Alison Richard
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2005
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the academic Professor Alison Richard. Professor Alison Richard is Cambridge University's first full-time female Vice-Chancellor. An anthropologist by training, the role of Vice-Chancellor makes her the principal academic and administrative officer of one of Britain's oldest universities, at the head of some 18,000 undergraduates and assets of more than a billion pounds.
She has been in post for just over a year and, for her, it is a return to the university where she studied as an undergraduate. She accepted the post after spending 30 years in America at Yale University - the last eight there as Provost. But much of her professional life has been based not in the ivory towers of academe, but in remote jungles and foothills working as an anthropologist studying the Madagascan lemur.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest |
| 0:25.4 | heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.7 | Hello, I'm Krista Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:35.6 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:38.8 | The program was originally broadcast in 2005, |
| 0:42.3 | and the presenter was Sue Lawley. |
| 0:44.2 | Music My castaway this week is an academic. |
| 1:02.2 | In recent years, she's moved from pure research into management, |
| 1:05.8 | becoming as a result the first full-time female vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. |
| 1:12.0 | No doubt her knowledge of monkeys and lemurs, she's one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists, will stand her in |
| 1:16.5 | good stead as she wrestles with the academic maelstrom she's now required to lead towards |
| 1:21.1 | profitability and efficiency. She's done it before. In her previous job, as provost of Yale in |
| 1:27.4 | America, she inherited a deficit but turned it around and increased resources for students at the same time. |
| 1:33.7 | It all seems a long way from the jungles of Madagascar where she spent much of her time observing the creatures that are the subject of her reputation. |
| 1:42.3 | But then, as she says, I have an insatiable curiosity about more or less everything I always have had. |
| 1:48.8 | She is Alison Richard. |
| 1:50.8 | Which is easier then, Alison, to win the confidence of Madagascan Lemus or Cambridge academics? |
| 1:57.8 | That's a very good question. |
| 1:59.5 | I think that I would say that there are challenges on both fronts. |
| 2:03.4 | I bet. |
| 2:04.0 | But do you employ your kind of anthropological skills when you're dealing with the Cambridge jacket? |
| 2:09.2 | Are you watching them? |
... |
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