Ken Edwards interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th February 2009 0:09:07 Born in Shropshire in 1934; parents ran a small tenant farm; went to the local grammar school in Market Drayton; became interested in science and wanted to be a scientist; because of my rural background keen to combine science with agriculture so went to Reading University; grandparents all came from farming families; father courted my mother for thirteen years before they married; it was not the custom to marry until you had a home and he was a farm manager without a house to live in; they married when he got tenancy when he was thirty-nine; I was born a year later and was their only child; rather a lonely childhood; not many books in the house so the school library was a great source of delight; father was slightly taciturn and was the dominant figure in the house; used to think that mother was rather weak but think that she was actually the stronger of the two and displayed this in later years; they were very supportive of me and had high ambitions; they did not understand what a university was but were keen that I should go to one 5:02:13 My first school was a small private prep school which later became incorporated into the grammar school through the 1944 Education Act so I just moved seamlessly through and stayed until I was eighteen; at home, wandered through the fields a lot though didn't focus on any particular area of interest in nature; later, friends came through school which was only a couple of miles away; at school, remember a classics teacher, Mr John, whom I admired; he encouraged me to read more widely, particularly in the sixth form; I was enthused by the biology teacher who taught both botany and zoology in the sixth form; I did both those subjects as well as chemistry and physics; it was a fairly small sixth form but we were a tightly knit group; we stimulated each other, talking about current affairs, books, and listening to music; as it was a small school it did not have great academic traditions; Edwards is a border country name; my mother was a Lewis, and both families lived within ten miles of the Welsh border, but felt very English and we did not have the musical tradition; I was not very good at games though played hockey and cricket; it was too small a school to have a rugby team which was one of my great regrets; I regret that I never learnt to play a musical instrument but I now spend a lot of time listening to music, again developed through school as a lot of my friends had gramophones; I used to think that anything written after Beethoven was rubbish; I did a little bit of acting; we used to discuss politics a lot in the sixth form during the time of the post-war Labour government; my parents were Conservatives but gradually moved from the right; I have very happy memories of schooldays and am grateful for the grammar school; I regret their passing as it gave people like me a chance to achieve things that otherwise I probably would not have been able to 11:51:02 For Higher Certificate I did sciences and a little maths; I had decided I wanted to combine science with agriculture and the most attractive combination was agriculture and botany; I did not try for Cambridge as you couldn't do that combination but went to Reading where you could; before that I had done two years National Service which was probably good for me as I had until then had a narrow experience of life; I got a lot more out of it being a university student later; as the RAF was training national servicemen to be pilots, which I thought would be fun, I applied, but failed my medical; as I had some science I was put onto wireless; volunteered for an overseas posting and got sent to Northern Ireland for six months; eventually posted back to within three miles of my home, so didn't see as much of the world as I had hoped to in those two years; when I arrived at university at twenty I felt more confident about being able to mix with people because of that experience 14:33:34 Reading was a very small university; agriculture accounted for a third of the students; one of the remarkable things for a male student was that there were equal numbers of men and women which was very unusual in the 1950's; quite a lot of relationships developed and I met Janet, my wife, when we were there; we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary last summer and had several couples whom we had known as couples there; I got enthusiastic about rowing and involved in student politics, so probably didn't work as hard as I might have done in my first two years; the head of department said I should decide between rowing and getting a good degree in my third year; I took his advice; I remember him particularly, an interesting man, a South African who had been the technical director of the ground nut scheme in Tanzania; his name was Hugh Bunting, and he was Professor of Agricultural Botany at Reading, and he enthused me; there were some very competent lecturers there; I was fairly clear that I wanted to do a PhD and wanted to be in full-time research work; my choice of botany became overwhelmed by my interest in genetics; in some ways genetics was easier as you did not have to learn so many facts; the ingenuity of applying the facts was what I found so attractive; because of the nature of the degree one obvious way in which genetics could be used was in plant breeding, and that was my next step; the kind of genetics I was doing was classical Mendelian based; it was clear that the discovery of DNA would in the long term have tremendous effects on the way that genetics was studied but at that time it was not clear how that would be done technically; it was clearly exciting as it was not only establishing the basic material of life, but was also giving the code through the sequence of DNA; William Bateson was one of the great figures of that period and the rediscovery of Mendelism, but the aspect that had the biggest impact on me was the development of quantitative techniques to understand more complicated genetics; what I was doing was studying complex genetics which didn't operate through single Mendelian ratios because they were probably controlled by many genes rather than just a few; the quantitative methods seemed far away from what Crick and Watson had discovered; in fact it has taken nearly fifty years to have a major impact; one did not need to be a good mathematician to do this work, but a reasonable statistician; to see what statistics when applied to biological experiments could achieve was really quite an eye-opener; Fisher was one of the great contributors to this; computers only became important some time later; I went to Aberystwyth to do a PhD, at a research institute attached to the University, working for what was then the Agricultural Research Council; here most of the statistics were done on electric calculators which was extremely laborious; the theme of my PhD was the inheritance of certain leaf growth characters in perennial rye grass; it aimed to try to find whether you could use fairly simple measures of growth which would allow you to make selections to improve yield and whether that would be carried through, rather than having to grow the whole plant to look at aspects of development in leaf growth; the work went well but I had the benefit of working in a research institute with lots of material and advice on what I was doing; what you lost was the general feeling of excitement about being in a university; my supervisor was John Cooper, a great enthusiast if somewhat accident prone 24:56:18 After getting my PhD I decided to go to America to broaden my experience; I had become involved in the genetics of complex characters which still involved quite a lot of statistics; I wanted to move into the area of population studies but did not have much background in it; this was where my reading of Fisher and Haldane had stimulated me; I went to a group in Davis, California University, which at that time was largely agriculturally-based; there was a particular person I worked with on population genetics; it was at the time of the short Kennedy Presidency and he had been elected the previous January; there was an air of excitement after the uninspiring period of Eisenhower, at least in the academic community, who were mainly Democrats; remember going to see Kennedy speak in the Berkeley football stadium; we had much political discussion; the man I worked with thought that in Britain we lived in a rigid socialist state and I was having to defend the National Health Service; was there for a year; by this time I had married; Janet was a qualified teacher by that time but her qualifications did not allow her to teach in California, so she worked in a bank; we had married during the time of my PhD and for the first time had enough money to travel; I came back feeling full of admiration for the United States; we went back to Davis some years later at the time that the Nixon presidency was in crisis; watching the Watergate hearings was really like watching an onion being peeled; remember feeling that it was quite impressive that the structure of the Constitution was robust enough to have that degree of public exposure of wrong-doing without being a threat to the system; our constitution rests so much on goodwill and the expectation that things won't go badly wrong but it is not as robust as theirs; every time I go there I have a buzz of excitement about the place; during the first year did consider staying but my parents were still alive and I was an only child; Janet was very close to her family and didn't want to be so far away; we decided to come back after a year otherwise we might have stayed; I came back to a job in the research institute at Aberystwyth and worked there for another three years 31:19:01 We had our first child within eight months of coming back from the States; my daughter was born in a snow-storm and it was difficult to get to the hospital; two sons were born three and five years later; they all went to schools here in Cambridge; Juliet is a pianist, Steve, the elder boy, went to work at eighteen, Tony has gone into academic life and is a Reader in Economics at King's College, London; knowing something about genetics there was always a slight worry in the back of my mind during the pregnancies that they might be born with afflictions of some sort, but all were normal; in 1966, I got a chance to go on secondment for six months to teach in the University of Birmingham genetics department; went for the Autumn and Spring terms and really enjoyed teaching; decided that the research institute was rather an introverted; could see people twenty years older doing the same sorts of experiments that they had done twenty years earlier; I started looking for teaching jobs; I liked the contact with students and the flow of ideas from them; I enjoyed lecturing though the supervisions were in some ways more rewarding, as was running practical classes; there was a vacancy in the School of Agriculture in Cambridge, which I applied for; before the interview I was phoned by John Thoday in the Genetics Department here who told me they were about to advertise a job that might suit me; I came and saw him and the department and decided that was what I wanted to do; part of me wanted to get out of the association with agriculture as my interests had changed 38:13:03 I came with some trepidation as I had done very little teaching and had no experience of Cambridge and thought it probably rather a strange place; indeed I have found it strange over the years but not in the way I had expected; I had trepidation that it would be rather cool towards somebody who came from outside but the department was not like that at all; John Thoday, who died three months ago, was extremely helpful to young lecturers; he offered to come into some of my lectures and comment, so I settled in very quickly; Michael Ashburner, who is a bit younger than me, was obviously a rising star; David Cove, who went off to Leeds to be a Professor., was large in every sense; the place bubbled with ideas and coffee breaks sometimes went on for an hour and a half; it was a bit isolated then, out on the Milton Road where the Veterinary School had been, but this meant that we saw a lot of each other and had lunch together in the local pub; only third year students came out there on their bikes; we came in to the centre to do our lecturing; one of my first tasks was to give some lectures to second year agriculture students and was rather amazed to see that lecturers still wore gowns, though not in natural sciences; I got involved in teaching in natural sciences and agriculture for first and second year students, so was fairly frequently coming in; I was not attached to any college at first but then was invited by St John's into a teaching fellowship; looking back on that period I found it strangely unsettling as there were so many things one could do here in Cambridge as a university lecturer; I think I did not focus enough on research as I should have and now describe myself as having somewhat of a butterfly mind; the upshot was that I got involved in all sorts of administrative activities, firstly in the department; John Thoday encouraged me; I am not sure whether academics are innately unable to cope with administrative tasks or they just desperately don't want to do them; I ran the department timetable and student assessment system and generally did things that John Thoday asked me to do; I also got involved in College life and became Secretary to the College Council; I remember clearly the day that changed my life when John Thoday told me he was going to take a sabbatical year and wanted me to take over as Head of Department; I had just got two new research grants and just become a College Tutor so was about to refuse but couldn't think of anyone else; after that year he asked me to continue until he retired four years later, so I did; I got involved in the Council of Schools of Biological Sciences and became Chairman; I was doing less and less research and got to a point where I thought that when Thoday retired I would take a year off and go to work in a lab in Canberra where I had some contacts, and study new techniques in molecular biology; I was organizing this when the Secretary General's job came up and John Thoday and Ian Nicol were very keen that I apply; I got the job 47:11:10 There may have been an element of feeling that I was not doing enough research in taking the job, but there were positive sides as well; the satisfaction of those impulses which I describe as a butterfly mind were most fully satisfied when I was a Vice-Chancellor because I had a good reason for going round departments and asking what they were doing; my greatest joy was doing this, asking to see what was most exciting, and having a range of interests was an effective tool in being Vice-Chancellor at Leicester; the three years as Secretary General in Cambridge were somewhat different; it was a strange job that doesn't exist now; you worked for the Vice-Chancellor, which at that time was a two year appointment; at the beginning John Butterfield was Vice-Chancellor; he was Master of Downing and Regius Professor of Physics and had lots of other commitments, so the time he could devote to the details of running the University were very small; Stephen Fleet, who was the Registrary, was very good at accepting that the academic matters of the University were matters for the General Board and the Secretary General's office and the Vice-Chancellor; I had a fairly clear view of the academic matters while Stephen got on with running the administration; on my first day in the job three people had made appointments to see me - John Taylor, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Applied Maths and John Rushbrook, Reader in the Cavendish; their concern was that the British Government were so worried about the foreign exchange levels that they were considering pulling out of CERN; this they said would be a disaster for them as high energy particle physics would become almost impossible overnight as they depended on the facilities at CERN; theoretical high energy physics would last a bit longer but would die in a couple of years; asked what they wanted me to do and wrote on it for both of them; the second visitor was Wynn Godley who was then Director of the Department of Applied Economics into which a University review was taking place; he wanted to talk to me about how the department was run and how one did research in economics; there was either his way of measuring patterns and associations, and the other was to have a theoretical idea about how the economy might work which allowed you to make predictions; the third was Don Cupitt who was then Chairman of the Faculty Board of Divinity; he came because there was a personnel problem in the faculty and involved the evidence that they had that one of their staff, in addition to being a fulltime member of the Faculty and a University Reader, had a Chair in a German university; I contacted the German university and found it was true; lead to inviting this individual to come and see me with two pieces of paper, his contract with the University and a letter from the German university - and that was the first day; one of the issues that came up was very dramatic; Martin Rees from the Institute of Astronomy came to see me saying that he understood that the Science Research Council was considering the move of the Royal Greenwich Observatory from Herstmonceux in Sussex to a university, and would Cambridge be interested in hosting it; my immediate reaction was to say yes; I then talked to people in the Cavendish and the Engineering Department and discussed a site on the Madingley Road; remember tramping through the snow there with representatives of the Science Research Council; then it ran into trouble with Regent House, the University governing body; there were a number of people who objected to the idea and everything has to go to ballot; here was an issue where all the people who were most concerned were enthusiastic; we had to negotiate the move and cost with the Science Research Council before we were actually asking for Regent House's approval; there was a dilemma about whether you started a discussion in general terms when people could say they didn't have enough to make a judgement on, or waited until you had a worked out scheme to put to them; I felt there were people making objections on not very good grounds; it took a long time and ultimately it wasn't a success as it was just closed down when the research council thought again about how they supported astronomy; now they fund astronomers to use the big observatories somewhere else in the world; remember when we were at near agreement with the research council but had to get it through the University; they asked how long it would take imagining it would be something like three months; in the end it took two years; remember after I had moved to Leicester meeting Bill Mitchell, the Chairman of the Research Council at that time, who said that had he realized how long it would take for Cambridge to make up its mind he probably would have let it go to Manchester; the role of Secretary General was fascinating as you did get involved in all aspects of university life; remember when the French department was proposing to give a paper in the second year in French art and literature and the upset it caused in the art history department which I naively assumed was just a territorial dispute; it was in fact about post-modernism and, as a scientist, felt really out of my depth on that one; I am sad to see that the job has gone although that arrangement was not tenable as the University clearly needed a fulltime Vice-Chancellor; I was representing the University but clearly did not have the prestige; now it seems to me that the Vice-Chancellor spends a lot of time being the face of the University from the outside, and there could still have been a role for a Secretary General type figure being like a provost in the American system, linked to the academic community 1:03:28:12 On the structure of the University at that time, Regent House was the governing body; the Vice-Chancellor chaired the General Board and also the Council of the Senate which is between the Regent House and the General Board; Regent House is the supreme governing body and includes all lecturers and senior members of the University; then the arrangement was that the Council moves a Grace which is a proposal to do something; if there are no responses from members of Regent House in sufficient numbers then it is automatically Graced within a certain time frame; if it went to ballot found the voting numbers were usually pretty small - from about 3,000 members, the voters would often number around two hundred; there is a problem about what is a representative group of members; I was in charge of effecting changes which the General Board had approved and sometimes they would fall foul of a small group who were not really representative; the strength of the system is the sense of involvement which is unique to Cambridge and no doubt, Oxford; it was different from Leicester which had the standard Governance arrangement for universities that had been created by statute from about 1890 until the 1950's; these had a Council, which was the formal governing body, which consisted of about forty members, of whom slightly more than half would not be members of the university; it would be chaired by a non-member; then there would be an academic Senate which would be quite large, all full professors and other people designated by office; that was chaired by the vice-chancellor; I think it worked quite well but there is considerable responsibility on the vice-chancellor in those circumstances to ensure that other opinions are encouraged by sub-committees; it meant that decisions could be made more quickly, for which I was quite grateful; for a university like Leicester which is competing with Oxford and Cambridge, is not going to get facilities as readily and the ability to make quick decisions is an advantage; for example, during my time there the Medical Research Council decided they would like to set up a unit of toxicology; Cambridge was one place and Leicester another; certainly the fact that one could make a very quick decision to accept it was an advantage; I sometimes think that here there is a fairly small group of unrepresentative people who decide they want to have a say in the running of the University but don't represent anyone in particular but themselves; Cornford's ' Microcosmographia Academica' is to a certain extent a caricature, but there is a lot of truth there; I used to reread that every summer while I was at Leicester along with Machiavelli’s 'The Prince', as guides on how to deal with my job; academics love debate though don't necessarily like making decisions; I remember a debate in St John's governing body on whether we should admit women; I was in favour, but one of my colleagues who I'd hoped would also be in favour, got up in the debate and spoke against it; I asked him why afterwards and he said I should realize that we loved to debate and if everybody was in favour we wouldn't be able to debate it any more; think there were some vice-chancellors who found that aspect pretty intolerable, I regarded it sometimes as an irritation, but as a challenge 1:10:49:23 As Secretary General, the fact that Cambridge is a collegiate university did not really impinge a great deal; there was quite a heavy weighting of heads of colleges in the Council of the Senate but I found them really pretty constructive and I got to know many of them quite well; they were useful people to talk to about what was going on in the University and what their ideas were; got to know Harry Hinsley, Master of St John's, very well; Derek Brewer at Emmanuel was also very good to talk to; it was important to know the movers and shakers, the opinion makers, and Gabriel Horn was one, Jack Lewis was another; certainly, when I went to Leicester, one of the first things that I tried to work out was who were the people who were regarded as framers of opinion in the University; I would try to get to know them and to gain their trust; in both jobs there is the challenge of providing leadership but also getting people to the position where they feel they have had their say, and recognise in the end somebody has to take the decision; others can judge how well I performed these roles; Peter Swinnerton-Dyer was Chairman of the University Grants Committee by the time I became Vice-Chancellor and I had dealings with him in that capacity; one thing that I remember was that I inherited a Faculty of Humanities which was in some disarray, with eighty to ninety fulltime academic staff and maybe a thousand students; there were thirteen different departments so that some were tiny with two or three people; the Grants Committee was then having a series of national subject reviews, one of which was earth sciences - should there be a smaller number of more viable departments; they came to the conclusion that there should be and Leicester was a beneficiary; they were also having reviews of classics, where we had a department of three people, and music, where we had two and a half people; I suspected that the answer was going to be that we should close them; I went to see Peter and told him what I suspected would happen; I offered to close these departments if I could keep the money and put it into archaeology, and history and English, all good departments which could do with being a little bigger; this arrangement worked; I retired in 1999 after being twelve years at Leicester, and three years before that as Secretary General at Cambridge; when I accepted the job at Leicester there were still discussions in government circles about the effect of the demographic decline in the number of eighteen year olds predicted over the next twenty years; there was talk of closing some universities; I remember thinking was I wise to leave Cambridge to go somewhere that might close, then I realized that Leicester had two political advantages, one was that all the parliamentary seats in Leicester were all marginal and the second was that it had a medical school, so I was pretty confident it wouldn't be closed; what happened in fact that the uptake rate among eighteen year olds rose so rapidly that it overwhelmed us; now we are talking about 50% in higher education, then it was 15%; a more pervasive change was the consequence of the change in the industrial base of the country, where Government have realized we have to live by our wits rather than by making things; education has become a central part of economic development; the combination of these two things has meant expansion without matching funding; there is a case to be made for students making some financial contribution; for two years when at Leicester I was Chairman of the National Committee of Vice-Chancellors and we anticipated that fees would be introduced; we commissioned some research to look at the financial benefits to individuals having a degree compared to those who could have gone to university but had decided not to; the financial advantage was quite considerable even after tax, as well as being to the public good, so some contribution could be expected; at the same time there was a greater sense of direction about what universities should be doing, and social engineering whereby you got benefit from taking students from certain post codes, and a higher level of accountability which is shown in the way that funding councils operate and many Government initiatives; like many aspects of public funded services there is a high level of target setting and accountability which is diverting effort on a huge scale from what universities should be doing; there is a dilemma between the opportunity to do more and make a bigger contribution to society and at the same time being swamped in a blanket of accountability; that change happened during my time; there are many complaints about the time spent on a whole range of administrative tasks many of which are having to account for what they have done; the research assessment exercise when it started was for the university system in general and had many beneficial results as universities began to ask themselves what they were doing to support research and whether they were doing it in the most effective way; however, it developed a life of its own and then became incredibly intrusive to very little effect; the problem is that bright ideas should have a short time span, should have a stimulus effect and then we don't need them; I think I retired at the right time 1:23:16:10 After twelve years coming back to Cambridge, I don't have the same involvement with the University; the City has been changing ever since I came here; in some ways I feel quite proud of the place; there is the University generating economic activity directly and indirectly that I think a university ought to, and it has not lost its soul in the process; the side effects are that it is more crowded, a larger city, traffic more gridlocked, but I don't get the impression that at departmental level the University has changed much except for the weight of demands for accountability which is affecting everybody; faculties are now much more responsible for themselves so the middle layer is strengthened as I did at Leicester; the heads of those working with me and the Pro Vice-Chancellor as a senior development team; giving heads of faculties more autonomy does mean you lose contact with them; our senate at Leicester was really too big and very rarely did the professors of medicine turn up but left the Dean to speak for them, and it was too big for effective decision making, but is was a good forum for debate and for spreading information 1:27:43:24 Politically, I have voted for different parties in different elections; I like to think that I am voting for the individual candidate; when David Lane was here, a Conservative, I voted for him because I knew and respected him; in 1997 I voted Labour as one of those who thought that Tony Blair was going to be a great Prime Minister, we all make mistakes; now I don't think any of the political parties are clear about what is going on economically, and there are not huge differences on social matters, they are all fighting for the centre ground; there is a feeling that it is sometimes a good thing to give the other lot an opportunity; on religion, I don't have a belief; I hesitate to say I am an atheist as it sounds too positive and puts me in the Dawkins camp; my reasoning is that I don't see anything in what we know about the universe and the way it operates any need to invoke anybody who changes things from time to time; once a rule had been set up it continued to operate for the last 13.7 billion years; as a biologist, having lived through Darwinism and the DNA revolution, it is now so clear to me that evolution and natural selection is a perfectly adequate explanation for the diversity of living form that we have; they clearly all share the same kind of information system and metabolic system; I don't see any need to invoke a God who is active, nor have I had any direct personal experience which I could say was religious; how it was all set up, what created it in the first place, whether there are parallel universes, I don't know, but I am not a believer; in my childhood I used to go to church; my parents came from different denominations, my mother was a Methodist and my father Church of England; they couldn't agree on where to go to church so didn't go very often, but insisted that I did; I was confirmed and was a believer for a time; gradually came to my present views in my mid-twenties, but I may be wrong; I feel I have had a fortunate life, with improvements in health care meaning I have lived to be seventy something in reasonably good health; I had the opportunity of a good education and the kinds of jobs I have been doing I have enjoyed at every level; I made a jump from one activity to another but within the same world; I am glad I made that change as I have enjoyed what I have been doing since; maybe it was a golden age, but that may be just the fact of looking back; do wonder whether the world will be as easy for my own grandchildren; the other side of growing old is the feeling that the future is going to be pretty miserable