Speaker 1: You touched on it before but again the life of the academic is obviously you are the academic, you've lived the life and you've talked about the writing and the research bits of it and a little bit about the teaching because I've seen some of your lectures online where you do that break in the middle and so on even in the recorded version so you can see that. And then there's the admin, How does all that fit together? Because I hear these days that there's an awful lot of admin, I get told, and for some academics they don't seem to like the teaching as much as I'd expect them to do, but they say they don't like that. So how have you, when you look back at your time as a working academic, how have you balanced out those four elements, the teaching,

Speaker 2: out men research and writing? Well my the world has changed hugely since I when I was at Oxford and was taught by Harry Pitt and James Campbell at Worcester College in History for example neither of them did anything much except teach. A little bit of administration just of the teaching course, and no doubt the gardening body had its meetings occasionally about this and that, but not many. Hardly any paperwork, hardly any committees at that time in the 1960s, and not much, and no hardly any publishing. If you were a medievalist you published one or two articles in your life, and you know people knew you were a good teacher and that you were very brilliant, and one day the book might come out, but it didn't matter, no one was going to throw you out because of that. So James Campbell until quite late in his life hardly published anything but one or two articles, just a couple of books later on. Harry Pitt published, I think, one smallish book on American history, but they threw themselves into teaching. They would teach enormously long hours by our point of view, in other words, sort of between 12 and 20 hours a week of supervisions, which is very intense teaching. They did still do the kind of supervisions where a student would come in and read an essay for 20 minutes, half an hour, so you could sit there, but they listened very attentively, and James at the end would say, had listened to every word and seen what you'd done wrong and comment on it, and Harry too. But to do 20 hours of that, and the pressure was increased by the time I was getting into teaching, because it was expected that the student would hand in the essay before, and so you would have to spend 20 minutes reading the essay, and then often they would, or they would hand it in afterwards. And that was even worse because they would read it out and you'd have the intensity of the thing. And then you'd have another 20 minutes, half an hour. So each supervision, particularly if you're prepared a bit, would actually be maybe up to two hours. And if you have 12 hours of that a week on top of seminars, which you're running, which takes some time as well, and then your lectures and so on. It was a heavy teaching load, but at least everyone respected you. You were known to be a good teacher and you were paid to be a good teacher. It was a medieval face-to-face system. What happened over time were two things. One is the American, well, both Americanizations. One was that teaching was relegated relegated to one part and perhaps not the most important part of what you did, your research. The payment to the universities was based on research assessment exercises. So how you, what books and articles you produced in peer-reviewed journals and elsewhere or academic presses would get your department money, that was from the 1990s that happened. And even before then, if you were going to be promoted within the system, at the beginning Oxford and Cambridge were very level, there were a few professors and that was it, everyone else was a lecturer and they were equal and professors didn't have much higher status. Gradually you get stratification in the universities and you get promotions to readerships and professorships And as this stratification grows, the way to get up, the only way to get up, no one cares how you teach or anything like that or administer, but your books. He published a good book last year, let's promote him to a readership. So you began to compete. You knew every hour you're spending with students was one hour off the chances for getting your readership. Wasn't that teachers didn't like teaching, although it is very stressful and not all teachers are very good at it. You're not taught to do it, of course, and so you fumble along and many supervisors were hopeless, absolutely hopeless. But, you know, you might enjoy it, but you couldn't enjoy it because a nagging in the back of your mind was, I should be getting that article, which I promised to this journal, if I don't get it in by Monday. And so there was a tension all the time And particularly during term time, when you should be teaching and administering mainly, and yet, you know, you've got that half finished book that you started in your sabbatical and you've got a deadline and so on. So gradually, this pressure on producing books and articles for external goals, either promotion or your department's success began to undermine the teaching. And then on top of that, the other Americanization was obviously bureaucracy, because when I, even when I first went to Cambridge, bureaucracy was very light. Meetings you went to didn't, there were no written papers for department meetings, you know, maybe the head of department would just scribble the agenda on the blackboard or just go through it. I mean, just before I went there, it was done over lunch. Once a fortnight, you just have lunch together and say, well, we've got a new paper on this, who's going to teach it? And that was it. But gradually, again it was part of the assessments because the university would look at this and you had to report on it. So gradually the pressure came usually down from the top, down seeped around through the schools to the departments, and so the meetings grew longer, the papers grew thicker. I first encountered this on a huge scale on the Social Science Research Council which I sat on for some years and I used to get half a filing cabinet draw of paper for each meeting and this was for various reasons to do with bureaucracy, accountability, everything had to be on paper so you could have paper trails. Also because you bureaucrats can't judge, they have no discrimination or no knowledge of the subject and therefore they had to duplicate everything and make sure that everyone has everything. And so gradually you at the beginning of my time you know you might spend two or three hours a week at the most on meetings by the end you might be spending one day a week on meetings at least. But one thing that so you've got this tension between these different things and the balance shifting. One thing I learnt was that actually they're not necessarily fighting against each other, once you begin to realise that it makes it a bit easier. For example teaching and research are not different, and we may talk about this because basically teaching, if you are in the good fortune of teaching in a place like Oxford or Cambridge or with good students is a form of research. You are dealing with very intelligent, if not as well-informed people as yourself, who are bringing you up to date with what they've recently read, and you have to explain things simply to them, and they counter your argument. So you learn, you know this as a teacher, you learn from good students, even at schools, you learn things, and certainly at university level than a second or third year student, they often amaze you and you learn new things from them and the communicative side of you which is required for good communication and writing and so on is improved by teaching. That applies particularly to lecturing, which again many academics saw as a waste of time, you know, why not tell them to just go and read the book, you know, why are they, we're doing this medieval thing as if they weren't books, but if you prepare your lectures and you give good lectures and you get some comments on them perhaps, they are an excellent adjunct, alternative. You explore and discover things in lecturing. So both forms of oral expression are a part of research and therefore the hours spent in teaching, and I think that one of the losses for some academics has been withdrawing. Cambridge never did this, but in some universities they split people, they said you are the star staff, you go off and write your books, the rest of the drones who just do the boring teaching. Now that was bad for both groups, because that's the other side of it, if you are engaged in teaching, you should also be engaged in thinking about other wider things. Students very quickly pick up from a lecturer or their supervisor, if they are not, their minds are not active in discovering new things, because it's that excitement of being with a teacher, lecturer, whatever, who suddenly says, you know, I've just found out, I've just been to Nepal, and this is what I saw, you know being feeling that you are on the as they say the the cutting edge or whatever it is of new things that's what university should be about and so teaching and research are not separate and even administration. Why some academics love administration is it stops you having to think. Basically it gives you a structure and I've seen good academics go into administration and they go in because they're good at it often and people say you know would you like some more money and would you like some more power and would you like a job where the satisfactions are immediate. You know you you get you solve problems and you go on solving problems and you it's creative you create a new department or a new faculty or you know you've got power so it's an interesting job being a vice chancellor or head of a college or something like this. Alan why don't you do that? Now you know I've been encouraged to do this from time to time and I've discussed it with Sarah and we both said now what do we want to do with our lives is that what I want to do with my life, push paper around and organise other people to do what I would like to do myself, like artists who become head of huge studios and don't do the art but they do the organisation. So we've always said no, even if you know you're foregoing some power, some pension, some... don't. Do what you're required to do and that's one of the great things about Oxford and Cambridge, everyone has to do administration. It still is devolved to the local level a lot, so you can't on the whole shirk it, you have to be in the examination boards and so on and so on, but you can keep it to a level and that's what I learned. I learned through time and through method that you can get administration to a decent level by keeping it circumscribed and to a certain time. And that's again, a matter of organizing time. I know a distinguished scientist who used to spend his whole morning on his science and then he would go to his college of which he was the head and he would then do administration through the afternoon from lunch till tea and then go and do some writing. You know, administration, you can, and when I was head of department, which I was many times, and I didn't enjoy it, but it was bearable because I used to say, I will keep the whole of this department's administration in one shoe box. If it won't fit in there, it doesn't fit. So I used to throw the paper into the shoe box. So you basically make sure that you do things quickly. You have to have the most important part of an administrator's kit, which is a pending tray. That is, you have a tray in which you put things you can't decide about. And you leave them there for a few weeks and then the decision has already been made or the problem's gone away or whatever. So difficult things you put on one side, immediate things you immediately deal with, long-term things you think about. So if you're fairly efficient, you're not frightened by it. If you treat administration as a team thing, you work, you really trust and work well with your secretaries or administrators, trust each other and work with them. And if you bring together your staff, not by bullying, but by setting an example of working harder than they do, which is what you have to do in Cambridge, because they're not forced to do anything. So if they see you're doing the work, they'll do the work. And basically it can be, you know, as enjoyable as a game of rugger, not what you prefer to be doing, but okay.