Alison Richard interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21st August 2008 and continued on 28th September and the 18th December 2008

0:09:07 Born in 1948 in Bromley, Kent; remember nothing of grandparents one reason being that my father was sixty-two when I was born and mother thirty-seven; grew up not knowing the date of my father's birth as it was kept secret from my sister and brother and me; thought we would find it weird to have such an old father; he had not married until fifty-five; he was born in Scotland and went off to South America in 1911 inspired by reading Darwin's 'Voyage of the Beagle', wanting to see the Falkland Islands; he spent eleven years in Chile sending nitrate and then grain back to England; returned to England in 1922; was working in the Royal Observer Corps in Bromley in 1941 and my mother was a volunteer cook there; they fell in love and married; result was that I grew up with a father who was a wonderful story-teller; a man of deep happiness who had lived more than half his life unmarried but when he died at ninety-three, in 1979, had both children and grandchildren; I had not known about his interest in Darwin until after he died, but when I announced at twenty-one that I was going off to Madagascar for eighteen months my parents didn't blench; possibly have a genetic predisposition to wandering inherited from my father; in South America he first worked for the Nitrate Corporation and then for Balfour Williams; when my elder brother was a little boy his headmaster told my mother that he was a pathological liar as he kept saying that his father was a cowboy; the next day he went to school with a picture of my father on horseback; mother died in 1998 aged eighty-seven; she was a strong, very intelligent person who nowadays would have had a stellar career of some sort; she had been at LSE and did an almonry degree and loved working as an almoner (now medical social worker); she gave up work to look after her ill mother until she died in 1938; she married my father three years later

7:18:03 Interesting that today one views students whose parents did not go to college as under-privileged; neither of my parents went to university and for our generation that was often more the case than not; however there were many books in the house and there was a love of learning and appreciation of education; I was the youngest and always viewed as the brainy one, but I was supported in everything I did; think that this is the most important role of a parent to give a child the confidence to dare to dream; my mother, particularly, gave me the courage to do things; my first school was a private girls' day school called Kinnaird Park; I was there from four and a half to thirteen; I remember a headmistress who was very unpleasant to me over a period of time; it was a forceful education where we were drilled, tested, but also learned poetry which I can still remember; when I am bored in Madagascar when the animals are asleep I just recite poetry to myself; think it a shame that our children did not grow up to learn poetry; the teachers at school were all larger than life ladies who impressed themselves upon me positively and negatively; one of the pleasures coming back to the UK after thirty years in the United States is that I have reconnected with some of the women who were at school with me; every year we lunch together and I remember why I liked these girls; I ended up doing what I have done through the influence of a succession of teachers; the fearsome headmistress, Miss Forth, taught me Latin and she obviously inspired me at some level; amusing to find my friends remembering what she was like

14:18:01 When I was thirteen I was awarded a scholarship to go to a girl's boarding school called Queenswood, Hertfordshire; when I went I skipped a year and it was very difficult as I was a slow developer and was with girls a year older; actually it was a fine school and I had a succession of good teachers whose inspiration led me to continue with Latin, English and French and to do Russian; at 'A' level did 'S' level Latin and English but had no idea what I wanted to do; I did no science or mathematics at 'A' level; the first chapter of Catherine Bateson's book 'Composing a Life' was a revelation; it describes how we live with the increasing fiction that lives are linear whereas as life is actually more akin to a patchwork quilt; I think I must look like a person who has led a linear life; to me it seems a large series of contingencies built around a fundamental interest in more or less everything; if you have broad interests how do you decide or do your teachers inspire you to do a particular thing; when I got to Cambridge and was inspired by David Pilbeam to be a biological anthropologist, then I asked myself over and over why I had not done calculus, statistics or biology at ‘A’ level; I played the bassoon in the school orchestra and it has given me a lifelong love of the instrument and bassoon music; I also sang in the school choir; Queenswood was one of the schools which sang at the Royal Albert Hall in Ernest Read's concerts; sang all the great choral works which I enjoyed at the time but didn't understand what a gift for a lifetime the experience would be; I am not a great athlete but used to win such novelty races as the egg and spoon and slow bicycle; I played hockey, but not well; now as Vice Chancellor I don't have much time to listen to music; when I met the man who became my husband in 1976, his father had been involved in the development of the Michigan Opera Theatre; as a result we became great opera lovers; when I do listen to music is it more likely to be opera than anything else - Mozart, Verdi, Monteverdi

24:27:12 Came to Cambridge to read archaeology and anthropology; had been wondering what to read but in the previous summer had been on an archaeological dig on an Iron Age fort which I found really interesting; I read a bit about the  course, decided I didn't really want to be a lawyer or do English, but decided in a totally feckless way to do archaeology and anthropology; having applied and got in I then went to north-west Greece with Eric Higgs who was digging in Epirus; I spent the summer there and decided I would be an archaeologist; when I got to Cambridge and started the course I met David Pilbeam who was teaching physical anthropology there; David inspired me with an absolute fascination in human evolution and the evolution of complex social systems; another person who inspired me was Robert Hinde, and then Alison Jolly; Alison came to teach at Cambridge as her husband, Richard, was a visiting professor in the economics faculty; she taught primate social behaviour in the autumn of 1968; I had just come back from the Panama Canal zone where I had been studying howler monkeys; I had decided to do this research as a project rather than having to do a Part II paper; David Chivers, then a graduate student, told me to go to BCI (Barro Colorado Island); being too young and proud to know what he was talking about said what a good idea, thinking  it was an island off the north-west coast of Scotland; subsequently found he was suggesting I spent the summer in Panama by which time it was too late to back out; I loathed it as it rained all the time, I couldn't see the animals, and there were poisonous snakes everywhere; I came back all ready to write it up for Robert Hinde; told Alison Jolly of my experience and she said that I should go to Madagascar as there were no poisonous snakes, there was dry spine forest and really interesting questions about the animals; she showed me slides of the southern spiny forest and I was entranced with the amazing animals; David Attenborough had done his 'Zoo Quest to Madagascar' series but otherwise it was an unfamiliar other-world that had evolved independently from the mainland

29:27:14 Robert Hinde was absolutely terrifying; I remember vividly the first time that I met him he asked me to tell him what I knew about territoriality in birds; he realized that I did not know much at all; when I was named as Vice Chancellor I got a letter from him; I was thrilled; he said he remembered me as a student for two reasons; one was that I was the only person he knew who had been on an owner-driver Land Rover maintenance course in Solihull; the second was that I was the only student who left for Madagascar to do field work in a full length fur coat; sadly I didn't leave much of an academic impression on him; he, like others of my teachers, made me want to be ambitious; the paper that I wrote on Barro Colorado Island was subsequently published; I wanted it to be really good to impress Robert Hinde which I see as a striving to produce something really worthwhile; at that time in social anthropology I was lectured by Meyer Fortes and S.J. Tambiah; I don't remember the supervisions I had there whereas those I had with David Pilbeam I remember vividly

33:37:24 On religion: my mother grew up in the Church of England, but we went to the Presbyterian church in Bromley every Sunday; Queenswood was a Methodist school and there was chapel every morning and twice a day on Sunday; I can't say it meant a lot to me and once I had left school I didn't go to church again; when our son died as a baby - a cot death - it was the minister of the church in our village who comforted us and performed the burial service - his flickering of faith was important in helping me to survive that; at the time I thought that whether I believed or not there was comfort at the darkest moment in my life, and there was a familiar relationship with a church; after that we started taking our daughters, then seven and five, to church every Sunday; we wanted them to have the possibility of what had made a difference to me, should it befall them, would make a difference to them; I go to Great St Mary's occasionally in my role as Vice Chancellor; the other aspect of this is the role of religious studies but also engaged scholarship and outreach in the life of a university; there is an argument that in a post-enlightenment world there is no room in a university for it; I don't accept for a moment that a university is entirely based on rational, empirical endeavours; if universities don't engage in a really serious way with matters of faith and spirituality one will leave it to the crystal-gazers and zealots; at Yale, the Divinity School there and the Department of Religious Studies were an important part of the landscape with which as Provost I worked to renew and support;  at Yale I was told that the Department of Religious Studies had to be a mile away from the Divinity School; when I got to Cambridge found that there is a mix of secular and engaged scholars, believers and possibly non-believers, but they all seemed to get on; very interesting that there isn't this very clear schism that has developed in the United States; at Cambridge the boundaries are not drawn in that way; I would classify myself as an agnostic; don't think that Dawkin's argument that science makes belief impossible is sustainable; there is a multitude of scientists who are believers; I don't find Dawkin's hypothesis terribly interesting as a line of argument

42:27:12 I was at Newnham College and a few weeks ago I did an interview with some graduates from there who are making a series on memories of Newnham as far back as they can find; I did not have a lot to say to them about Newnham per se; it is curious looking back because there is one girl for every seven to eight boys here, but I didn't experience it that way because I was in an all-women's college, and had plenty of women friends; I suspect we led more normal lives than the men did; there were plenty of men for us to be friends with but that was not true for them in reverse; we also had a rich array of wonderful and remarkable women living in Newnham; it was important for me both as a maturation experience personally and also providing the basis of friendships for a lifetime

45:19:00 I am not sure why I didn't stay here to do a PhD; the students I have taught and trained I think have been given a far more rational and systematic framework for thinking about what they do; I think career counselling is a relatively recent thing; I knew that Madagascar would be interesting but then I thought I wanted to do functional morphology and John Napier was one of my heroes; I decided I wanted to study with him for a PhD, but how I imagined I could do that with no training in anatomy to speak of, looks ludicrous; I went off to meet him in London and he said he would take me on as a student; I gave him my proposal to study comparative functional morphology of jaw mechanics of leaf-eating lemurs in Madagascar; I applied for money from the Royal Society and the Explorers Club of America; I got a NATO scholarship and went off to Madagascar; on the plane I changed my mind about what I was going to study; what I ended up doing in Madagascar was a comparative study of this one species Propithecus verreauxi, a big white lemur living in the spiny forests of Southern Madagascar and in a much wetter, greener forest in the north-west of the country; the question was, if environment determines social behaviour, how do these two very different environments shape the behaviour in this single species, and that was the subject of my PhD; the subject has moved a long way since then, not least due to the work of Tim Clutton-Brock who was a year ahead of me when I was an undergraduate; we used to write to each other when he was studying red colobus in Tanzania and I was in Madagascar; John Napier continued as my supervisor and at my PhD defence he said he would let John Crook ask the questions while he poured the sherry

49:56:24 I had intended to go to Alaska to study the behaviour of musk oxen with Paul Wilkinson who had been a graduate student of Eric Higgs; I had met him when I went digging in Greece as an undergraduate; he was undertaking an interesting project with, I think, the support of the Kellogg Foundation; he is an archaeologist with an interest in the domestication of wild animals and was working on a project to domesticate musk oxen and harvest their wool which is of high quality; this could be done by plucking rather than sheering by Eskimos as an alternative to working for oil companies; they were interested in having someone with knowledge of the social dynamics of these animals; I was interested in doing this as I thought it had some value in doing something good for people rather than just from the research point or view; in the middle of that I got a phone call from David Pilbeam, who had moved to Yale as Professor of Anthropology, inviting me to apply for a post as an assistant lecturer there; I flew over and gave a job talk in the spring of 1972 and was offered the job and took it; went to Connecticut in the autumn of 1972 never imagining that it was going to be the next thirty years of my life; my husband's name in Dewar; he was from the side of the family that didn't fight with the Campbells and as a consequence got thrown off the Highlands; they went to Canada then drifted down to northern Michigan where my husband grew up; he was a graduate student at Yale in archaeology and his supervisor, Chang Kwang-Chih, was the Chairman of the department when I was recruited and claimed the credit for our marriage; Bob was married at that time but he went to do his PhD work in Taiwan and they decided to separate; Bob came back single in 1974; after his PhD he was offered various jobs but managed to get one at the University of Connecticut; we got married and bought a house at the mid-point of the shortest route, so each commuted forty minutes in different directions; he is an archaeologist and human ecologist and did his PhD on the origins of agriculture in Taiwan; as it turns out the provisions for preservation of organic remains in Taiwan are not good; he found a lot of pottery but did not find the grains and organic remains he was looking for; at that time it was not possible to work in mainland China so was thinking about Indonesia; I kept saying that Madagascar was really interesting so around 1975 he started working there and still has major research projects there and in New England; he is here in Cambridge as a Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology when he is not being consort to the Vice-Chancellor, another of his duties

57:41:15 I met Keith Hart at Yale; he was an enormously important intellectual influence on me and on Bob because he had a deep belief in the intellectual coherence of anthropology, which is rare; he came to Yale driving an agenda of intellectual engagement among the sub-fields of anthropology; he would come to our house and we would argue into the night, and there was brilliance amidst this cascade of ideas; we have remained good friends; in terms of giving me a sense that anthropology does have as much sense as a discipline as many did, Keith drove that into my brain in an uncompromising and cogent way

Second Part - 28th September 2008

0:09:07 I went to Yale from Cambridge by way of Madagascar and London so there was an interlude of not feeling part of any institution; the most traumatic experience of arriving at Yale was that I was expected to lecture to classes of 60-70 students twice a week for thirteen weeks; not only had I not done anything like that but had never experienced anything like it as a student; I made the mistake of telling the students in my first lecture that I didn't know what I was doing and that we should learn together; so a huge cultural shift as well as being away from my family and everything that I was used to; but I was twenty-four and it was an adventure; I settled in quite quickly, earning $10,000 a year, but living like a graduate student, so I saved almost all of it; it defined some sense of autonomy; partly because I have never been very reflective and had not imagined what things would be like, found them rich and productive years and made friends of a lifetime as well; Harold Scheffler and I taught together on the application of Darwinian theory to human social systems, which was intellectually important to me; Joe Errington and I taught a course on language and symbols in human and non-human primates together; there was wonderful seminar co-teaching; Kwang-Chih Chang and Emily Ahern and I taught a seminar in my first year there called the food seminar which was about food from an anthropological perspective; Keith Hart was enormously influential for me; John Marks, my colleague in biological anthropology - the list is very long but I was much influenced by my colleagues in anthropology; Yale had reading courses which were similar to the Cambridge supervision system, particularly for third and fourth year students and all those doing their senior projects; much of the work with graduate students was also done one to one; I was familiar with this but the performance element of lectures and the systematic way in which one was expected to decide what constituted the knowledge that the students should acquire, which is itself a heavy responsibility, and then how do you convey that; in my own case this was deeply inadequate for many years as I learnt on the job how to do this; even now if I were to return to teaching I believe that my experience as a Provost and a Vice-Chancellor would itself influence the way that I would approach teaching; when I arrived at Yale there was no instruction on how to lecture, you were just expected to know how to do it; over the years this changed and graduate students were given training in how to teach; now at Cambridge there is help available, though not everybody avails themselves of the opportunity; teaching is so central to the University it is strange that we provide no training; my husband learnt by listening to Sidney Mintz's lectures when he was a teaching assistant; it is common practice in the U.S. for teaching assistants to attend lectures of their senior staff for this purpose; Sidney was a warm and welcoming senior member of the faculty when I arrived in 1972 and Bob was his teaching assistant, so we became friends and colleagues

10:21:20 I did not seek out administrative roles so it was more accidental than intentional; I cannot remember important committees that I had anything to do with in my early years at Yale; my first administrative task was to be director of graduate studies for the department; I still look back on that as being the hardest thing I ever did; graduate students have many needs for support and advice and it was hard to draw the line; I nearly drowned doing that because I cared about the students and have remained friends with some of them; from there I went on to become chair of the Department of Anthropology; then one's colleagues would phone at night but the emotional neediness of graduate students was missing, it was more the politics of a community with some shared sense of purpose; the anthropology department had four sub-fields where you are crossing epistemological divides, which was particularly difficult in the 1980's; I was chair from 1986-1991 when I became the Director of the Peabody Museum; in American universities it may be more possible for a chairman of a department to get colleagues to deliver on the expectations of the institution, which exists here as well, but in all matters of any consequence there are no positions of real authority; I don't think the difference between here and Yale is as strong as some might imagine; it is easier to lead there as people are willing to be led, but there is not more power or authority; one of the most difficult areas of agreement is promotion; at Yale the chair of a department had no authority to decide and could only try to manage the arguments among colleagues; I could not articulate what it is that makes a good chairman; if one is always looking for the middle ground does this mean one misses the opportunity to make radical step changes? There are such changes at universities but they tend to play out over a longer period of time than a radical step change; a good example at Cambridge is the change in the demography of the undergraduate population; still think it is extraordinary that an institution that was dedicated to the education of men by men for almost all of its history, in the space of ten years would take almost a residual tolerated presence of women and transform it into a 50/50 undergraduate population; that was radical change but it took over a decade to implement and one could argue there were 50-60 years of precedent leading up to it; Cambridge is thus capable of radical change but may take longer; the question then is does it take too long and are there some radical changes that should happen faster; it is not evident to me that that is the case; I go into meetings well briefed with some sense of what I would hope the direction would be; I do have a sense that the Vice-Chancellor's authority being still at Cambridge a highly questioned or challenged issue; sometimes I bump up against the limits of what I may say or do in ways that surprise me and I am constantly aware that I don't fully understand how Cambridge thinks about what a Vice-Chancellor is and does; I believe that that is changing and evolving and I am cautious in asserting a leadership role that as Provost at Yale I could do; a risk in being too bossy and directive is that people leave the room feeling steamrollered; women were not allowed to take degrees here until 1948 although they had been able to attend lectures and even do the examinations before this; a scandalous muddle and I think a great blot on the history of Cambridge that it took so long for women to be given formal recognition

Third Part - 18th December 2008

0:09:07 I was asked by the President of Yale whether I would consider being Director of the Peabody Museum; I refused as at that time our children were young; I was asked to serve on the search committee and spent two years describing to various candidates why this was a wonderful job; I completely internalized my own rhetoric so after two years, having failed to persuade anyone, the President asked me again; I took it and loved the job; a natural history museum at this juncture in history with new technologies allows one to capture then share information; I was at the Peabody at the moment when the collections manager was telling me that it was impossible to capture in an electronic digital form the nuance and detail of the collection; within a year they had undergone a complete transformation; we had 18,000,000 accessioned objects and it was supposed to take decades; by the time I left after three and a half years, because they were completely fired up to do this it was happening at the speed of light; that made the Peabody collections available around the world; for what is going on environmentally around the world, to have an historical record going back 150-200 years, allows you to see environmental change from another perspective; objects in a natural history museum can be "read" in profoundly different ways as technologies evolve; being able to extract DNA from fossilized and sub-fossil material gives you a whole new meaning of what are in the objects; it is a very exciting time where traditions dating back to the cabinet of curiosities intersect with modern technologies; university museums also have a responsibility to the larger public by way of exhibitions; problems of how to display and how to stimulate debate; made for me a rich experience so when the President asked me to serve as Provost I really did not want to do it as we were reorganizing the Museum

7:30:04 Cambridge has no visitor centre like Oxford; it was under discussion when I arrived here to put such a centre in King's Parade; I am sympathetic to the idea but it is hard to decide who it would be for; I think that Cambridge is hard to visit in a serious way; tourism is an unresolved issue for Cambridge; the blue badge guides do brilliantly, but you cannot invite tourists into departments or even parts of colleges; my scepticism when I arrived with the vision presented to me was coupled to the sense that there are so many needs here and this would not go to the top of the list; our museums have so little dedicated funding and it would not be right to take money from them for such a scheme; I worry when I think things can only get tougher; of the fundamental proposition, I think Cambridge is an inimitable place; could do a virtual tour for tourists before they walked round - its time will come

14:37:03 I did become Provost of Yale; it was a very hard job; the division of labour was that the President had prime responsibility for setting general strategic directions for the outside world and the Provost's task was the day to day running of the academic and administrative activities within the University, building the operations and capital budgets; we worked together and I would never have done anything major without consulting with him; looking back at Yale with all its wealth, one wonders how it could have been a tough job; I became Provost in 1994 when we were running a $20,000,000 deficit and my first task was to figure out whether we could save money to bring the budget back into balance; we did succeed in no small measure because the Yale endowment grew so rapidly; however academics are always imagining new and wonderful ways of using money before it has even quite materialized; the aspirations and ambitions of the institution will, and should, outstrip the available means; worked on the institutional policies of Yale for eight and a half years, and had practice for Cambridge's 800th anniversary from having Yale's 300th anniversary in 2001; they  were very interesting years; financial difficulties are breaking over US universities at the moment as their endowments plunge, and our turn will come

20:19:15 When I was first approached about this job at Cambridge I said that I had no interest in it; however, when I was offered it I had no difficulty in accepting it; in between, after refusing to have anything to do with it over a period of several months I was then persuaded by my husband and daughters, and by the indomitable Tony Badger who was chairing the search committee, that I should go over for one day; I came to Cambridge for a day and was far from persuaded; then I came back and forth over the course of an autumn and met members of the search committee and others; I fell in love with Cambridge again so by the time I was offered the position I was clear that this was an irresistible combination of a great university but with all kinds of challenges; I thought my experience at Yale could be helpful to Cambridge; also I had met people here who had impressed me deeply by their wisdom and thoughtfulness, and by their ambition for there to be change at Cambridge; that was my frame of mind in December 2002; work with senior administrators and academics heads of departments, but also with enthusiasts at lower levels, on policy or new installations, through discussion and revision; it takes time at Cambridge but because people have been involved it is imbedded and becomes part of the fabric of the place; there are frustrations, but I have come to feel that the way that we do things is far more defensible than I probably thought during the first year that I was here

27:46:00 Delighted that Cambridge is recognised as a place of great and broad strengths, but it is not all fine; there are things that other institutions do better and I am wary of triumphalism; Cambridge has transformed the way the world works, transformed the way it thinks, contributed to a degree that is staggering, but it has not been doing so steadily throughout its history; there have been bad patches; one of the things that interests me is how it is that Cambridge emerges from the bad patches to become truly great all over again; when I am no longer Vice-Chancellor and have the time I am interested to understand this; there were far fewer universities for much of our history so there was not as much competition; I believe that the relative autonomy of universities in this country for much of their history has been enormously important; I think that today people confuse autonomy with receipt of public funding; they are not the same; it is possible to receive public funding and have a high level of autonomy; think that as we become more and more relevant to society, as we are perceived to be, the temptation of society to try to get its hands into this activity will grow; I have not encountered anywhere a will to undo the autonomy of universities and I take government to be a proxy for society at large; I think being a beautiful place is important; the colleges provide a scale so the university can be both big and small at the same time; that has been part of its configuration from the earliest days; you also have to manage to attract extraordinary people into this free, nurturing environment; I don't think that Cambridge went out and recruited people in the way we do now; I don't know how that process worked in the past; as important as the people we attract are those we send forth; debateable whether the academics are more important for their thoughts or the students that are educated here; much is done spontaneously with little attachment to the university, but which people feel passionately about; I have often been asked the secret of Cambridge's success and I am trying to understand why, when most institutions don't survive,  universities have done; they are very different organizations from most others;  mere survival would be remarkable, but here we are at the dawn of the 21st century, a splendid university; this still needs explanation

40:02:22 My term ends 30th September 2010; I plan to get my life back and do a lot of things that I have not done for fifteen years; I have continued going to Madagascar throughout these years but for painfully short periods of time; there  is a mass of data that my colleagues and I have been collecting covering many aspects of life and environment there, so a twenty-five year history of a community; not sure whether there is material for a serious work, but I am attracted to doing that; however, I don't want to do just one thing full time; I am interested in trying to understand the longevity and success of Cambridge too; I am a gardener, but have no time for it and have gardeners to do the Vice-Chancellor's garden; I am looking forward to gardening again and cooking for friends; I enjoy doing such things with my husband and there is not enough of that life to enjoy with him; it is the rebalancing in our lives that I a really looking forward to; however, I don't want to think about the future as I am focussed on Cambridge now, and the rightness of this 800th anniversary at a time of great tumult; I had worried as anniversaries can be such a dreadful, self-congratulatory wallow; I never thought that Cambridge would do that, but then one wonders what is the point; I actually believe that it will be a very seriously affirmative activity over the course of this coming year when so much is uncertain in the world, and yet Cambridge persists; I am seriously excited at this point over that and it has got all my attention; also managing through whatever storms will come our way, as there surely will be; Cambridge is not immune to what is going on in the world and all our revenue streams will probably be hit; it is going to be tough, but we will survive

Postscript 13th March 2009

48:12:09 Importance of daughters, Bessy and Charlotte, in our lives