Another Year, Another Speech

Posted on October 5, 2019 by Athene Donald

Writing and delivering uplifting speeches comes with the territory of being the head of an Oxbridge College. Although my interview for the position at Churchill did not require a dry run of this, to check that I was capable of exhorting the troops appropriately, perhaps it should have done. Over the five years I have been in post now, I have become more relaxed about the delivery, making it possible for me to sip a little wine without feeling I will fall over the words and start slurring my diction. In 2016 I wrote about the challenge of delivering a Graduation Dinner speech on the evening of the referendum result. That was a tough nut to crack to find the right balance. By comparison last week’s speech to our alumni Association Weekend was a piece of cake – other than having to speak after a brilliant speech by Christopher Frayling (alum and Extraordinary Fellow; yes that really is the title!), former Rector of the Royal College of Art and ex-Chair of the Arts Council. I was merely giving an update on the past year of the college, mundane but I hope also of interest.

Christopher spoke about where the two cultures stand 60 years after CP Snow’s famous Rede Lecture given here in Cambridge: Snow was a founding Fellow of Churchill College. Christopher and I agree that the divisions Snow saw are still lurking. For instance, we share a fury over how the word ‘creative’ has been hijacked, as in ‘creative industries’ meaning those of an ‘arty’ bent and excluding the techie stuff; the way some see creativity as the prerogative only of humanities’ studies and absolutely not to be found in STEM courses, an issue I have also highlighted before. I know Christopher’s views are equally strong on this point because I have discussed it with him at length, both last week and on previous occasions. Churchill College, home of Snow, will continue to work to ensure all our students appreciate the importance of not living in disciplinary silos and of becoming well-rounded citizens. Inclusion and inclusivity need to reach this strand of education as well as encompassing gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and the rest.

But, to return to the matriculation speech I need to give to the Freshers, the challenge for me now is not unlike that I faced before the 2016 graduation speech. Everything is so uncertain, the situation changes day by day. We seem to be in a world where untruths may be uttered on both sides of the Atlantic with comparative impunity; we see incitement to violence and despicable behaviour. But I want to encourage all who are just starting out on the adventure that is university and college life, to be positive not ram the distasteful stuff of UK politics down their throats. There will be those coming from unsettled regions of the world or chaotic family backgrounds, but many more who come from backgrounds whose futures might once have been thought to be secure. We, collectively, need to ensure they are able to thrive here whatever the state of the world outside, so that they can go on to forge a better future for everyone on issues from climate change to equity. The one thing I will certainly be doing is to encourage every fresher who is eligible to register to vote; the date of the next general election may still be unclear but it cannot be far away.

I definitely believe that my role is to oversee a college where academic striving is encouraged, if not to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps I should be encouraging the girly swots in the audience (in which I would include students of any gender). Baroness Hale has definitely turned it from a political jibe from one prime minister to a predecessor into an appellation to be proud of. She of the Supreme Court, a woman who has more professional firsts to her name than most, whose school encouraged her to apply to Cambridge (she was a student at Girton about a decade before I was there) to read law because

 “my headmistress didn’t think I was clever enough to read history!”

she is also a woman showing that lack of clarity about a career path at 18 or 21 is no barrier to subsequent success. There is so much today’s students can learn from examining her career.

Stereotyping by gender is every bit as bad as stereotyping the humanities as ‘creative’ and STEM subjects as cut and dried and dead (to paraphrase William Blake), the idea that Christopher Frayling took exception to in his speech. Reading interviews with Baroness Hale it is clear that stereotyping has dogged her career, even if ultimately she has overturned many people’s expectations. As the interview in ChambersStudent explains

“Those making the decisions had never worked with women on an equal basis. They’d had them as typists or secretaries, but not as colleagues.” …so it was “harder for them to judge who was a good candidate or not – or who had potential or not.”

That will sound familiar to the women in STEM subjects (and probably the men in subjects such as those ‘allied to medicine’). How often are young women told ‘you don’t look like a physicist’ in tones of astonishment? Or selection panels overlooking the smart woman because, well, she’s a woman and so not a leader. However, one should take heart from Brenda Hale and just get on with the job. If one can. If one can defeat the feeling of ‘I don’t belong’ so many internalise.

In Churchill I hope everyone feels they belong. We worry about stereotypes, the different hostile –isms, the need for students to find their feet within their discipline and far beyond. I hope our Freshers will be able to shut out the uncertainties and appalling behaviour of some of our so-called leaders and just make the most of time here to work out who they are, what they want to do and where to put their best efforts. And to make sure they don’t end up disrespecting others’ choices or mentally put their peers into neatly-labelled but totally inaccurate boxes.

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What Do We Know about the Research Ecosystem?

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Athene Donald

While funders make decisions about where their money goes, and PhD students decide what to study, with whom and where before they go on to wander along the career maze; while publishers decide who to publish and universities around the world make decisions based, at least in part, on these same editorial decisions, who looks at the Big Picture? There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study. Meta-research (scraping – of data – was a word frequently used) is facilitated by new tools, but there are many other tedious longitudinal studies of people, places and impact that will probably need a rather more old-fashioned approach to gathering data too.

RoRIlaunch2

Topics for the day included Priorities, Careers (in which I had the unenviable task of summing up and being ‘provocative’ about the other contributions, the panel is shown in the photograph), Culture (featuring fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry), Decisions and Partnerships. Each, as you can tell, a massive topic with many strands to delve into. Of course the next challenge is to work out just which parts of this vast array of possibilities for study RoRI will concentrate on. Something I think the partners are currently thrashing out.

In the Careers session, we heard James Evans (University of Chicago) consider connectivity of researchers and the impact on research outputs. He described the research system as ‘deeply complex’ with ‘emergent phenomena’. One of the results of his study of the networks formed and the groups that acted as nodes in the networks was that as fields grow new work is exponentially less likely to impact that field radically. In other words, just having more people working in any given area is more likely to lead to incremental research than breakthroughs. As he put it ‘social connection leads to cultural collapse’ and he felt that ‘aliens’ from other disciplines were crucial for new insights. Funders should definitely take note.

Sally Hancock from the University of York talked about data on career pathways following the PhD. (Her co-authored working paper can be found on the RoRI website.) She particularly highlighted how different disciplines have different patterns, and how there are quite distinct differences between the genders. But the data is incomplete. It is hard to find out what happens to those who leave research completely or to analyse more nuanced issues that may impact on individuals. This could of course range from having a disastrous relationship with a supervisor to an equally disastrous relationship with a piece of equipment. Continuing on the theme of PhD students Megan MacGarvie (Boston University) and Kolja Briedis (DZHW, Germany) gave international perspectives on the careers question, also with an emphasis in the former case of international students who travel to the US for study and then may – or may not – return to their home countries thereafter.

My task was, in six short minutes, to bring together these different threads and join them into a coherent whole. But, this session coming immediately after one on Priorities, I pointed out how funders, policy makers and indeed the tax payer to some extent, have big decisions to make about choosing what student(ship)s to fund. I have written before about the danger of the ‘lumpiness’ of the UK’s research council (and specifically EPSRC’s) programme for doctoral training. Bearing in mind the comments of James Evans regarding radical new ideas tending not to come in large fields (he referred to people sometimes as living in a bubble chamber), I think it is worth considering whether such lumpiness is even good for getting the science we need done. We should ask what are we training students for and who are we training. I certainly strongly believe that those who leave research completely (be it academic or industrial) should not be regarded, as they so often are, as failures. We need people educated to think critically, to solve problems and to be aware of context to enter many different professions. These people are not failures.

Perhaps inevitably I picked up on the gender disparities Sally Hancock identified. If the THE is to be believed, I said female students are ‘forced out’ by a hostile environment. I don’t remember saying that but, since my comments had to be produced on the hoof, it is quite possible that I did. I certainly said I thought it would be useful to carry out exit interviews for students as they complete their PhDs, to find out what went right and what went wrong. Such qualitative data would be invaluable to help interpretations of the quantitative data that is so much easier to collect.

Later in the day, we heard from Molly King  (Santa Clara University) on data extracted from JSTOR articles which showed an appalling mismatch between women as last (and so presumed senior) authors and their expected benchmark figure. Building on an article Melinda Duer and I wrote earlier this year I questioned the role journals play in this, by virtue of bias (no doubt predominantly unconscious) in their editorial processes and decisions. I am delighted to say this was picked up by some of the Nature team present and I hope to follow this up with them in due course. Our concerns, as expressed in that earlier article, are that there is insufficient scrutiny given to factors such as relative time in review for men and women, or whether referees’ reports ever contain clear evidence of bias. There are many places where the editorial process collectively shows bias, as has been shown for economics but not, as far as I can tell for other disciplines.

I can only give you a sample of the fascinating talks we heard covering this broad and burgeoning topic. If I’ve whetted your appetite here are some further links to fill you in further with the intentions of this institute (I may not have a complete set here).

Overview by James Wilsdon, Director of RoRI, in WonkHE.

Commentary in the THE.

Blogpost by Richard Jones,  Associate Director, on his own talk at the launch.

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Talking Leadership in Toronto

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently been in North America meeting up with Churchill College alumni, flying into New York City and out from Toronto, with a delightful flight with gorgeous views over New England in between. It was rather exhausting but was also something of a trip down memory lane, initially triggered by a nasty incident. A few days before travelling I had had my wallet stolen in Cambridge, pickpocketed, and although this became clear very quickly so all my cards could be stopped, it meant significant worry and inconvenience. In fact the replacement cards came fast enough that I was able to travel abroad with them (taking piles of cash feels so old-fashioned, although I got myself prepared courtesy of my husband’s visits to holes-in-walls), but it reminded me of what happened when I went to the USA for the first time.

Immediately after the end of my PhD and accompanying viva, in early October 1977, I was due to travel to Cornell (in Ithaca, NY) to take up a post-doc position, my husband already having travelled earlier to start his course. It was the time of ‘standby’ flights across the Atlantic, the idea being that if you turned up early enough in the day you could purchase any empty seats on major transatlantic airlines. I dutifully turned up at crack of dawn and got a seat at my first attempt (I think I even managed to buy a ticket for a connecting flight on to Ithaca). Having a lot of time to kill before the flight I set off to buy a cup of coffee, managing to leave my purse behind in the café. My final phone call to my mother for many months was therefore ‘please tell the police’, so I could claim on my insurance. My finances, my state of mind not to mention my ‘status’ as it were, were very different upon arrival this time at JFK compared with that previous trip! The timid and impoverished postdoc who turned up that first time could never have imagined that 40+ years on I would return, essentially also wallet-less but otherwise a totally different person.

One of the events I did for Cambridge University alumni was with Churchill alumnus Bruce Simpson, a Senior Partner at McKinsey, in Toronto. Together we talked about leadership. Bruce discussed leadership in the present day, while I could steal lots of appropriate quotes from papers held in the Churchill Archives when talking about the very different styles of leadership of Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher, including their attitudes towards science. In this vein it has always struck me, however bad Churchill may have been at maths at school and lacking any formal science training, through his friendship with HG Wells he developed far more interest and curiosity in science than really comes across in Thatcher’s actions, despite her degree in chemistry.

Churchill had a child-like curiosity towards inventions, whereas Thatcher’s attitude seems to have been far more utilitarian. Jon Agar’s recent book Science Policy under Thatcher spells this out in depressing detail. In Thatcher’s view scientists needed constant scrutiny, a view which in turn led to the introduction in 1986 of the (much lighter touch) predecessor of the Research Excellence Framework. Churchill, on the other hand, was prepared to commit huge sums of money to the uncertain end of nuclear weapons through the so-called Tube Alloys project, work that later crucially underpinned the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb. Whereas Thatcher expected to be fully engaged in decisions about scientific policy, dispensing with or ignoring the chief scientific advisor for much of her premiership, Churchill just wanted to be kept informed and involved by his close friend Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), despite the latter being such a contrasting personality in his approach to food and drink.

Nevertheless Thatcher’s scientific background stood her in good stead when it came to some of the big scientific issues of her day: the first signs of climate change and AIDS/HIV. On the former she spoke passionately at the UN in 1989.

“It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself.

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”

Ronald Reagan at the time would not have uttered those words, and it is perhaps even harder to imagine the current President echoing them, even over Twitter.

Both Bruce and I referred to the gender angle in leadership. He referred to a recent Harvard Business Review article discussing the skills women possess when it comes to leadership, an article I had read when it first appeared this summer. Surveys of corporate America using so-called 360o techniques have showed that women most certainly are viewed as possessing the necessary attributes to succeed. Indeed on many fronts they out-perform their male colleagues, according to the evidence. But there are still only a tiny number of senior female leaders in Corporate America. As the article says

“Leaders need to take a hard look at what gets in the way of promoting women in their organizations. Clearly, the unconscious bias that women don’t belong in senior level positions plays a big role.”

It isn’t that women aren’t competent; it is that too often they aren’t believed to be competent.

I faced this myself years back when told kindly to my face by an older male faculty member that ‘it would be my turn next’ to be head of department, despite the fact that I was older both in years and seniority (if you call possessing an FRS as I did at the time ‘seniority’) than the other – needless to say male – contender. He got the job. He was, I hasten to say, a very good head of department, but that completely biased statement based on very little (it was not a faculty member I’d ever worked with or knew more than distantly) rankled then and rankles now. It is anecdote not data but I internalised it as how, in the absence of other evidence, gender trumps facts.

Yet, the evidence is constantly building up that diversity in an organisation’s senior leadership really matters in achieving successful outcomes. A study from 2018 showed this clearly when considering profits (not, of course, the only important outcome), but to be effective it does require diversity to be broadly defined not just in terms of gender, but also including ethnicity, education and socioeconomic background. If we are to get the best leaders we must not just look for clones of past CEOs. Interestingly, the colleges in Cambridge are now essentially equally split between male and female heads for the first time this coming October, with several powerful new (external) heads joining colleges old and new.

Leadership is a tricky beast. Many of us (certainly when it comes to heads of colleges) learn on the job rather than through the formal training of an MBA or equivalent. Our present-day politicians likewise seem to be making it up as they go along. Watching them is not edifying. Whatever one may feel about Churchill and Thatcher and their policies it is hard not to think they made a better fist of leadership than the current bunch.

 

 

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Red Lines Don’t Need to be Political

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Athene Donald

Despite the introductory couple of paragraphs, this is not meant as a political diatribe….it’s just hard to avoid parliamentary affairs currently. I did foreswear following Brexit news for several months after the last deadline in the spring for the sake of my well-being, but somehow I’ve got sucked in again….

We’ve heard a lot about red lines from UK politicians over the past many months. It turns out they didn’t do much to help Theresa May in her negotiating stance with the EU, although we seem to have a different type of rigidity being played out right now (‘die in a ditch’ hardly seems like a pragmatic or flexible approach). The PMs current position looks set to leda to potentially even more disastrous outcomes, hard though it would have been to imagine that a few months back. It is often informative to read the foreign press to see how others view our current political antics. I’m off to Canada soon for a brief visit for the College and was particularly struck by an editorial in their Globe and Mail which was full of pithy, if derogatory comments about the current parliamentary mess and its arch purveyor the country’s prime minister (his Special Advisor didn’t get a look-in in this article, although many see Dominic Cummings as the puppet-master behind the scenes). The article says:

Megashambles? Summa cum laude shambles? Tyrannosaurus shambles? The-Chernobyl-reactor-just-exploded-and-the-dosimeter-reads-15,000-roentgen shambles?

Mr. Johnson is the author of 11 books, some admittedly banged out in the careless haste that is his style. But this week, without breaking a sweat, the PM penned the Odyssey and the Iliad of shambles. He faced his first votes in Parliament and lost them; lost his minority government’s governing majority; sacked 21 of his own MPs, including his party’s longest-serving member and Winston Churchill’s grandson; provoked his own brother into resigning from cabinet, citing a conflict between “family loyalty and the national interest”; and lost control of the House of Commons while remaining so offside the chamber’s confidence that it will not yet allow him to resolve the matter by calling an election. Mr. Johnson did all that, and more, in the space of two days.

(One of those eleven books I actually possess: the one about Winston Churchill based extensively on his papers in Churchill College’s Archives and substantially compiled for Boris Johnson by his research assistant Warren Dockter. I’ve even read it but did not fall for the line that Johnson is a latter-day Churchill, despite it being implied throughout the book by Johnson. Somehow, I now seem to have mislaid that book….)

Nevertheless, whatever you may think about those particular red lines of May’s, let alone dying in ditches, there is no doubt that personally I have sometimes approached difficult meetings with mental red lines in place. I was reminded of this when talking to a younger colleague recently who could see such a meeting speeding towards them (nothing to do with Brexit I should add). Being not that much younger than me, with plenty of managerial/leadership experience, I was surprised that they did not seem to think in these terms. I know when I worked out the importance of creating clear no-go lines before a meeting started rather than on the hoof I felt much more in control.

Even so, I was myself late to the realisation that planning in advance for challenging situations can only be helpful. It is too easy, in my experience, just to think ‘this is going to be dreadful’ allowing panic to filter in rather than organised thought. And panic does tend to bring on absolutely everything you fear because it drives out clear thinking. ‘This is going to be dreadful’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if you would like to think you are merely preparing for the worst. So, the day I went into a tricky meeting about resources around the turn of the century, armed with a bottle of water (to prevent my lips sticking together and my mouth feeling like sand) and some red lines, I felt I came out in better shape and with a better outcome than my experience up till that point might have led me to expect given the other protagonists involved. I emerged with my dignity intact and without being made to concede ground (in this case literal ground, i.e. space – isn’t space always one of the inevitable battle grounds in university life?) beyond what I had known from the outset I would have to give up. I had laid down some conditions of my own which had, apparently, been accepted and I felt I had more confidence in my negotiating abilities than at any point previously in my life.

Unfortunately, although I won that battle ultimately I suspect I lost the war, not least because the convenor of that meeting decided to send an email around widely shortly afterwards which did not entirely reflect what had been agreed. A second lesson to learn there; make sure notes are taken and agreed at the time. In many situations that is a strategy to bear in mind, so that there can be no ambiguity about what decisions have and have not been made. For younger readers note I may be, now, the Master of a Cambridge College but I doubt many of my colleagues would have given good odds on me achieving that accolade at the time of that meeting 15 or more years ago.

I guess, political diatribe apart, my aim in writing this down is twofold. First to pass on the tip – that no one had ever thought to mention to me, however obvious it may be to those born with (too much?) confidence or schooled earlier in tactics rather than pure science – know what you are willing to concede and what is too important to give up without at least some extremely firm resistance and counter-offers. Secondly, not just to those of mature years but those setting out, remember that experience counts for a lot. Many of those at the top of their game are not – unlike former Bullingdon Club members – born with a sense of privilege or an expectation that everything and everyone will bow down in front of them. Remember that senior leaders are not necessarily born with Leader engraved on their foreheads, but have had to learn the hard way what works and what does not, given their own personalities, strengths and quirks. We are all different and our strategies for survival and achieving positive outcomes will also differ. Learning on the job is crucial, reflecting on failed strategies is at least as much, if not more important, than simply thinking about success stories.

So, next time you can see a tricky meeting looming – be it with your supervisor, your head of department or even a grant-funding agency – consider what your red lines are. What is so fundamentally important to you that you would walk away from any agreement in preference to conceding this one issue? What could be a sacrificial pawn? And what are you willing to do to meet in the middle of some disagreement? Don’t be too rigid, but do be prepared.

 

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Trying Not to Discourage Others

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Athene Donald

What should one say to school children about to make university choices regarding life after school? Of course there are lots of positive things – clichés abound to supply them – but there are also the darker elements of the conveyor belt they are on. Talking to a group of around 50 teenage girls considering applying to Cambridge for maths or natural sciences last week, I found myself wondering whether honesty is always the best policy.

As the local student newspaper Varsity described earlier this summer, Cambridge maths remains overwhelmingly male. This isn’t because the faculty want this to be the case (I know, because I’ve talked to some of them and they feel very strongly how disappointing this is), but they do expect, and probably require although there may be slight college variations, students to do well in STEP (Sixth Term Entry paper) exams as well as Maths and Further Maths A level. It is clear that this is less attractive to girls who, the evidence suggests, disproportionately don’t want that additional uncertainty and stress. In 2018 Varsity quotes a mere 35 female students were admitted to study maths at Cambridge, out of a grand total of 234 accepted students, the lowest proportion for many years.

To stress the low numbers being admitted, might just make potential applicants feel put off or presume that it’s all just too difficult for them, particularly if they in any way already lack self-confidence. Not to be open that the numbers are low seems misleading at the best. I was struck some years ago by an article from the USA stating that at high school the only successful intervention keeping female students in physical sciences (so not maths explicitly) was pointing out that women were typically under-represented. Not, as one might have thought, having female teachers, or single sex classes, or talking about female scientists or having female scientists come into the classroom. In this one study only talking about under-representation mattered.

It isn’t clear to me how much follow up work there has been by other groups, but a later paper from the same team indicated that talking about under-representation ‘explicitly creates an opportunity for students’ figured worlds of professional and school science to change, and facilitates challenging their own implicit assumptions about how the world functions.’ Which, in layperson speak I think means that children can re-evaluate some of the stereotypes they have internalised without necessarily noticing, but only if the low numbers are discussed in a supportive environment. So, from those studies, perhaps pointing out low numbers is not a bad thing to do, although after my talk there wasn’t really much indication of the students wanting to discuss this. It was the end of an intensive three days, there really wasn’t much sign of them wanting to do anything other than go home.

So moving on from these specific challenges, in my talk I discussed my career path, trying to point out – as I so often do – that life doesn’t necessarily go in straight lines and that things can go wrong without it meaning you personally are a failure. Perhaps to that audience that too was a mistake. Those girls presumably all have stellar track records at school; the hiccoughs that most lives throw up may not yet have assaulted them. Do they want to be told that my first post-doc was an unmitigated disaster and that luck enabled me to overcome those two years of nothingness? Different members of the audience may react with anything from ‘whatever’ to, if it’s all down to luck what’s the point of trying. It is so easy to tie myself up in knots (never mind those listening) with worrying about what the ‘right’ message is.

I have learned that talking about my CV as a ‘standard’ CV is probably the wrong thing to do. I remember using that phrase once to an audience of ECRs and being pulled up. I meant this was what my CV looked like in the way it might appear on a job application (really as opposed to one in which life-events such as marriage or children might feature, versions of my CV I also typically share). The challenger in this previous case obviously felt the word ‘standard’ came across as if everyone’s should end up with a big shiny FRS or professor’s title attached. Not my intention, but it just shows how careful one has to be.

However, whoever the audience and at whatever career stage, I do believe the mantra ‘seize opportunities’ applies; that it is hugely important not to be passive and wait for others to tell you what you should be doing but make your own deliberate life choices (even if they turn out not so well, they are at least your choices and you can usually change your mind or direction); that seeing confidence in others should not convince you that their confidence is warranted, so it should not undermine your own faith in your abilities; and, yes, luck plays a part in everyone’s life. I hope that by finishing off with those messages, leaving that slide up while answering the few questions that came my way, meant one or two useful take home (literally) messages may have resonated and may stay with some of the listeners. And I hope we will be seeing some of those students return to Cambridge in due course.

 

 

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