preparing for this seminar, I unearthed my presentation to GB during my election in 2004. I ended itquoting from my favourite poet since undergraduate days, Louis MacNeice. His view of the world as“incorrigibly plural” is mine too. I was seeking a description of what I thought should be the virtuesof a College. I quoted from his preface to Modern Poetry, in 1937, where he wrote about the role ofa poet in society. I argued it could apply to anyone engaged in intellectual and creative endeavour inany discipline.

“The poet” he wrote, “is a maker, not a retail trader. The writer today should be not so much themouthpiece of a community, (for then he will only tell it what it knows already) as its conscience, itscritical faculty, its generous instinct.”

If became Principal of St. Anne’s, I said, a college that embodied: “a conscience, a critical faculty anda generous instinct “ is the one I would hope to lead.

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Now, there is another quote where MacNeice wrote about Oxford to a friend after a visit in 1961:'I marvelled once again at what Oxford does to her captors or infiltrators. Whether they come fromthe redbrick enclaves or from Cambridge, they seem to pick up overnight the soft-spoken malice, theostentatiously throw-away display of inside information, the heavy-lidded thin-lipped irony, theaddiction to verbal arabesques, the exquisite verdigris of cynicism, that have traditionallycharacterised this city of sneering spires.'

I decided not to use that one. I suspected it might not be, as the headhunters say, “supportive of myapplication”. However, though I have on occasion found echoes of this attitude in my time atOxford, it has never been, or hardly ever, been at St Anne’s where our “critical faculty” is matchedby our “generous instinct”, whether in the relationships between students or in those betweensenior academics from utterly different disciplines. It is what holds us together.

Let me start with what it feels like to be a Principal of St Anne’s, and how this job has connected withmy very different, previous life. For if there is an underlying theme to this talk, it is to argue that thefuture direction of St Anne’s will best be plotted with a more deliberate curiosity as to how theworld around us and outside Oxford is changing and how the two should interrelate.

I have had, I suppose, three careers - as journalist, as television programme executive, and then hereas what is erroneously described as an administrator. A Principal in reality defies job description. Nothaving ever been an academic, I have always felt at one remove from Oxford even when findingmyself at the heart of it. As a Head of House, one is also at a remove from the most intense aspect ofan academic’s career, their scholarship and research, (which is why I have always valued this DomusSeminar and regard the Subject Family events as one of the best things we have introduced here andI hope they continue). The last phase of my career, at the Nuffield Foundation, will take me muchcloser to academic research, insofar as I will be funding it – it is amazing how many friends I haverecently discovered I have always had amongst social scientists. It is a job I could not have thought ofdoing without having been here.

I often ask myself what thread, if any, connects these rather different parts of my life. I think thereis one. In my time in television, I tried to unearth the most arresting ideas emerging from theAcademy and connect them to audiences, not necessary intellectually trained in any formal sense,but hungry for fresh ideas. At St Anne’s, I have tried to nurture an environment that supports theburgeoning of those ideas, because that’s what colleges should do – it all starts with the researchdone by our Fellows; the Fellows pass on that knowledge through our students; the students take itout to work in very different contexts across society. I’ve always believed the essential value of theadvancement of knowledge lies in ensuring it gathers up people in its wake.

I did give a Domus Seminar five years ago. It was called: What I do on Tuesdays. It related to myother life as a regulator at Ofcom. I considered then the future of broadcasting in a digital world.Rereading it the other day, my pessimism about future of public service broadcasting was notoverdone, my view of its enduring value to a cohesive society has not changed. I was right about theincreasing marginalisation of civic space in our media landscape; for all the plethora of informationnow available, we see the shrinking of a public arena where people as a matter of course take noticeof views different from their own; digital social networks lack that inherent aspect of civic inclusivity.However, I underestimated the aggression of this Government towards the case for recognisingpublic value beyond market mechanisms, as we now see in the forced shrinking of the BBC – its roleincreasingly defined in terms not of public value but of market impact - and the likely privatisation ofChannel 4. This has been one of the pernicious, unnoticed changes from the coalition to aConservative government.

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I only revisit this terrain because I think universities should take note of these trends because theyhave a resonance for them. There are clear links between the arguments facing the Academy andthose confronting public service broadcasting; both professions face sometimes hostile challenges totheir shared cultural assumptions on grounds of mind set and efficiency. Both can let themselvesdown by the closed language of their professions that can sound self-serving to the outsider. Theslow but sure erosion of the support for the values of public service broadcasting should alarm thosewho work in universities, especially the Humanities, though governments can take a reductive viewof the value of scientific research too. Instrumentalist arguments about direct measurable economicoutcomes from investment in higher education are likely only to increase. Academic judgement,whether on the merits of research or on decisions about student admissions, is already beingmuddled up with government’s wider public policy imperatives. I think we are too often reluctant toweigh these arguments among ourselves, or we find it easier simply to rail against them. We need tolearn from the mistakes of the BBC’s defensiveness. We should make the effort to recognise wheresome of these arguments do have force but construct a more persuasive case for the public value ofthe totality of the work of a University and justify the importance of our independence to oursuccess.

This might however require us to think afresh about how we deliver that public value and, inparticular, whether a reshaped student curriculum would make that case the better. I will come tothis later.

Anyway, since Christmas I have no longer done Ofcom on Tuesdays; I find that my mind has alsomoved on from matters of broadcasting policy which have occupied it for past 25 years; I am ratherbored of the sound of my own arguments. However this in turn means I am left with no subject onwhich to give a seminar in which I am in any way expert. From September I won’t be doing St Anne’seither on the other 6 days of the week. So, this is my one chance to give a personal perspective andnot just to be, as I have been these past 12 years, the voice of what St Anne’s represents.

I have already effectively confessed that, after three careers over forty years, I don’t now know verymuch about anything. I say this not with any faux Socratic modesty but because it was only when Icame to Oxford that I truly appreciated this. Academics sink ever deeper into their subjects- thereare, I guess, dangers in that too –but their slow, unhurried concentration and accrued depth ofunderstanding contrasts quite strikingly with my personal history of intellectual restlessness.Fortunately, you don’t need to know very much about anything in any great depth to be a Principal.Put unkindly, in some ways, the past 12 years have been one of the less intellectually concentratedtimes of my life. Being a Principal has demanded nothing as complex as wrestling with the structureand rhythm of a 50 minute documentary. The Principal’s job has required learning different skillswhich, looking back, I was pretty hopeless at in my previous career. St Anne’s has taught me to dothings differently.

As Principal, I have had to adapt what I learnt from a very different career to approach this one withcritical detachment as well as with fierce sense of responsibility towards the College which youentrusted me to lead. I think it is important that a Head of House should not be over sentimentalabout a job that involves, in endless speeches, constant expressions of sentiment. I am glad that asan undergraduate I went to Cambridge not Oxford. If I had been a Head of House at Cambridge, Iwould have too often been haunted by a vision of my 20 year old self coming round the corner. InOxford, I have had the freedom of disinterestedness when judging the college’s best interests - butout of that, I have no doubt at all that this job is the thing that I have done in my career that hasmattered to me the most.

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It matters a lot that a Principal is elected not appointed. This has never been in my eyes anemployer/employee relationship; it has always felt to me like the bestowing of a trust, one that onehas a duty to repay. The role of the Principal is in counterpoint to what the rest of college does.Running a College is like catching vividly coloured petals swirling and floating around you and seeingif you can mix them into some sort of a potpourri; or, to put it less fragrantly, to distil our collectiveintelligence into a common sense of togetherness that gives us common values and direction.As Principal, you must hold a steady course through the returning gyres of the academic year,imbuing into its repetitious seasons that infectious sense of renewal that the Freshers feel eachOctober. It is a job defined by the serendipity of constant random email traffic; there is nothing onwhich to focus for more than an hour at a time. The Principal sits at the interstices of everything andthe centre of nothing.

But, maybe that is exactly why colleges work; for academics and students alike, they are not so mucha place to be as a place to come back to - from the laboratory, the lecture hall and library, sabbaticalleave, vacation, the exam schools. They are not places over whose operations academics andstudents want to ponder too much, they are the place from which you can face outwards towardseverything else you may be doing. This is a good thing. Unhealthy colleges in Oxford, and there aresome, are those that have Fellows whose lives and visions have shrunk to the confines of the Quadand High Table. Mercifully we are free of such people though they still exist elsewhere.As a Principal you need to know how to tell stories. I think that is why, in the years since I was

elected, so many of my old colleagues in journalism have followed me, and Frances Cairncross atExeter, to be heads of colleges across Oxford and Cambridge – St Peters, LMH, Hertford in Oxford;Selwyn, Lucy Cavendish, Peterhouse in Cambridge. In telling stories, one reflects back to one’sacademic colleagues a collective vision that they, for all their narrow focus inherent in being at thetop of their field, can nonetheless recognise as something that binds them together. One has torefine this story to engage the alumnae too. Governing Body members normally run a mile fromalumnae, though they are always tremendously nice to individual past students of theirs, howeverhopeless, but for the Principal the alumnae and the Fellows must be conjoined if the College is toturn its sense of what it is into a case for supporting it in what it can become. This is why I have verymuch enjoyed fundraising – constructing the story, then making the pitch, then delivering the result– that is what I used to do in broadcasting.

Rereading my address to Governing Body in 2004, I find much of it now does not really stand up toscrutiny – but two phrases still ring true. I said:

The Principal must keep alert, think harder, and look further ahead than others in the College havetime to do. He or she must ensure that the Governing Body has the information and necessaryperspective to hammer out a collective view of where St Anne’s wants to position itself as theuniversity changes.

I went on:

Obviously, I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. It is not the Principal’s role to dictateanswers anyway. It is his or her role to prevent the College from ducking them. What I can do is leadthe debate and narrow the points of decision. Then test the arguments against the evidence and seta timetable for the College to make up its mind and so keep control of its own future.

I still think that’s the job.

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That is quite enough about being a Principal;

I am going to spend the rest of this talk considering Oxford in the context of the disruptive currentsthat swirl around us and about which I don’t believe we think hard enough. I will offer myimpression of the way the collegiate university works, what it does well and what it should thinkabout doing differently; also what we do at St Anne’s that leads the way for the rest of Oxford. I willdive into a number of familiar areas: the changes in the past decade - to academic careers, tostudents’ experience. I want to look at the university’s successes and failures in responding to thesechanges; to ask questions about the undergraduate curriculum, the right relationship of theacademic degree to the modern world of work; how we should consciously relate to and engagewith wider society; inherent in all this is the relationship with our alumnae and the role they need toplay in future.

The most obvious impact of change on Oxford’s everyday life has of course been fromcommunications technology. When I arrived at St Anne’s in 2004 Facebook had only just reachedOxford from Harvard and I caused great affront in the JCR when I revealed I had signed on because Iwanted to know what students were thinking. The use of Skype was against university regulations.My internet provider was AOL. Most students used computer terminals in the JCR and Library. Therewere no tablets and no 4G. Many tutorial reports were written by hand. The journals in the Librarywere still largely paper. It would be interesting to discuss the manner in which the digitalconsciousness of future generations is changing what a University should be; it has already resultedin huge changes in the way we interact; ought it therefore fundamentally to change the way wethink about the substance of our disciplines, and the way we expect students to learn. In some ways,it has already. Is this simply a matter of a revolution in communication, or is it more fundamental;changing the way we think, the way we process knowledge and relate to our culture? I don’t know,but they are things we as an academic community should discuss more.

If I ask myself what has been the most valuable new thing I have taken from being at St Anne’s, itundoubtedly has been the chance to make friends with scientists and encounter the scientific mind.This may shock you but, before coming here, I had scarcely talked at any length to scientists. Scienceso dominates the University’s purpose, it is hard to describe how relatively little the manner ofthinking of scientists is reflected in the wider public conversation, let alone the media. I do notpretend to have understood the many seminars and presentations I have attended but I havelearned a lot from the patient empirical optimism of the scientist’s mind, the methodical and preciseevaluation of data, the working through of proofs and the belief in solutions. Last week, BudimirRosic took me to Japan as a guest of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; I was captivated by the sheer scaleof the gigantic gas turbines, their technology and manufacture, the precision of the mathematicalresearch providing constant improvement in performance, all linked to and reliant on the researchupstream done here by the research teams of three of our Fellows - Budimir, Alan Cox and RogerReed, the same colleagues whom I meet quietly eating at lunch in Hall. It is hard to connect theexternal lives of our scientists, whether the nano world of the Material scientists or the geneticists -or, for that matter Don Porcelli in the wastes of Siberia, Neville Harnew astride the Hadron Colliderat CERN, and Pat Irwin somewhere between Jupiter and Pluto – to our day to day lives here. Irealise I have never succeeded in painting for the College a full enough picture of the far horizons weencompass.

However, the quiet assurance of scientists that I have found so invigorating, and their prospectusfor constant improvement and future wellbeing, can seem confusingly at odds with the turbulenceand darkening prospects that have swept over the world in this past decade. I often find it odd howlittle we discuss together what the future holds from the different perspectives we have.

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It is quite sobering to realise how long ago was 2004. In my first months here, George W Bush wonre-election to a second term; six months later Tony Blair won a joyless, but decisive third victoryconsolidating the hegemony of New Labour; until around 2008 our Arabic students would spendtheir second year in Damascus, a relaxed city where students could study without any sense ofthreat. Fees for UK undergraduates were just going up from £1,000 to £1,500 a year. Everymathematician and scientist seemed to be hoovered up into the City; I went fund raising from analumna who was married to one of the top executives at Bears Stearns. I see my time at St Anne’sdivided by the financial crisis of 2009. It is only now apparent how it has changed the culture andassumptions of a generation.

Such is the apparent permanence of Oxford it is easy to ignore the seismic shifts in geopolitics wehave lived through as if they do not really touch us; Oxford’s internationalism is an obstacle to ourrecognising how the world is closing down around us even as it is a bulwark of culturalconnectedness that stands against that closing world. I worry that we fail to appreciate how out oftune our belief in reasoned, evidence based, international discourse is with the growing clamour ofprotest against such norms. Communications, markets, access to knowledge have globalised,whereas politics, power and cultures, in reaction to these forces, are moving in the oppositedirection. Given the brittleness of our current stability, I have to admit I am frustrated by thetendency in student politics to focus on issues of personal identity and the preference to sit injudgement on past centuries when we are faced in our own time by the awful challenges we haveand which it will our students’ burden to try to solve: the rise of isolationist nationalism, thedysfunctionality of representative democracy, the growing power of state coercion in countries thatare not democracies, and, in places, the barbarity intruding upon all we take for granted. We shouldthink of what has happened to those classmates whom St Anne’s students met in Damascus adecade ago.

These gloomy preoccupations ought to concern us in the University and not issues on which weshould be reticent; for protected as we may be, what happens here is important to the world. As Iwas writing the above, I thought of Howard Hotson’s Cultures of Knowledge digital humanitiesproject. The networks of intellectual life and the correspondence of ideas that this project tracesacross the 16th and 17th centuries are threaded through the horrific, dystopian European landscapeof the Thirty Years War, a period in European history with which the Sunni/Shia civil war in theMiddle East is being compared. Such historical research holds up a mirror to us in our time of theenduring values of scholarship in a fragmenting world.

You cannot travel as a Head of House and not realise the privilege of being at Oxford. Everywhere Ihave been, Oxford is, sometimes, almost embarrassingly, bathed in a light of idealistic impossibilityin the eyes of those will never get here. It is for them a symbol of a better world. This is why the waywe conduct the business of our jobs matters.

So, in this light, let me move to the everyday aspects of our working lives.

Because Oxford is perceived with such idealism, it makes it almost impossible the task of living up toit. Oxford is heralded for its research and scholarship and for its teaching. They are seen as indivisiblebut it is a shock for any Head of House arriving here, who has not been an academic, to find thetensions between the two. The one debate that has not altered in my years here is how canacademics balance their responsibilities in teaching and research. At times, this genuinepredicament has been reduced to terms which are foolishly oppositional – when I first arrived I wastold by someone that he had been told by his Head of Department that “teaching was for wimps”.However, I think at St Anne’s we have managed to preserve what is valuable in the tutorial system atthe same time as doing a lot to spread the teaching load beyond our Fellows. We recognise the scale

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of the University’s research enterprise that determines Oxford’s place in the front rank. Failure forOxford would lie in falling out of the top ten universities in the world.

I am especially glad at the value we have derived out of our 6 stipendiary JRF posts and their quality.A few weeks ago in the TLS, the lead review hailed a magnificent new work on Samuel Pepys. Thework was by Kate Loveman, of Leicester University, who was a witty JRF in my first three years here.She used to say she spent her time lying on her bed reading books. Our next JRF post will be inModern Drama, endowed from the legacy of Rosemary Pountney, who never missed a Domusseminar, who died at Easter, and who has left us her flat to fund it. When I first came, I found ourJRFs were hardly ever teaching undergraduates at St Anne’s because we had no systematic way ofencouraging this. These days, the roles they take on are integral to life in College. I can think of atleast four occasions over the years where the presence of a JRF teaching in a School has made anoticeable difference to that cohort’s examination results. They are joined by our new nonstipendiary Research Fellows, some 20 in all, many of whom are glad to do some teaching and like tocontribute. Looking back over the decade, it has been our early career academics who haverevivified us year in year out.

Our graduate development scholarships have brought doctoral students into far more structuredrelationships with Schools as part of tuition teams. This was all ad hoc before. Our practice ofintegrating these different levels of teaching in College is very different in kind to some moreanonymous departmentally based graduate teaching initiatives that do not recognise theimportance of a joined up academic community. Taxi rank graduate teaching is a menace. I amconcerned, from conversations with undergraduates, at the less personal use of graduates asteaching assistants in some departmental classes. When I sat on university Education Committee, Iwas staggered at how the discussion about graduate teaching was construed solely in terms of whatit might offer our graduates; there was never any consideration given to how well theundergraduates might be taught.

As a College, we have consistently championed research leave, but his has only been possiblebecause most Fellows in individual Schools plan together to stagger their leave in order not to allowpersonal tuition to suffer. If Schools are not founded on a professional generosity they fall part. Wethink as a community not as an institution.

I believe the academic and intellectual culture of the College is strong; however in future it will needmore mature collective thinking about how more formally we interconnect ourselves. The buildingup of Mathematics and Computer Science, the growth and interleaving of Engineering and Materials,Matthew Reynold’s and colleagues’ initiative in Translation, Sally Shuttleworth’s Science and SocietyHumanities projects, and the Personalised Medicine Centre all in their different ways have given usidentity. Neil Macfarlane has ensured we have built International Relations here as a new strength;we should connect it with International Law. However, other colleges, encouraged by the Divisions,are clustering their graduate students around cognate disciplines. By comparison, we are being quiteslow in this. I would advise the College to create a Research Committee of its own with the remit tobe creative in the way we better choreograph ourselves intellectually. Colleges should always beincorrigibly plural but I think in future that plurality will depend on different parts of the Collegetaking more interest in each other. We can be bad at making collective choices. We are very bad atdeciding what not to do.

And so to studentsNothing has mattered to me more in my time here than the conversations I have had with ourstudents. I never expected to feel such engagement, admiration and concern for them, collectivelyand individually. Their range of intellects, their growth as people in their time here, the charitable

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activity many undertake when not studying, their determination and concern for each other – all thisI will miss deeply. But there are student issues to address.

Let me begin with our graduates because this has been the greatest change in the past decade, aswe have increased numbers from 140 to over 300. As I hope I have made clear, the increasingcontribution of research students has been one of the great advances. The Fellowships we havegained, in Film Aesthetics, African Studies, Israel Studies, Major Programme Management have beenbecause of the growth in Masters courses. The College is a far more intellectually sinewy place as aresult; our Subject Family events are primarily graduate events; the MCR seminars are a tribute toour students who organise them and hand on the responsibility year to year. My critique thatfollows should be taken in this context.

Within 5 years half Oxford’s students will be graduates. My favourite graduate college is Clare Hallin Cambridge; that is because it is built as if someone asked: “what sort of place would graduatesreally like to live in, what works for them, how might they best connect with the Fellows; what sortof relationships are we building into these buildings?” This is very different to: “This is a college,how do we get graduates to fit into it?” It would be a good exercise to sit down as if with a blankcanvas and sketch out what a St Anne’s graduate space might look like. It might sound crazy but,when St Anne’s thinks big, it attracts those who wish to fund it in a big way; it would be a greatachievement of the next decade to create a designed-from-first-principles residential graduatecentre; it might just be for research students; it might be for a few clustered related disciplines. Notsure yet exactly where you might build it, but it would be in the spirit of our predecessors who hadthe far more difficult task of establishing St Anne’s in the first place.

The prize would be to establish at St Anne’s a really distinctive prospectus for a graduatecommunity. If a wide range of subjects is a virtue in an undergraduate community, a more shapedset of connections, still plural, but with a greater sense of pattern would make for a better graduateequivalent.

More generally, I think the University has harder thinking yet to do about its objectives in shaping itsgraduate strategy. The worn arguments about size and shape, where divisions understandably blamethe colleges for frustrating their ambitions to expand, and the colleges rightly resist taking numberswhom they do not have the capacity to support, avoid the prior need to distinguish the differentcharacteristics of graduate degrees - their purposes and attainment - and the relationship of cost toincome. Masters students are often politely reticent when I ask them what they think of theirexperience here. The increase in graduates has brought with it a far greater strain on welfare andstudent support, none of it budgeted for, which Departments have neither the time nor culture toaddress; the burden inevitably returns to the colleges. This is why I suggest St Anne’s should take alead - imagine what a model graduate community should look like, then attempt to be it.

Now to undergraduates:

Ruth Deech has a good line in her speeches at alumnae reunions: “For each other”, she says, lookingout at a hall of middle aged professionals, “you will always be 20”. Its’ true – these are the years thatforge us, and our friendships and connections that shape a lifetime; but the experience of being 20now is different to even ten years ago. This is a more austere, focused generation, but sometimescautious to the point of repression when it comes to the impulsive exploration of ideas outside thenext assignment. Adventurousness with ideas ought to be core to the intellectual/emotional muddleof being “sweet and 20”. In saying this, I recognise the admirable intellectual connectedness inconversations I have had with many students, and the breadth of reading, in particular of somescientists; so many tell me that it is the quality of talk over meals in Hall that they will miss most

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when they leave. I am struck by the students with 4 good A levels stretched across the Arts andSciences who regret the paths not travelled even as they are fulfilled by their chosen degree. Butthere seems less time or permission now for thinking extravagantly.

This relates to the increasing levels of student anxiety and self-analysis. I admit to a generational gulfin perception here; I can get a bit impatient at the “resilience” word – in grumpy mood, I fear we arecondoning a generation in medicalising “Life” - escaping the truth that sometimes some things don’twork out, and that we are fallible. Everyone has to learn sometimes the price of experience. However,I am persuaded that for this generation the world feels extremely fraught. As Ben, our JCR Presidentexplained to me, today’s students are on the double treadmill of degree and CV from the momentthey arrive. Prelim marks determine success to the internship that in turn determines success on thegraduate trainee scheme. A façade of manicured perfectibility is assumed at that point in life whenone should be free to make mistakes. Add to this the impact of student debt, and the coming changefrom grants to loans for maintenance funding, and the student of 2016 is in a very different place tothat of 2004. I am not going to talk about undergraduate admissions but this is another growing pointof stress.

This combination risks fracturing the traditional pedagogic relationship on which Oxford is built and Ithink we need to address each point if we are to secure it. I believe the increase in Fees has, in fact,brought some improvements. Though it is correct to challenge the characterisation of thestudent/tutor relationship in consumer terms -as the relationship between student and tutor is acovenant more than a transaction - I do think the increase in fees has provided a corrective to thedisheartening cynicism towards undergraduate teaching that I mentioned could be a feature ofcentral university thinking a few years ago. Students are now more openly critical of inefficiency incourse organisation, poor communication and the indifferent scheduling in some departments ofcentrally organised tutorials. However, it has also strengthened a more reductive view of thepurposes of a degree, where the syllabus is seen as a product and a degree a return on investment.These trends, combined with the anxiety about anxiety, result in a growing demand for longer, lessintense terms, with more time to catch up, for reading weeks, mark schemes, a desire for Oxford tobe more like other universities; for longer periods of vacation residence. This last will be a challengefor us, not least for the conference business that underwrites the cost of teaching. However, I thinkthere are issues to unpack here which link to the very changed society from which students comeand into which they will go as adults. I believe we need to engage with these arguments andrecognise the valid ones even as we reject the unwarranted.

At the heart of these student concerns is a wider consciousness that there is an ever moreproblematic interface to be negotiated between the academic depth of degree, with all the pleasureand inherent value that comes from its intellectual stretch, and the very different demands of theworld of work in a digital knowledge economy. Talk to our alumnae who employ the millennialgeneration and they will tell you similar things. I am not arguing for vocational degrees nor forqualities such as “leadership” to be considered at admissions, as at US Ivy League universities, but Ido not believe the current default position that, beyond the Careers Office, subsequent careeroutcomes are not a matter for us, is sustainable. I recognise that careers are not necessarily theremit of academics, and this is an area in which most academics have little experience, but I do thinkthat a discussion about the construction of degrees has to be part of this wider argument.

I think that one of the most important debates the University needs to have is about the balancebetween depth and breadth in an undergraduate degree. Does the modern digital world, with itsexponential increases in the connectedness of data and the consequently more protean role of theindividual in society, require a more connected intellectual framework to reflect the approachnecessary to take into the world after university? Again, I am not arguing for the modular approach

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of a liberal arts degree, for that is incompatible with the intellectual depth required to justify thetutorial system. But is there a way we can retain the seriousness of endeavour we expect of singlehonours schools but introduce greater range and connectedness? Our students increasingly wantthis, citing the more interesting combinations our visiting students are allowed to do; our recentlyleft alumnae reflect on the disadvantageous narrowness of aspects of their degree even as theyappreciate what its rigour and depth still give them. We celebrate interdisciplinarity in research; wefind it hard to embrace in our curriculum. Where we do it, it could work better; every year I hear thesame criticisms about the inability of the Humanities to make joint schools more coherent; one ofthe most damaging decisions of recent years was when the Department of Economics killed offMaterials and Engineering’s joint degrees with Economics and Management without looking at theextraordinary success of those students in their subsequent careers. The expansion of Philosophyinto Computer Science and Linguistics is a clear advance. And if I really wanted to be a nuisance, Iwould propose a new degree PPT, Politics, Philosophy and Theology because I think religion maywell be as important as that of economics to our understanding of the world as it is becoming.In my time on the University Education Committee, there was never once a discussion of the sorts ofissues I have been talking about; rather a deliberate closing down of any attempt to do so. Oxfordsuffers from a deadening culture of exceptionalism – present an idea, and if one detail of it is notfully thought through or does not quite stand up to remorseless scrutiny, that shortcoming is enoughto put it back in a box, call for more data and ignore it for a decade.

So let me propose a framework for a reshaping of our undergraduate academic experience, if only sothat it can be given initial consideration in 2026.

I propose that every undergraduate degree should be four years. They should be wider in the firstyear, but by the fourth year should have the same approach to a taught Masters; Humanities andSocial Sciences degrees should follow the Sciences, and convert the fourth year into a Mastersdegree, with some element of a research component. You would get a higher quality of student ontaught Masters courses as a result. (I accept the more vocational degrees such as Law and Medicineremain three years). There should be an element of shared curriculum in the first year for allundergraduates - what about a compulsory paper in Logic? Scientists should learn something ofEthics and the history of ideas; Humanities students should learn something of data managementand quantitative analysis, and the history of technology and science should figure more. Thesepapers would not necessarily be in tutorials but class based. They would count towards Prelims.Humanities students would have most to gain; I am disheartened by how many now feel they areunemployable in the private sector because of their lack of quantitative confidence. This is in no wayto diminish the value of their disciplines; quite the opposite -what I fear is that the values of theHumanities, which have informed every part of my working life, will not take their vital place in ourbusinesses and professions as they have in the past unless those trained in them have also the abilityto engage to some extent on a quantitative plane as well. Bluntly, I fear I would be consideredunemployable today in some of the jobs I have done.

Further:Every degree that does not currently allow for students to go abroad for some of their study shouldinclude this as standard, not necessarily for a year but for six months from April to September. TheLong Vacation is far too long for students anyway. We should consider accepting credits from otherinstitutions towards an Oxford degree as Visiting Students’ institutions accept them from us.I have become convinced about this as a result of my conversations with our alumnae in SiliconValley. Some of the most stimulating moments of my time as Principal have been as a result ofconversations with St Anne’s former students working there – who incidentally read English, History,Materials, Biochemistry, PPE, Classics, Mathematics and Computer Science –and now work at thecentre of technologies and a culture that is refashioning the future of all our lives. They have

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persuaded me that the way the world is going to be requires us to think far more about teaching theconnections between intellectual disciplines, and their application to a digital society, if we are tocontinue to claim that an academic degree at Oxford is a credible preparation for a fulfilledsuccessful and socially valuable life.

This takes me to FundraisingMuch of the above has been informed by conversations with our alumnae now at the height of theircareers, with whom we have only built connections this past decade. We need to put greater energyinto ensuring that they have an informed understanding of what we do, we should listen morecarefully to their responses, and spend time building a sustained critical relationship with them. Thisis not about money. Those who were once taught here have the best minds to enlighten us as towhat we might now need to do differently. They haven’t anything to tell you about your subject;they have a lot to tell you why your subject is valuable beyond the terms in which you haveexperience of it. Finding the right relationship with them will be central to what colleges should do,as well as a critical factor in whether St Anne’s in the next twenty years can prosper.

Development is complex; a development strategy based only on financial return is unlikely to delivereven that. Twelve years ago I hazarded a guess as to what development entailed and I think inretrospect I got it about right: I said in my interview with GB:

When you ask donors to give money, they like to think they are giving more than that. They aregiving back to a younger memory of themselves. These things go deep. The Principal’s job is to puttime aside to work out what an association with the College can offer, to understand where they arecoming from.Fundraising is not a matter of opportunism; it is about sustained relationships. The benefactor willgive to an institution which has a clear and unapologetic sense of its own values, not to one that triesto ingratiate itself. You need: a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve. Then proof: you arecapable, you mean what we say, you will deliver.

I would add to this from my experience. Private philanthropy will be the only means, with otherincome streams effectively capped, by which St Anne’s can survive as it is, independently over thenext 20 years. However, significant donations tend to come for visionary projects whereas most ofour needs are for day to day sustainability. The University faces just the same problem. Hence theLibrary, endowment of Fellowships and the call to fully fund bursaries after the tripling of the feebrought in those donors who individually gave over £1m. The Library was supported not as abuilding but for the ideas we persuaded our alumnae it enshrined - access and opportunitycollaborative working, diversity and international connectedness, and the inherent connectionbetween research and teaching, graduates and undergraduates. However, our future needs, therefurbishment of Hartland House and Bevington Road are more difficult to describe in such terms. Ibelieve the best way to ensure them is to conceive them in a new articulation of the College’sambition. Bigger ideas attract bigger donations. We will need to be prepared to name the oldHartland House Library after a donor who will support a new narrative that can surround it – somegreater vision of the College’s Humanities identity in the 21st Century perhaps. Similarly, what is thelarger vision for Bevington Road beyond it being an accommodation block?

I have come to see Development as the most creative part of the Principal’s job. I like the thrill of thechase, the sense of being on the line when one “makes the ask”. We have raised £19.6m since 2007,the same as our endowment was in 2004. However, and much more importantly, I have met manymore interesting and admirable people across the world as a result than ever I did in Television and Ilove the real shared sense of purpose, possibility and idealism that one can engender with a donor. Iam genuinely touched by how generous people are, open hearted in their preparedness to do

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something for their college, however much or little they can afford to give. In only a very ,very fewcases does on come away feeling a little sullied, as if the donor is buying something, bargaining forrecognition, weighing the maximum they can get for the minimum donated. When a donationbecomes a deal, it loses its value. This is extremely rare, almost all our donors, great or small wantus to do something with their money; it is for us not them.

We should unselfconsciously admire those who have gone on to be very successful in life even whenthey were, in terms of academic seriousness - the terms academics care most about - not exactlyshining examples. One of the dilemmas of universities is that on the one hand there must be a beliefthat the “best” students will want themselves to have academic careers, and these are the valuesthat must be asserted over all others whilst they are here; while, on the other hand, we shouldrecognise that the reason Oxford is considered one of the world’s greatest institutions is because ofthose who studied here whose achievements rest far from the confines of academia. For mostpeople who care about this university, Oxford’s scholarship counts most because they tasted it at abrief formative time of their lives, and still feel it gave them a shape to their energies and abilitieseven though they have left it behind to do other things.

Finally, a tough point: I am concerned that Oxford culture means we can inadvertently showinsufficient collective gratitude; there can sometimes be a sense almost of embarrassment whensomeone gives us a lot of money; or uneasiness at the fact we are dealing with people whosecareers may have had very different incentives to those of an academic. We must avoid giving adamaging impression of carelessness - that the College simply pays its development professionals tosay thank you. We should, all of us, go out of our way to do that more. For our alumnae, it is theirtutors’ approbation and friendliness that they appreciate the most, and even when their tutors arelong retired they, sometimes rather shyly, like to meet their successors.

GovernanceThis brings me finally to governance. I believe the joint enterprise between the College and thewider embodiment of the College in our alumnae might be more effective if more formallycombined. I also don’t believe Governing Bodies in Oxford colleges as currently formulated are reallysustainable or compatible with their statutory charitable responsibilities. The conflicts of interest aretoo great. The elaborate process of decision making too often leads to decisions dodged. Academicsin the midst of their research understandably can seldom commit enough time to being trusteesgiven all their other commitments. However, anyone who has been the trustee of another charitywill know we do not conduct ourselves collectively as we are expected to do. Every Head of Houseknows this, we have the conversation among ourselves all the time, but we are too squeamish tobring the issue to a head. Our establishment of Council and an Advisory Board has given St Anne’s amuch better structure to most other colleges but I think it needs to go further. I suggest we shouldconsider whether trusteeship should rotate amongst us; should it rest with a Council made up of 12academic members of GB, up to 4 Colleges officers, and 4 externals, the members of our AdvisoryBoard; (plus of course junior members in attendance). Every member of GB would be expected toserve at least one term of 5 years as a trustee in the course of their career. Terms limits for othermembers would also be set. Other college officers could be in attendance even if not members.Members of Council could not be paid by law but might be given significant teaching remission. Theywould however be obliged to attend meetings and to be inducted and trained. I have beenincreasingly worried at how few of us really have taken time to understand the numbers behind ourfinances. It is not that academics should necessarily have to, but trustees should.

The Advisory Board, of 4 – the externals - would be smaller than now, appointed by the College froma larger Advisory Council that meets once a year. One criterion for membership of the AdvisoryBoard could be a commitment to give, or get others to give, a certain target each year. This is quite

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common in other charities. The externals would represent a range of experiences and bring to beartheir networks and contacts to worlds we do not easily find.

Governing Body would still meet as it does and guide Council but it would embed its fiduciaryresponsibilities in the Council. I am still impressed at the preparedness in 2007 of GB to move to aCouncil structure. I think you should give serious consideration as to whether St Anne’s will bettermeet the significant challenges ahead if its governance structures complete the route begun then.For, if St Anne’s faces one major threat, it is Drift. The Ship, if not steered with continuousconcentration, can easily veer towards the rocks. There is no guarantee St Anne’s will be viable in 20years’ time, just as there was none 20 years ago. We make our own future as we always have. Thegreatest fallacy is to argue that academic choices and financial choices can be kept apart. Our corepurposes are now almost entirely dependent upon the businesses we run to support them and thesewe will have to develop if our academic mission is to be secured. All our financial decisions should bein the interest of academic objectives but please do not succumb to the delusion that hard financialdecisions are for others to make, and one’s own academic case is always the exception. St Anne’s isa small barque on what is going to be a rough sea. Far better, whenever you feel it to be unstable,put down the anchor, furl the sails and hunker down until you have found the map and the resourceto set sail again. If you make timely decisions, unappetising as they may appear, there is alwaysmore time than you think.

I am sure that there will be polite resistance to what I have just proposed, and that if I had raised thisat any other time, it would have been a distraction. But, as I am about to disappear I thought Ishould at least suggest you consider it - because now it is up to you…. .

BoojumWhich takes me to Boojums. I am not sure, having written this, if I speak as Bellman or Beaver. But Ihave been in pursuit of a Snark – a creature whose only affinity with St Anne’s is that it is a quest andan obsession, as is the ideal College in the mind of every Head of House. Arguably, the Snark is alsometaphor for the contradictions inherent in seeking an ideal – the disappointments as well as thecompulsions. It may even be the embodiment of the Principal’s relationship with a Governing Body –“You may charm it with smiles and soap” - it may be the College’s settled decision as to its size andshape –

“But never as yet, (‘tis your captain who speaks),Have we caught the least glimpse of a snark”.

But the Snark may also represent another eternal truth - that for every Principal the hunt is bound tohave no end.

Being elected to St Anne’s as Principal was for me not simply a change in career but the beginningliterally of a second life; I could not have asked for anything that could have grown my selfknowledge and wider understanding more than this. I could not be more grateful to the Fellowshipfor the opportunity. Equally, it is also necessary to know at what point it should all come to a close,and when one should cease to be the voice that speaks for what St Anne’s is, has been and might be.Because otherwise one would not register the essential truth of this place: that, at the right point,you should recognise the moment:

“to softly and suddenly vanish away,Because the Snark was a Boojum, you see”.