Alison Richard
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2005
⏱️ 38 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 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an academic. In recent years she's moved from pure research into management |
| 0:35.3 | becoming as a result the first full-time female vice chancellor of Cambridge University. |
| 0:40.5 | No doubt her knowledge of monkeys and leymers. |
| 0:42.8 | She's one of the world's most distinguished |
| 0:44.7 | anthropologists will stand her in good stead |
| 0:46.7 | as she wrestles with the academic maelstrom. |
| 0:48.8 | She's now required to lead towards profitability and efficiency. |
| 0:53.0 | She's done it before. |
| 0:54.0 | In her previous job, as provost of Yale in America, |
| 0:58.0 | she inherited a deficit, but turned it around |
| 1:00.0 | and increased resources for students at the same time. |
| 1:03.0 | It all seems a long way from the jungles of Madagascar |
| 1:07.0 | where she spent much of her time observing the creatures |
| 1:10.0 | that are the subject of her reputation. |
| 1:12.0 | But then, as she says says I have an insatiable |
| 1:14.5 | curiosity about more or less everything I always have had. She is |
| 1:18.8 | Allison Richard, which is easier than Allison to win the confidence of Madagascar |
| 1:24.6 | leymus or Cambridge academics? |
| 1:26.6 | Oh, that's a very good question. |
| 1:29.2 | I think that I would say that there are challenges on both fronts. |
... |
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