Professor Louise Richardson

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My Castaway this week is the political scientist Professor Louise Richardson. The two hundred and seventy second Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, she is the first woman to hold the post. In fact, she was the first in her big Irish family to even go to university, and possibly the first person ever to pick the institution for a subsequent master's degree on the basis that she liked the look of the nearby beaches. She chose California.

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She spent a number of years as a Harvard professor, and after nine eleven published the book What Terrorists Want Understanding the Enemy Containing the Threat, and governments around the globe have sought her advice on the political preoccupation of our age.

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Just as well, she's used to handling thorny subjects. She's Oxford's Vice-Chancellor at a time when universities are grappling with fundamental issues from funding to free speech. She says, We need to expose our students to ideas that make them uncomfortable so they can think about why it is that they feel uncomfortable and what it is about those ideas that they object to. So, Professor Louise Richardson, welcome to Desert Island Discs. You became Vice-Chancellor then at the beginning of this year, and you were, well, it was a baptism of fire, wasn't it? You were thrust into the position just as the whole Cecil Rhodes thing was properly kicking off. We should remind listeners that was about the statue at one of the colleges of this imperialist Brit who in his time had very racist views. Many people said the statue should go, it is now staying.

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Did it feel like a baptism of fire at the time?

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Well, I think it probably did, but Rhodes was just one aspect of that. Coming into a large, complex institution with which I wasn't terribly familiar, it was going to be a baptism of fire anyway. I didn't quite expect to be in the limelight to the extent that I was over Rhodes and similar issues. The most recent National Union of Students survey says that 63% of students support the idea that people with potentially offensive views should be banned from British campuses, banned from speaking at events.

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What on earth is it, do you think, that that accounts for this great wave of caution that is overcoming our universities? Well the first point is I couldn't disagree more with that view, I have to say. I wonder about it. I think perhaps it might be partly attributable to social media and the fact that students and young people generally today operate in an echo chamber of like-minded people in social media, less exposed to contrary views.

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I think perhaps this generation has been more cozetted by their parents than earlier generations too.

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I would say this isn't entirely a new phenomenon. When I was a student in the 70s, there were chants of no free speech for fascists and so on. But my view, of course, is that a university is exactly where you should hear these views, and part of education is about hearing them and countering them, countering them reasonably. So as I mentioned then, there have been 272 Vice-Chancellors at Oxford University, and you are the first woman.

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How much do you think that matters?

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Oh, I think it matters to uh young women and men. I think it's very important that girls have role models. This isn't the first time I've been uh the first woman. I was also the first woman at the University of St Andrews, and there were lots of pitfalls there that I hadn't anticipated because of my gender, and so I'm

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I was prepared, I think, this time. Maybe we'll touch on a few of those throughout. For now, though, let's go to the music, Louise Richardson. Tell me about the first piece. What are we going to hear? Why have you chosen this? We're going to hear from St. Andrew's Acapella Group, the other guys, singing St. Andrews Girls. The other guys are this wonderful acapella group made up of St. Andrews University students. They sang this song at my farewell party. And they're a wonderful group of fun-loving boys. They're funny, talented, terrific group.

Speaker 44:20

Other guys break the necks Tryna keep a little sneak

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You can travel the world, but nothing comes close to the East Five Coast. Once you party up, no hope that you'll be falling in love. Our same Andrews girls, they're under Getty Wood. Hunter goes and barbers on top.

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That was St Andrews Girls from the Other Guys. They are the St Andrews University Acapella Group.

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So, uh Professor Richardson, one of your academic areas of expertise is terrorism. You argue that the global war on terror, as it has been characterized broadly, was always doomed to fail. Why is that?

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Because ultimately I see terrorism as a political, not a military, issue. Terrorists are invariably outmanned and outgunned by their opponents. And what they're deliberately trying to do is to provoke governments into an overreaction. So by declaring war on terrorism, we're elevating their stature. We're playing into their hands because they are, after all, in the case of, say, al-Qaeda, motley group of extremists living under the

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sponsorship of one of the poorest governments on the planet,

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And then the Western world, the most powerful countries in the world, declare war on them. That elevates their stature to a degree to which they could have only dreamt. If terrorism could be solved militarily, it would have been solved. It's precisely because it's ultimately a political issue rather than a military one. Which is not to say that there's no role for military force in countering terrorism. Of course, so long as the force is exclusively used against the perpetrators of the violence and not the broader communities from which they come, how would one know when one had won a war against terrorism? Is victory when there is no terrorist attack ever? We're never going to achieve that, not in a free society. So we can never declare ourselves to have won. So why cede that kind of initiative to our opponents? I'm going to ask you a big question now, and it's because so much of what you've written is tackling the big questions and, as I characterize them, the preoccupations of governments and voters right now. What should governments in the West be doing right now that they're not? I think governments in the West need to ensure that the communities within their countries from which these groups are recruiting do not feel alienated.

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The best source of intelligence on the bad guys operating in our societies are the communities in which they operate. We need to ensure that we have the loyalty of those communities so that they will turn in the extremists. Now, we should, of course, be investing in intelligence. I'm no pacifist. Intelligence is the best possible weapon in our arsenal against terrorism. We need to be engaging them in cyberspace. We need to be engaging them in the battle of ideas, because I think the ideas that they're touting are completely unpalatable to most people in the West, but we need to be engaging.

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Let's have some more music, Louise Richardson. We're going to your second of the day. Tell me about this. Well, this is James Galway playing the flute, and the song is called Brian Brew's March. This speaks to my Irish heritage. Brian Brew was the last High King of Ireland, won a famous battle against the Norsemen in 1014. So he, as Yeats put it, stilled our childhood play. He was a great hero in Ireland. But this particular piece, I think, is an absolutely beautiful piece.

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Brian Bruce March, played there by James Galway on the flute with the harpist directed by Marissa Robelis. Uh your mum was eighteen, just eighteen, when she married your dad, uh Louise Richardson. What were your parents' backgrounds?

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My father was from Dublin. My mother was from Trimore County, Waterford, grew up in the house that they still live in. They met while he was on holidays in Tramor. Tramor is a little seaside town on the southeast coast. So my mother left school at 16 and married my father at 18. And she is somebody who, in this generation, there's no end to what she might have achieved. But she stayed at home and raised seven children and remained glamorous throughout and is an extraordinary capable person to this day. And my father is a gentle, caring man with a wonderful sense of humour who's totally devoted to his large family and we're all totally devoted to him. It was then the late 50s when you were born. What are your very, very earliest memories of life at home?

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Well, I had an older brother, which dominated my early years, I suppose. I think.

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Birth order is very significant. So, with seven kids, everything has to be negotiated, and that's a good life skill. I was envious of my brother because boys seemed to have all the fun and have get all the respect, and the assumptions that they would do interesting things were always there, where there was never any assumption that I'd do anything other than get married. But we were a big, happy family. How early on were you aware that how come it's like that for him, and it's like that for me as a girl?

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Oh, very early on. I was a real tomboy and I thought he got all the advantages. And very early on, for example, I remember he got a new communion suit, like a mini version of a man's suit. And this just was the most profound injustice, to my view, so much so that I went into my parents' wardrobe and borrowed it and put it on and walked downtown, which of course was reported to my parents with advice to take me to a doctor. What age were you when you did that?

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That four, three or four.

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How fascinating

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What do you make of that thread, that that very early

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Was apparent in you? I was very lucky to have self-confidence pretty much from the beginning, and that was a huge piece. And I always felt that there's no easier way to explode the myth of male superiority than having three brothers. I have three wonderful brothers, but the notion that there was anything that they could do that I couldn't was preposterous. Let's have some more music. This is Carolyn's Concerto by the Chieftains. The Chieftains were one of the Irish groups of my youth. I choose a song I love that makes me want to dance any time I hear it. I grew up doing Irish dancing, so used to dance to this music, and it's a wonderfully upbeat, terrific song, Carolyn being an ancient blind Irish poet.

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That was the Chieftains with the Belfast Harp Orchestra and Carolyn's Concerto. Is it true that one of the nuns who taught you in your convent school had not just taught your mother, but had taught your grandmother? That's right, yeah, mother sister Saint Anthony. I was introduced to her on my first day. She didn't chat to me that much. The nuns weren't the chatty sort of.

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That's right. Yeah, motherfucker.

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You said earlier that, you know, you were probably the expectation is that you would do what your mother had done. You know, you were a girl growing up in County Waterford at the time that you were. What were you taught at the convent? We were taught ironing, and we'd start on men's handkerchiefs, and at the end of the year, made it up to the collars of men's shirts, and woe betide any girl who had a wrinkle in a man's shirt. And I remember saying, There's no way I'm ever going to marry anyone who expects me to iron his shirts. Did you say that out loud? Oh, I did say that out loud, yes. I used to get in trouble quite a bit. And of course, I didn't marry a man who expected me to iron his shirts. Tell me about the time when you were, I think by then you would have been about 14. It was 1972. It was a week or two after the Bloody Sunday killings. And your mother...

Professor Louise Richardson12:19

In labor.

Professor Louise Richardson12:20

Yeah, yeah.

Professor Louise Richardson12:21

But at the time.

Professor Louise Richardson12:41

Oh uh

Professor Louise Richardson12:44

And

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Well, she sort of barricaded you into your bedroom. Tell me what happened.

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Well, I was always very interested in history and politics. Then, when Northern Ireland started to explode in the late 1960s, we all saw this as a continuation of Irish history and British oppression of the Catholics. I would say at school every day we assembled and said our prayers beneath a crucifix and then a photograph of the seven men who'd been executed for signing the Proclamation of Independence in 1916. So we got a very biased view of Irish history, which we took as gospel, a very Republican view of Irish history.

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And that was the view high health. So after Bloody Sunday, I was completely incensed. I followed events in Northern Ireland very closely. I kept scrapbooks. And then the week after the Bloody Sunday, there was going to be a big peace march in Derry. And I decided I was going to go up and march in it. And I announced this to my parents, which was completely preposterous because I didn't have the means to get all the way up there. It was the other end of the country. But I said to my mother, we had a cousin of my mother's had married somebody from Noray, so I thought maybe I could stay there. And I said this to my mother that I was going to go. And she said, for the only, only time I've ever heard her use this word in my life, she said, I forbid it. You will not go. I forbid it. You have chosen to write as a prominent academic that you would have joined the IRA in a heartbeat if they'd allowed you to. And I think that is a very brave thing to admit, to actually put down on paper.

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It's haunted me since saying it, though it was true. I was describing this period after Bloody Sunday, which was a very freebile time in Ireland. You're looking back on that now, I've I've tried to understand that and tried to think of the in the same context of other kids and how

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who didn't have the advantage I had of getting an education and questioning everything that I'd been taught.

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how they hold on to these ideas and um end up joining terrorist groups. Let's have some more music. Tell me about your force. This is a wonderful musical. This particular song speaks to talented women and how they sometimes wind up with men

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That they probably shouldn't and are underappreciated by. And it's a song my two daughters, I've two very independent-minded daughters, both of whom have wonderful singing voices, so they love singing this song.

Professor Louise Richardson15:20

How many women would drive themselves crazy by arguing over a game of chess?

Professor Louise Richardson15:27

Not very many, the way things are going, there'll soon be one less. Don't believe you, sweetie pie. Listen, Freddie, I too had ambitions. How did I get way late?

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The way things are going now

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Don't believe you.

Professor Louise Richardson15:40

Such a flower, a sensitive soul, a delicate child. Wind up as a nursemaid, respectably set for the glittering prizes, instead of which I landed you.

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How many women from the musical chess composed by Tim Rice, Benny Anderson and Bjorn Olveas? The singers were Judy Kuhn and Philip Kasnoff. So, Professor Louise Richardson, you went on to study at Trinity College, Dublin, and this was a college that had been forbade by the Catholic Church of being attended by Catholics. The Catholic Church banned Catholics from attending until 1970. There were very few Catholics there when I was there. So as you have characterized it in print then, you were a Catholic country girl and you say I was very much out of my depth socially in this upper crust Protestant campus. That was tangible, was it? Well yes, insofar as most of the others in my class knew one another, they'd gone to the same handful of Protestant schools.

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I didn't have a chip on my shoulder about it, but I was just very conscious of it. They had more disposable income than I did. They knew one another and were very comfortable around Trinity, whereas it was all completely new to me. All the unwritten rules and norms I had to figure out. And 1975 was, you know, when you started university, it was a time of particularly bloody turmoil in the Troubles. You know, in Nyuri and South Armagh, in particular, people were being killed. As you say, you were one of the very few.

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Catholics there in this Protestant institution, was there a challenge to you? Was it did you feel a a sense among the other students that uh you know you had to be answerable for the crimes of others?

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No, I didn't. But there was a Republican club on campus which invited me to join. And did you? I didn't. But I went along to many meetings and I had decided at that point that while I shared their objectives, I didn't approve of violence as the means to achieve them. So I declined to join.

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But there was no particular pressure. It was all very friendly. We sat around arguing. I used to go to meetings. But I drifted away from that into other causes like anti-apartheid and so on. By the time I got to Trinity, and certainly in the course of my time there, when I learned a different version of Irish history, I was much less convinced. And I think that's part of what education does. It robs you of your certitude. It sows doubt. And it certainly sowed doubt in my whole view of the history of Ireland and view of Irish politics. So it was a gradual awakening. It was, yes. Yes. Let's have some more music. Tell me about your next then. Oh, this is a beautiful song. As a family, we love films. We watch a lot of films. We joke my husband buys a new projector every two years. And this is a beautiful film which speaks to nostalgia about somebody leaving a small community and going out to the big wide world. But it's also just the particular theme song is when I associate with my husband who used to play it constantly in his car.

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That was the theme music from Cinema Paradiso, composed by Ennio Morricone and performed by the Unione Muzzicisti of Rome. So tell me, Professor Louise Richardson, about this time when you were taking your history degree, as we know. You got a scholarship to study at UCLA.

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I said in the introduction that you'd chosen it because of the beaches. I mean, I'm not half wrong on that, am I? No, you're not wrong at all, actually. I saw an ad in the Irish Times for a Rotary Foundation scholarship, and I thought I'd apply. I thought this would give me experience competing with my classmates because it was a national competition. So I applied without ever imagining that I would win it, and I won it. And you could choose to study any subject you like in any university in the world you liked. Extraordinary. And at the time, we had an ancient encyclopedia at home, and I went home to choose the five universities, and I looked up the universities I knew, Harvard and Yale, and according to the encyclopedia, they were men only, which I hadn't realized. Of course, it was just that it was an ancient encyclopedia. So totally out of date. Totally out of date. And there was a photograph of this brand new campus in Southern California. And I said, oh, that sounds good, near Newport Beach. So I put that on the list.

Professor Louise Richardson20:38

So totally out of date, yeah.

Professor Louise Richardson20:44

Oh.

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And rather a golden time to be there, I imagine. I mean, what are your most vivid memories of California student life in the late 70s? I was quite a novelty. I had a heavy Irish accent. They thought I was very curious. And I was being hosted by this group of local Rotarians, who it was an all-male club, and they saw it as their responsibility to look after me. So they were extraordinarily generous. And early on,

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Somebody asked me what I thought of the place. I said, I couldn't believe how everybody seemed to drive around here. And he said, You mean you don't have a car? I said, No. And he said, Well, you can have one of mine. And he took me to his house and I chose the one that looked like the most bockety, which turned out to be a 1957 Nash Metropolitan, which he gave me and which I drove for the year. And then back home you graduated in Dublin, and then you successfully applied.

Professor Louise Richardson21:32

Uh

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To Harvard. So here we are seeing you on this. You know, it's a very high-flying academic trajectory that you were on by then. I'm wondering.

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What it felt like to sort of leave your beginnings because you very much were looking out to the big wide world and very much leaving everything that you knew and everything that was dear to you in your family in Waterford behind. It was the fact that I had such a secure upbringing that gave me the confidence to feel I could travel anywhere and that home would always be there and my family had lived in the same house for many generations. Certainly I didn't want to be there, but I was certainly happy to leave it all behind. Let's have some more music, Louise Richardson. Tell me about what we're going to hear next. It's your sixth of the day. Well this is Joan Baez. One of my first dates with my husband was at Newport Beach Folk Festival and we discovered we shared a love of Joan Baez. And I hesitate to name this song because I don't want it to appear hokey in any way, but it speaks to the expatriate going home and seeing things that are so familiar and yet you feel less and less comfortable in them when you go home.

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The old hometown looks the same As I step down from the train And there to meet me is my mother

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Down the road I look, and there comes Mary Hair of gold, and lips like cherries. It's good to touch the green, green grass of home.

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Joan Baez and the greeny green grass of home. And you mentioned, Louise, that Joan Baez was was it the first concert that you went to with your the man who would become your husband? It was the first concert. We met at uh a Brian Friel play. We uh really connected at a a n a second play and um this was the first concert we went to. Uh by the time of the late eighties then, you were both uh building your flourishing careers. He's uh a doctor and it was then that your first daughter was born. You have three children, two girls and a boy.

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Your first daughter had very serious health issues when she was born. What can you tell me about that? Well, the delivery went badly wrong, and she was medivaced out of hospital in Boston onto an experimental life support system in New York. I date my loss of innocence to that. That was a difficult time. Yes, and even the word you say that are experimental. I mean, nobody wants anything to do with their newborn child to be experimental. Was it days or weeks that you had to wait to know what she was doing? She had to have a simultaneous heart and lung bypass. Goodness.

Professor Louise Richardson24:18

Wait was it

Professor Louise Richardson24:20

She was

Professor Louise Richardson24:23

Yeah.

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Yeah, we didn't know if she'd make it and uh we didn't know how much brain damage there would be if she did make it. But she did, and she's uh a healthy, happy twenty six year old. She graduated from Harvard University. You went on to have two more children, another girl and a boy. And I have read

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That you balance your Harvard career and parenthood.

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The amount of work you had to do meant that you d you didn't sleep on a Monday and a Wednesday. Did you literally not sleep on a Monday and a Wednesday? Well, not throughout the whole period, but certainly my first year as an academic, my lectures were on Tuesday and Thursday and there was no way I could get to bed because that's um

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I would write the lectures during the night through the night and the goal was to get it done before the baby woke up and needed to be fed. So it wasn't throughout my career, that would have just been for the first year. It was during your third pregnancy you were diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I had surgery which wasn't successful because the cancer had metastasized. So I had to decide what to do because I couldn't have the treatment while the baby was in uterose. So I had to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or not. And it was a difficult decision, but I decided to roll the dice and postpone the treatment and wait and have the baby. And my son is now a strapping 22-year-old, so that too has a happy ending. And you say you have this wonderful strapping 20-something son, and indeed you look in rude health yourself. Is all well? Absolutely. I haven't had a day's ill health since. Let's have your next piece of music, Louise Richardson. We're going to hear your seventh. This is Jumping to My Life in America. And Yo-Yo Ma was a classmate of my husband's at Harvard. They lived in the same house, so he remembers them jamming as students. He was very generous to Harvard, comes back. We've heard him play at many reunions. He lived in the same town as us. Our children went to the same nursery school. And then just last summer at the Proms, I heard him play all six cello suites, which was just extraordinary. So this is his cello suite number one.

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Uh

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That was the prelude from Bascello's suite number one in G major, played there by Yo-Yo Ma. Louise Richardson, you left your academic life in Boston then in 2009 to become Vice-Chancellor of St Andrews University. As I understand it, your family remained in the States. How difficult was that? Yes, we didn't plan it that way. The plan was that in six months the whole family would be in Scotland. But Kira, our eldest daughter, had a place at Harvard, so we knew she was going to stay. My son Rory came with me and started boarding school in Scotland. And Fiona, the middle daughter, had six months left of secondary school, had a place at St Andrews, so we thought she would come to St Andrews. She then got an offer from Harvard, so she decided to stay. And Rory initially did not like Scotland. It was a very rocky transition, and he wanted to go back to the States. So after six months, all three kids were in the States, so Tom decided he better stay. Rory has subsequently moved to Scotland. Kira is now working in London, and Tom commutes back and forth. So we're a classically mid-Atlantic family. Yes, that's quite a commute, isn't it? One of the established perks of being Vice-Chancellor at St Andrews is this honorary membership of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

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At the time that you began your Vice Chancellorship it was a male only club, and goodness me, to use a good Scottish word, what a stooshy there was about that

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Um it was a lot of stuff in the press uh that you couldn't be a member in the way that vice-chancellors had before. How much did it bother you personally?

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It didn't bother me personally that I couldn't join these particular men and have lunch with them, but it bothered me that women who wanted to be members of the oldest and most prestigious golf club in the world could not be. There was much coverage of the fact that you were by certain members of the Royal and Ancient sort of mocked by them. You know, the sort of tie waving, look at me wearing my golf club tie and you can't wear them. Is that true?

Professor Louise Richardson29:08

Yeah.

Professor Louise Richardson29:09

And most prestigious.

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I wouldn't make too much of that. It was individual members waving their tie in just this puerile way boys do sometimes. The rules have changed now. They have voted to admit women, so I see that as a result, and I'm absolutely delighted. You preside now, of course, over one of the world's most prestigious universities, and it's internationally known and desired for the quality and the level of its education it's teaching. How certain do you think it is that a girl like you, from your background, from a family that had never been to university, could make it to Oxford now? What would the chances be? Not great.

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Well, I think it shows the power of education to transform lives. I am so committed to education. And it also shows the importance of ensuring that people have support in going through education. Most of my education was funded by winning scholarships. So I think it's so important that people who can afford to do help support students who need that help.

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I mean the real gulf that needs to be bridged, it seems to me, is the attainment gap between rich and poor children long before they ever come to university. This is the real problem, that so few poor kids have the qualifications necessary to compete successfully for the most competitive institutions. That's the real gulf we as a society, I think, need to worry about.

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You are at your heart an intellectual and an academic, and yet here you are running this huge organisation with the many demands that that must surely have. Where do you think? When do you stop? Well, I'm just four months into my job and I do not yet have a handle on my schedule at all. And one of my difficulties at the moment is there's not nearly enough time for reflection.

Presenter31:03

Well, here's the thing, on the island the desert island, you'll have plenty of time. Sounds like that actually might be quite welcome for you right now.

Presenter31:10

Yes, a little time would be nice. I might go stir crazy with too much time on my own. Let's have your final piece of music, Louise Richardson. What are we going to hear?

Presenter31:19

This is a familiar song to many people, I'm sure. Colin Wilkinson, Bring Him Home. I first heard this in the Palace Theatre in London in 1986 or 87. I paid £4 to go around the back and up to the very top. And Colin Wilkinson has just the most extraordinary voice. I've seen it many, many times since. Brought our children many times. When we're travelling in the car, we all sing the song. And it's such a moving, beautiful song. And the way he can hit those notes, I think, is sublime.

Speaker 431:52

Easy uh

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Um he's afraid.

Speaker 431:59

Let him rest heaven bless.

Speaker 432:09

Bring him home, bring him home.

Speaker 432:17

Uh

Presenter32:20

Bring Him Home from Les Miserable, sung by Colm Wilkinson, and the music was composed by Claude Michel Schoenberg, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. It's time then, Louise, for me to give you the books. And goodness knows, you've spent your life surrounded by many, many books. So what are you going to choose? I give you, of course, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible to take with you. I think I would take the largest collection available of Seamus Heaney's poems. Ah, I can read them over and over and over again. Right, that's yours then. We allow you a luxury. What's that going to be? That was a tough call between champagne and chocolate. Oh, dear. Well, that is a tough call. So ideally, I'd like a fountain that could produce both. If I had to go for one, I'd go for champagne.

Professor Louise Richardson32:51

Corb

Professor Louise Richardson32:54

Yeah, is it a

Presenter33:01

Okay, we shall give you that then, cases and cases of the stuff. And which track would you save?

Presenter33:07

I think cinema paradiso.

Presenter33:10

It's yours. Professor Louise Richardson, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

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