Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is Talking Politics.

Today we're joined by Stephen Toop, who is the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University,

the boss, and we are going to talk about the politics of higher education.

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Joining me along with Stephen R. Helen Thompson and Chris Brooke, we're going to start by talking

about the most political thing that's happened here for a while,

which is the strike that we've just been through, and it's not resolved by any means, but it's

been parked for now. It's about pensions. And Stephen, you've been in this job for less than a year.

You came here from Canada running big institutions in Canada, So you have something of an outsider's perspective

on this too. And this thing kicked off fairly early on in your tenure. It was, it still is,

about pensions, about the pension scheme that academics were relying on and now felt for a while

that they couldn't. But it became very political. And it became, I think, to a lot of people's surprise, extremely fraught and contentious. Do you have a sense, looking back with a little

bit of hindsight now, why pensions became such a political issue here? Well, I think it's wrapped up with

a lot of different issues. In part, it's wrapped up with the increased tuition fees that students are now paying in the United Kingdom.

I think a fundamental shift in how we understand the funding of higher education.

But I also think it's quite closely related to concerns that many people have been raising over the last few years about how universities are viewed by government, particularly, and I think through government in a sense by the wider public.

And that is that universities are increasingly seen primarily as economic engines, which they are, but they are not solely that.

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