Picture a meeting in the office of the Vice-Chancellor and you might expect oak panels, an array of decanters, colonial memorabilia and a smattering of armchairs. If you do, you’ll be disappointed – I’m greeted by Louise Richardson in a spacious but stringently utilitarian office in the distinctly pedestrian confines of Wellington Square. Richardson jokes that the biggest surprise in coming to Oxford was how ugly this building is. “How did anybody ever knock down a square and put up this monstrosity? It really surprises me that anyone could have put up this building and chosen to have their offices in it,” she tells me.
Richardson clearly has opinions, and is unafraid to state them boldly. An expert on international terrorism, she does not mince words in explaining her opposition to the Prevent strategy, with which the University will have to be compliant in August. “I understand the intentions of the government but I think this legislation is unwise,” she says. “I’m worried that a particular group of students – Muslim students – might feel like they’re suspect and I really worry about the threat to free speech.”
She doesn’t hesitate to criticise OUSU’s response to Prevent. “I’ll be honest, I think it’s a shame that the students have decided not to engage on this. OUSU has a policy of not engaging with this…Personally, I would prefer to see us work together to express our shared reservations about the legislation.”
She continues, “Within the confines of the law I think universities are the best place to hear objectionable speech – radical speech if you like – because it can be countered openly. I think that’s what a university’s about. I think it’s an unfortunate piece of legislation; we will of course have to comply with it, and we’ll do so, but I’d much prefer we didn’t have to.”
The Vice-Chancellor has a clear and uncompromising level of faith in that most hotly contested of topics, free speech. In her installation speech earlier this month, she raised eyebrows when she stressed that “an Oxford education is not meant to be a comfortable experience.” In an interview with The Telegraph shortly afterwards, she described her preferred approach to free speech as “quite the opposite of the tendency towards safe spaces.” I ask her how she understands the term ‘safe space’. “My understanding of the term as it has evolved in American campuses is as a space where people do not have to confront ideas they find disturbing or upsetting and that’s what I think is inconsistent with university life.”
I press her further: should there be no safe spaces anywhere in a university? “My approach to life is not to issue blanket prohibitions. I would say that I do not think that safe spaces are compatible with university life,” she replies.
What would she say to students who feel they occasionally need an escape from “ideas they find disturbing” so that they can confront difficult opinions when they need to? Richardson responds quickly, “Isn’t that what your private life is about, that you have your friends, that you create a social group around you of people with whom you feel comfortable? Why would that need to be an institutional space?”
I am struck by how forthcoming she is with her views, and turn to the more sensitive issue of her salary. In her former position as Vice-Chancellor of St. Andrew’s, her total remuneration package exceeded £250,000 in the academic year 2014-15. Her predecessor at Oxford, Andrew Hamilton, drew criticism for his £442,000 salary, £100,000 higher than that of the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor. Is the Oxford Vice-Chancellor paid too highly? “I didn’t take a pay rise for five years and the money [a £30,000 bonus] went straight back to student support and libraries.
“We operate in a global marketplace, and the salaries of British Vice-Chancellors are lower than in many competitor countries. If we want to attract people we will have to pay salaries that will not be completely out of sync with those in the marketplace that we’re trying to attract. But I would say that I’ve met a lot of Vice-Chancellors in my day and there’s not one who is motivated in their job because of their salary.”
She adds, “In these questions it all depends what you compare them to. If you compare a Vice-Chancellor to a cleaner, it seems like an extraordinary discrepancy; if you compare a Vice-Chancellor to a football player or a banker it seems much less. Salaries should reflect societal values, and I believe there’s nothing more valuable than education.”
We move on to discuss the cost of a degree. Andrew Hamilton made headlines a few years ago in suggesting that there be more of a debate about tuition fees, given an Oxford education costs £16,000 to deliver, a figure far in excess of the £9,000 most students pay in tuition fees. The Vice-Chancellor is non-committal. “The money for education has to come from somewhere; the question is where it comes from, because universities are unsustainable if we can’t cover the cost of education.
“I have said and continue to believe that the benefits of education are shared both by society and by the individual. This is true financially, because people often earn higher salaries with a university education and the Exchequer gets higher taxes as a consequence, but also in all the intangible ways.
“With a university education, you can enjoy many intangible aspects of life that you wouldn’t otherwise, and I think the civic life of a country benefits from having a highly educated population. It seems to me that the benefits are shared by both the individual and the state so it’s reasonable that the cost should be shared.
“As a society, we can have debates about what the proportion should be, whether there should be a link between somebody’s income and how much they pay, this is how we as a society should decide about fairness.”
‘The money has to come from somewhere’ becomes something of a recurring theme. When asked whether she thinks the University should divest from fossil fuels, taking a lead from other universities including Stanford and Glasgow, she says, “It’s a very difficult issue and it sounds as if there was a very serious discussion about it last year – I followed it from afar.
“The point of the investments is to generate revenue for scholarships and so on, and it’s a matter of to what extent you want to constrain the hands of the investors. As an undergraduate, I was heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement and the move to divest from South African produce. These are all balances you have to draw, fine lines you have to draw. I don’t think fossil fuels are quite the same as apartheid South Africa.
“It seems to me that the University came to a very reasonable conclusion last year. That said, there’s so much we can do for green energy. I worry that future generations will look back on us as morally culpable for the way we wasted resources when the information about climate change was readily available, so I think there’s a whole lot more we can do and I think will be doing to promote green energy.”
One thing Richardson is clearly not prepared to compromise on is teaching. In the Chancellor’s controversial address at her installation, he warned that the prized but expensive tutorial system might “come under more fierce scrutiny in the future”. The Vice-Chancellor appears unperturbed. “We have centuries of graduates who will attest to the values of the tutorial system and I’ve been very struck by recent literature in the US on education and the best types of education.
“They’re discovering that in fact the secret to good education is personalised teaching, so they’re trying to introduce a much more focused and personalised method of teaching in a number of charter schools and innovative schools across the US.
“That’s precisely what the tutorial system is, and it’s part of the Oxford experience. It’s something that across the University you’ll find real commitment to.
“Of course, when it comes to teaching certain science courses where you have to spend time in the lab we’ll have to adapt, but the locus of tutorial teaching in the colleges is something I think is really cherished across the University.”
One element of Oxford Richardson is a little more concerned about is its fragmented administrative structure. Moving from a university of 8,000 students to one with over 20,000 and a huge amount of devolved power across 44 colleges and Permanent Private Halls presents a unique set of challenges. Richardson worries about a potential lack of unity. “I met a very famous alumnus of Oxford a couple of days ago. I introduced myself and said, ‘I see you’re an alumnus; I’m the new Vice-Chancellor’. And he said, ‘Oh gosh, I see myself as a graduate of (and he named the college) – I’ve never thought of myself as an alumnus of Oxford’.
“I thought ‘how strange’ – that’s really different from other universities. So I think we would all benefit just by being drawn together”.
