Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The By 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.

She spent a number of years as a Harvard professor and after 9-11 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.

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 Brits who in his time had very racist views. Many people said the

statue should go it is now staying. Did it feel like a baptism of fire at the time

...