| Description | Second interview with Professor Elizabeth D. Fraser recorded on the 20 November 1985 by John Hargreaves.
Interview transcript:
JH I thought we might begin today by talking about changes in the University community as a whole during the period of your service and raise one or two rather more general questions and, in reply to these, it might seem useful to make a distinction between your recollections of the experience in the period between 1948 and 1964, the beginning of the expansion which was also the beginning or your own service as professor, and the period since then. And the first question I thought would be a question about the quality and aptitudes of students during these two periods. Did you notice any change there or any change in the balance between Arts and Science students?
EF Well, to take the second point first, the change in the balance between Arts and Science. There was a clear move, of course, in that whole period towards a greater proportion of students coming from Science later on than had happened before because of course at one time Psychology was purely an Arts Honours subject and it's difficult to remember exactly the period, I suppose it was sometime in the '50s, when it became a Science subject where candidates for Honours could do BSc Hons in Psychology. The proportion of Science students increased enormously relative to Arts until at one time I think they were about almost even, as distinct from what '48, when it was entirely a hundred per cent Arts students.
JH Now did that change correspond in any way to a quality shift? Did the increasing Science students tend to raise in any way or lower in any way the general level of he class?
EF I think there were differences between he Arts and Science students but not an overall one in ability I don't think. I think reasonably enough, we found that the Science students were less good at the essay writing part of their requirements for the course than the Arts students. This I think was simply a matter of practice, or lack of it in their case and the fact that this had not been one of the major demands made on them over, for a number of years. That I think, that difference probably was lost by the end of the four years and I don't think there was any difference in ability of any size between the two groups at the end of the four years.
JH Did you make any distinction between Arts and Science, deliberately brigade them separately for tutorials or practicals?
EF No, no. Except insofar as it was necessary because of their timetable. In fact Science students later on were timetabled separately because the Science Faculty wanted to do it that way. But it didn't mean that we had lab classes which were a hundred percent Science or a hundred percent Arts. There were just higher proportions in some of them than in others.
JH Well, coming to the overall quality of this mixed class, mixed of Arts and Science students, would you have seen any changes in that respect either before or after the great expansion?
EF Again it's difficult to say because so many other factors were involved. At the time when, for example, seventy percent of all Arts students took Psychology at some point we probably had a bigger catchment group from which we selected our Honours students. It was my impression, or it is my impression, that the early Honours students in Psychology were a better group then they were later on. But it's so much a matter of impression; the evidence is not there. We had first class Honours people then; we had first class Honours people since. The course has changed so much, the coverage has changed so much, that any comparison on that basis and, of course, what gets a first class Honours now is a different set of abilities from what got a first class Honours then but we had some, in the early days, we had some very outstanding people as students.
JH Yes, it's difficult to make a distinction on the end product because the product itself has changed. Could you …?
EF Sorry, if I may interrupt. The other thing was that most of our early Honours students were people who had come up to do Honours is some other subject and has changed over to Psychology because they became interested in the subject and very often these were very good people who would have done first class Honours in Classics or History, or in something else.
JH And they had special motivation?
EF And had this very special motivation whereas later on our students came from, very often from the group who had intended to do Psychology when they came up first. So comparisons I think really are very, very difficult to make.
JH At the other end of academic life, were you conscious of any change in the aptitudes and abilities of the ordinary class at the start of the year?
EF Yes, their ability to write grammatical English had declined quite considerably and I think this has been the experience of a great many people, not just in the Psychology Department, but across the board. I think it's a question of what they are taught in school and how much insistence is placed on good English writing.
JH Were they any compensations for this decline?
EF Oh yes, I think they were willing to take a line or to follow an idea in some cases. Apart from that I don't think there were any major changes I think they were less authority-aware. They weren't so much concerned with pleasing the people who were taking the class as the earlier one were, but not very much.
JH Did the widening of the University's geographical catchment area have any impression of which you were conscious?
EF I think the American students when they came over made quite an impact. These are the ones that we had for a year or their third year abroad and our experience of them in the Psychology department was very favourable indeed. They were very highly motivated and their comments on the Scottish students were, I think, very interesting. I think the American students were somewhat surprised at the lack of interest. Now I say apparent because it may have been a matter of personality rather than actual lack of interest. It may have been that the Scottish students were less willing to talk to the Americans than the Americans were to talk to them but they seemed to be rather critical of the Scottish students and said that they were, that they were never interested in talking about the subject, that they seemed to be offhand, not terribly concerned with the subject itself but simply with getting the required number of reports in at the right time and so on, but not willing to discuss it at length, as of course the Americans were always very willing to do.
JH You seem to be reserving your own judgement as to whether this was a fair criticism of the Scottish student?
EF Well, I think there may be something in it. But on the other hand I think there's also this difference in personality. The American students we found were so outgoing and willing to talk to anybody about what was interesting them at the time, whereas the Scottish students by and large are rather more introverted and even if they are vitally interested in their subject they may not always be willing to talk about it so readily, so I think one has to modify the opinion a little bit although I think there may be something in it.
JH If we could go on to another portion of the University community, talk about the position of non-professional staff within the University, and their relationship with seniors and their part in University government. How would you describe the changes you have seen and taken part in?
EF Oh, there's been a complete revolution, I think, in that area. At one time, the whole government of the University was in the hands of the senior members of staff. The Senate and the Court were almost entirely professorial and there was no, virtually no, representation of non-professorial members of staff in the government.
JH Did you resent this because it was a period when you were on the other side of the divide?
EF No I didn't. It didn't occur to me I think that there was any need for my presence on these bodies. We always had discussed problems quite fully with Professor Knight in the department. We knew what was going on.
JH Did Professor Knight have regular departmental meetings?
EF Not as such, because we were six members of staff and you met inevitably, you know, over a cup of tea or something. You couldn't miss meeting the rest of the department because we were all in one corridor in the old St Mary's Church and we saw all the rest of the staff every day, if not at any other time, then over a cup of tea in the afternoon. So departmental meetings as such were really, they existed by in a very informal way but at these meetings, these teatime meetings, we talked about problems and discussed things and discussed how the department should tackle various problems so it was a very open exchange of ideas in that sense.
JH What about relations, either social or intellectual, with colleagues in other departments? Were these close? And with which departments in particular?
EF Oh, they were very close, I think, for example at that time if you remember we had our staff common room for the whole of the Old Aberdeen community, University community, in one room down in what is now the Linklater rooms, one of those, and for morning coffee or in the afternoon, again we met, or at lunch time. Of course the dining room was down there too. You met people from every other department in Old Aberdeen and relationships were very close and you knew every member of staff practically in the Arts Faculty and discussed all the problems that were around at the time.
JH Were you ever in the AUT as a lecturer?
EF Earlier on, yes.
JH Did you feel this was playing part in the government of the University?
EF Not really, no. I was quite often out of sympathy and I resigned eventually from the AUT. But at that time I don't think was really aware of it as a body, as a functioning body at all.
JH So the revolution of which we've spoken took place after the change in your own status as a non-professorial member of staff. You say you didn't feel underprivileged or resent the lack of status. Did you in any way as a professor regret the events, disapprove of the changes, which have taken place since then? And did you consider they were a necessary consequence of expansion?
EF I think they were not necessarily a consequence of expansion but I think they were a necessary development. No I don't think I resented at all. What I felt on many occasions was that the decisions that were made should have been accompanied by a sense of some responsibility for the actions that had to be taken and sometimes I thought that was not the case. It's difficult to give an example but in an hierarchical body like the University where the Head of Department is responsible to the Court, to the Senate then to the Court, for the carrying out of the running of the department and so on and this is technically the case. Obviously, he has the co-operation of his colleagues and so on but the final responsibility is his, or hers, and sometimes it's difficult to combine that kind of system with a system which allows freedom, not only of expression but a sharing in the decisions to be made by people who don't have this responsibility for the decisions. And I think you've got two systems operating here, sharing in decisions and non-sharing in the responsibility, which don't really mesh too easily. I don't know what the solution is. Either have less hierarchical system or a system with less equality of decision-making but there's an essential conflict there somewhere in the meshing of those two.
JH But you can't recall an occasion when this caused you personally great embarrassment?
EF No, I don't think so. I think it …, for example, if you have something at a departmental level discussed, you may have the situation where the department as a whole, the majority of the people of the department, are keen to push for one set of actions, whereas the Head of Department at that time has got to report say to Faculty, or Senate, or wherever, on what decisions have been made. Does he report what the majority verdict of the department is or does he say this is my decision and this is what I have made? Now, where there is a very marked conflict, I think he is almost obliged to say the department as a whole feels this by a majority, but I personally as Head of Department do not agree with the majority and then of course it's pushing the decision away from the head himself towards the Faculty or Senate, so I think it does make in some cases for …
JH As a supplement to that, you and I were the first two Heads of Department to suggest to the Court that somebody else should take over from us. Does the relation of headships tend in some ways as it were to the depersonalising of authority?
EF Oh yes, I think so; it's almost bound to. And I think reasonably enough. At the same time while the individual is head of the department he has officially got that authority but it makes only good sense that the people who are involved in this rotation should work closely together if they can and come to some agreement so that one of them does not spend the next five years undoing what the first one has one in the last five, which would be very unwise if that arose.
JH Could we talk a little about the position in your experience of women within the University? As a wartime student in Arts you were in the great majority, as a lecturer as I recall you were in a substantial but relatively small minority. Later you were our first woman professor. Perhaps as a starting point, did you at any time find that your sex was a handicap, did you ever find it was an advantage, in the conducting of your work?
EF No, I think this was one thing that I was very, how shall I put it, I was pleasantly surprised about. I found then I became head of the department and became full time member of Senate and other bodies, that I was never aware of being treated differently from other Heads of Departments by the Senate or by any of the officials, administrative people, Principals, or anyone else, and neither more nor less favourably. As far as I could see, I was treated in exactly the same basis as everyone else. If you had an argument and put forward a good case for whatever it might be, the result depended on how good your case was. This was my impression and I hope that I never made any attempt to be treated differently. I certainly was never aware of trying, in fact I was determined that I would never make any special claim on that score.
JH To go back to your period as a lecturer. Would the same be true then or did you have any feeling that in matters of promotion and appointments a woman was at a disadvantage in any other respect?
EF I think there were one or two people in the University who were quite openly against having women on the staff but they were in the minority certainly. Well, there was one certainly, one Head of Department, who made it quite clear that he held this view and it was certainly not a secret. But he was the only one that I've ever come across who expressed that view and I was never really aware of any bias or prejudice against women. As far as I knew, for example, on appointment committees, the women applicants - and of course there were very very fewer women than there were men - were always treated as far as I can judge on exactly the same basis.
JH So you wouldn't feel from your experience of Aberdeen at least that there's been a justification for special representation or women's committees or anything of that sort in the University?
EF No, no. I'm on the whole against the idea of having separate representation for women. I think this in a sense bets the question. It picks them out as being a separate group and different from the rest. And I think this is almost giving away the argument for equality.
JH And going back as far as you can to your student says, were you conscious of being a women student as distinct from the rest of the students?
EF Well, I don't think you're ever unconscious of being a woman but a woman student, no I don't think so.
JH Could we then perhaps go on and talk about your own experience in positions of authority and perhaps first as Head of Department during the period of expansion. We've been talking about this in relation to the development of the discipline of Psychology. As Head of Department what would you regard among the any things a Head of Department has to do as you priority: teaching, research, personal relationships, university business, fund-raising?
EF Well, I think in Psychology, and this differed from some of the school subjects one of your primary requirements, duties I think, obligations was to ensure the development of a good Honours class, for the good of the subject, the future of the department and so on. And we, the subject I think, was at something of a disadvantage, in the earlier stages anyway, in the early days, because students coming up then knew very little about Psychology or they had rather unusual views of what Psychology was about and I think there was a very clear need to put across a first year course which would give the students a good idea of the subject and at the same time stir up enough interest in the subject and its possibilities as an employer of students later on, to encourage them to come on and later on to do Honours, because we were in competition with other subjects, other departments where the students had had a fair amount of experience already at school and in that sense, I think the first year was of crucial importance in Psychology particularly.
JH Did you teach the first year class largely yourself or was this no longer possible with the expansion?
EF Well, with the expansion it became impossible because we had to give every lecture twice over and since we lectured four afternoons a week as it was, it was impossible to do the whole of the course, but there's certainly no question that I did a very high proportion of it. I think, well eventually Professor Symons and I between us did about eighty percent of the first year course and I think this was, this certainly was a tradition in Aberdeen that the senior people did most of the first year teaching but also, I think it was particularly important in a subject like ours where there was no previous experience or no very clear experience of the subject before the students came. Sorry where do we go from here?
JH Well, I was asking about priorities. You made this a high priority and again priorities might mean two things, one what you gathered was most important, and two where you actually had to give prior attention. These cannot always be the same.
EF Well, I felt this was particularly important. I also felt that the personal relations with the students were important although that was rather difficult when you had about five hundred or more students in the first year. It was very difficult to get to know more than a fraction of those. Once the second year was through then things changed I think and they became much more ... They were drawn on by the subject into further study and deeper study into the Honours course but I think the first year particularly was of critical importance and of course the numbers increased quite considerably. The number of students doing Honours rose until we had about at our peak something like forty-five, forty-eight, In each of the two Honours courses.
JH What about research students, how did they …?
EF We had not very many, probably not more than a dozen, about a dozen, twelve to fifteen, but I think fairly highly selected and well motivated.
JH Did you have a policy for research students or was it just a matter of assigning a supervisor and trusting him or her to get on with the job?
EF As far as the choice of topic was concerned, there was a general tendency to allow the student as much latitude in choice of subject as we could afford so that the area in which he was going to do research and the particular of his research was very largely his or her choice. Given that we had somebody who was able to supervise at that level, the responsibility for the supervision was very much in the hands of the individual member of staff but there was an overview of that, making sure that the students were being reasonably dealt with and that they were getting proper attention because on one or two occasions that was not always the case.
JH Did you know all your research students, whether you were supervising or not?
EF Yes.
JH Relations with staff were changing. You said Rex Knight didn't have departmental meetings but you had instituted them. How formal were these? Did you have minutes?
EF Yes, they had to be. I think it was, it became essential I think to have the staff meetings regularly. To begin with, we had staff meetings when the case demanded but on the whole it soon became clear that these ought to be formalised and eventually they took place every week, whether or not there was anything on the billet.
JH You can't date these developments?
AF I think probably '65 I should think, staff meetings began and I think within a year or so they became a regular weekly, one hour a week was set aside in which these took place with a formal billet of business and formal minutes agreed at the beginning of every meeting. As far as I know it was within a year or two, within a couple of years of '64, simply because with the rapid increase in staff, there was a need for information to be put down on paper and a need to ensure that everybody heard, was given all the information that was available.
JH Do you have any regrets at all about the scale and speed of the expansion in the University and in your department in particular?
EF Yes, it was rapid, it was really too rapid to be readily absorbed because those first few years when we moved from six members of staff to about fifteen within a year or two, to take on, on top of an existing staff of six to more than double that number and to make sure that you've got the right distribution of effort throughout the department was extremely difficult and this was always of course, again in an atmosphere where you could, where it was very, very difficult to recruit staff. It was almost impossible as I mentioned before. So it was very rapid, and more rapid than we would have wished, quite certainly.
JH In 1976 you became Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and this was, at or near something of a watershed. How soon did you become conscious of the changing financial climate?
EF Very soon indeed. I think, well, I think probably in the second year when we had a major exercise on the Library. I'm not sure what the date was of that but an effort was made to try to cut down on the unnecessary or less necessary journals in order to make sure that the Library wouldn't run out of funds altogether. I think that was in the 1977 session which involved an enormous amount of work with, as I remember, very little actual change at the end of it.
JH As far as the work of the planning committee, or as far as staffing was concerned, was how much change?
EF Not so much then, there were murmurs I think only of cuts to come but nothing did very much happen at that stage. There were meetings of the planning committee at which [our priorities were,] choices were put in order of priority but on the whole I think even at the end of that, many of those high priority, or even moderate priority, posts were filled, whereas later on as you know it became a very different story.
JH So you you'd really no premonition of the scale of the cuts which would come in 1981?
EF No, there were a great many rumours of cuts but we'd had rumours of cuts long before that with nothing happening and I think it was, oh, even in the last year which was '78/79 I think of the Deanship, even then I think there was no great feeling of urgency about those, except on one occasion, I think, and this came a bit earlier when there was a suggestion that the Scottish universities might attempt to rationalise the teaching of the minority languages. Not French, but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Icelandic, Gaelic, Celtic and so on, Swedish, Norwegian. And they had a meeting of Deans in St Andrews, it was called, and I discovered when I went down there that I was the only Dean present. All the other Deans had sent deputies and it so happened that every deputy was either the head of, or was closely involved with, the teaching of minority languages, so that particular meeting, as you might well imagine, was a total fiasco. Nobody was willing to make any move in any direction of rationalisation and it wasn't until a couple of years later I think that the UGC called a meeting in Edinburgh about the same problem with particular reference to Russian and even then, I think they were making noises at the time, saying if you don't solve your own problems of rationalisation then it will be done for you. And I think that was in my last year, the meeting about the Russian problem. And it was then that the UGC was saying, were making this slightly threatening remark, saying if you don't do it, somebody else will, but that was two years before the famous, or infamous letter.
JH Looking back with knowledge of that letter and later developments, do you think Deans and Head of Departments were as well supplied as they might have been by the University Office with information about costs of the various departments and developments and so on, or information of any sort?
EF Well, I think it was there if you wanted it, or if you asked for it. It was available or could be made available, because we did do in our department, a costing, what our department was costing to run and the result I must say shattered me. [I was, and] even then it didn't cover all the overheads and buildings and that kind of costing, but I think you could easily have, or Heads of Departments cold have had, the information if they'd wanted it but it was not proposed or it was not given to them without their asking for it.
JH And deans could presumably have got it on a comparative basis if they'd …?
EF If they' wanted it, yes.
JH If they'd asked for it. But …?
EF Of course [it put a bit of stress,] if they'd asked for it en bloc, it would have put additional stress on the finance office particularly, but nevertheless that stress came later and if it had been done earlier a lot of the information would have been available when it was needed. But I think that this is something that Deans and Heads of Departments and others were a little slack about, that we ought to have done our costing and known what our costings were, without waiting for the axe to fall before finding out.
JH I wonder why they didn't? As an ex-Dean I would entirely agree with what you're saying there. Why didn't we? Was it our fault or that of the administration in any way?
EF No I think we had been really rather well off before because the University, Aberdeen University, I think was pretty well looked after in all kinds of ways. As we discovered later on, our costs were higher than any of the other comparable universities because we had been expecting to build up to a population of ten thousand or more and had staffed up in advance of that. So that we were, in fact, rather well off and had become a bit complacent about it.
JH What about your relationship as Dean with colleagues in other departments in the faculty?
EF Well, I found the faculty a very supportive body on the whole. I found the experience of being Dean much less stressful than I thought it might have been in general if you did your homework, prepared adequately and were well briefed by the very efficient secretary we had, things on the whole went quite smoothly, with one or two minor exceptions.
JH We'd had a recent review of Faculty Government, do you think it could have gone further and that we could have improved committee structures or composition of the faculty in any way?
EF I think it was quite a reasonable organisation. Of course it's changed a good deal since then but [as long] while the members of [the, of] staff in the Faculty had an opportunity of coming along and listening, it seems to me that there was adequate representation and reasonable coverage of the Faculty as a whole and that the relationship with the Dean was quite a good one, partly because I think there was a feeling all the way though since the Dean was not an elected individual but came up in the natural succession as it were, there was a sort of feeling that, 'there but for the grace of God go I', which might not have been the case if someone had put himself up for election and, you know, they'd deliberately invited the office. I think that might have changed the relationship quite seriously so [I was very much, in fact,] long before that I had voted against election of the Dean, and I think on the whole my opinion on this did not change.
Second side of tape 34.
JH In '79 you were elected as an Assessor to the University Court. How far did this change your pattern of life and activities within the University?
EF Very considerably. I became a member of the Finance Committee and associated with that I became Convenor of the Halls and Catering Committee and also the Disbursement Committee and Vacation Grants Committee, so it all meant the business that I was particularly involved with on the court seemed to be to deal with finance. And I had to learn how to read accountants reports and financial statements which was something that, [I was not] although I was reasonably numerate, I was not really familiar very much with accounts as such, or with the accountants' ways of presenting information which I found slightly baffling. But that side of the Court business I found extremely interesting and of course tremendously important because my period on the Court overlapped very considerably with this enormous shock that the University went through after the dreaded UGC letter of 1981.
JH Did that letter and the change of Principal with which it was associated, perhaps we should distinguish the two, did that change the nature of Court business and the work of Court members very much?
EF Oh I think so. It increased the amount of information that had to be processed for every Court meeting and for all the other committee meetings in between. It increased the work of the Finance Office to a degree where they were being asked to produce masses of information at very short notice almost every week for these urgent meetings that were being held because then, as you know, the UGC letter announced that our grant was to be cut but twenty-three percent over a period of three years or so and this caused a tremor - no it wasn't tremors - an earthquake in the University, in the administration and in the rest of the University that took a long, long time to subside, if in fact it has subsided. Even now I doubt if it has. So the amount of information that had to be absorbed by everybody on the Court and in all the subcommittees of the Court was enormous.
JH Could you hazard an estimate of the amount of your time and energy that was going to Court business before and after 1981?
EF Well, all I can say really is that I was spending every evening practically preparing for and reading material, preparing for meetings, working out ways and means of economising in all sorts of areas. I think I just couldn't guess how may hours a week but it was very considerable.
JH What suffered? Teaching, research, the department?
EF No, research just went by the board and the supervision of research too, [I didn't] I just pulled out of that. But, no, teaching I kept going, more or less on the same basis as before, possibly cut by one lecture a week or something of that sort but not seriously.
JH Given this experience, do you think the Court as constituted is a good body for the management of the affairs of the University? Do you think it's proved adequate to the challenge of 1981, or would you like to see its composition change in any way?
EF I think it's really a matter of individuals. The composition, the people involved, or the various groups of people, I think will continue to be represented there and ought to be represented there. I think it's a question of getting individuals who are a) competent in this area, numerate mostly, and b) who are willing to give the time and are interested in the problems of the University as a whole and who [are not there for any, who] have not got a particular axe to grind for a department or for a subgroup of departments. I think the one thing that impressed me about the Court was that it was there as a body of people looking at problems but not particularly with a given angle, or axe to grind for one department or another, and I think that if it doesn't stay that way it will be a disaster. I think it would wreck the Court if it became riddled with factions and various subgroups operating as representative of groups. I think that would be fatal.
JH Is a four-year term of service right given this increasing complexity and specialisation of business?
EF I think four years is not bad. I think it takes you the best part of a year to see a full circle of the all the business of the Court and then there are three years then you can really make a positive contribution I think. I think three would be too little, five is longish probably unless of course an individual wants to put in for a second term On the whole though I think that there's a certain resentment in the University among the non-members of Court, members of staff who are not on the Court, there is a resentment on their part of the Court Assessors.
JH The court has to do many things that are unpopular?
EF Exactly, and therefore I think the probability now getting a member of Court being re-elected for a second term is probably very, very low, whereas at one time it was a normal pattern a member of Court to take on a second term. But I think four years is not a bad period.
JH I wonder if you'd like to comment on the leadership the University's had in your time, particularly your time on Court, from the different principals. You'd like to comment, perhaps, on Principals Taylor and Wright as well, but you had particularly close contact with Principal Noble and Principal McNicol?
EF Yes, I came on to the Court when Principal Noble was in his penultimate year, I think, as Principal. So I had two years under Principal Fraser Noble and two years with Professor McNicol, Principal McNicol. Principle Noble. My criticism of him would be that he was coasting a bit by the time that I came on to the Court. He had by that time, a fact that he didn't know then, two years to run and I think he was easing off quite considerably by then. He was a very relaxed chairman of the Court, in same cases I think maybe too relaxed in the sense that he had not always done his homework or prepared himself for the billet but [it was a very] the meetings were very free from tension, which is I think not what you might have said of some earlier Principals, although I was not on the Court with them, but to generalise from Senate meetings and so on. So there was this feeling of relaxation and a feeling that you could discuss things in a very temperate sort of atmosphere. I think he made on enormous contribution before he left the University when it was quite clear that the University was going to have to contract very considerably by some means or another in terms of staff. He prepared the structure of staff for the future with this expected but although it was even greater then he had expected and left that for his successor, Principal McNicol, as a working document. And I think this took a good deal of the pressure off the new Principal which might otherwise have been even greater then it was. So I think Principal Noble did a really mansize job on that. He prepared this document in the last few month of his tenure as Principal and left it for the Court to operate on and it came through, oh really, virtually unchanged I think, from his assessment of the needs of the individual departments and the size of the individual disciplines and that plan really survived pretty well until the end of the time that I was on the Court. Principal McNicol was a very different chairman of the Court. He was always prepared up to the hilt, sometimes leaving possibly too little room for manoeuvre but nevertheless there was never any suggestion that he had not done his work beforehand. Rather more, not dogmatic but almost pre-prepared to get his own way. He knew what he wanted to come out at the end of the meeting and he pushed for that very strongly, reasonably enough. But again there was not this relaxation feeling in those meetings, always very friendly, always very courteous, but much more greater sense of urgency which of course was, there was indeed at that time. It was a very difficult time for anyone to come in and take over as Principal at that point. He couldn't possibly have known what a disastrous position the University was to be in and it took a great deal of courage and determination to work through that first spell, couple of years or so, and he showed courage I think, in many instances at the very beginning. He had a rough time in the Senate, I don't think there was ever a time when he had a really rough spell in the Court because the Court I think was very supportive and appreciated his problems in a way I think that may be the Senate did not, although their points of view of course were very different but the atmosphere I think was a much more business-like one in Court under his guidance than it has been before. It was a different atmosphere.
JH Do you have any particular recollection of other members of the Court who made a particularly distinctive contribution to the affairs of the University?
EF Well, Calum McLeod on the finance side was a very strong, effective member of the Court. He made an enormous contribution on anything involving finance and investment and anything to do with the money side. I think he tightened up or helped to tighten up the finance section of the University administration and there was obviously need for somebody with his enormous experience on that side. Lord Arbuthnott [on the more] on the lands and investment, lands, properties side was a very major influence and although I didn't share those committees with him, the reports that he produced on that side of what the University should retain and what it should get rid of were obviously of major importance. Mr Fleming, who has, since died of course, was also particularly useful on the business side. I think the lay members of the Court, if you could call them that, the outside people who were elected to serve on the Court, were very powerful people.
JH You haven't mentioned any of the academic members or the Vice-Principals. Now the Vice-Principal's role had obviously begun to change. I don't know if you'd comment on that. If you'd been serving longer, would you have liked to have been Vice-Principal?
EF No. I don't think so. [I] maybe that's slight exaggeration. I think there's a danger of course if you're chose as Vice-Principal that you might be asked to do all the jobs that the principal didn't want to do because he had something better to do with his time. That's maybe not quite fair. No, the principals, the Vice-Principals that I worked with were very good indeed, Professor Rutherford of course, and Professor Keir, oh, I overlapped also with Mike Meston, Professor Meston, but I probably had less involvement with him except on one report on the Halls of Residence that he and I were closely involved with, but the other two certainly played a very, very major part in the work of the court.
JH Do you think University administration is going to go more and more into the hands of people like academic managers as distinct from academics who are doing a spell on the Court such as you have done? Is this going to be a consequence of the great financial squeeze?
EF You mean that people would be appointed to do nothing else?
JH Well, they'd find themselves for substantial period doing little else.
EF Well, I think it's almost inevitable. I think it has its dangers because I think [people will come] other members of staff who are not on the Court, will come to resent this kind of arrangement because they will feel that the management of the University is in the hands of a very small number of very powerful people, with 'powerful' in quotes. I'm not sure that any of them have any real powers, but unless the business is fairly open and there's a limit I think to the openness that there can be, there will be, as it has appeared in the last few years probably, this division between this small group of people and the rest and I think although this feeling of separateness may be exaggerated, nevertheless if it is felt to exist it is a bad element in the University.
JH Finally, do you think much damage has been done to the University, much lasting damage, by the cuts which have been imposed since 1981?
EF Yes, I do. I think it has done lasting damage, at least damage which will be apparent over the next twenty years or more, partly because of the major shift it has produced in the balance of age groups in the University staff. Before this 1981 letter, there already had been a period when there were very few young people being appointed to the University and as a result of the 1981 cuts, the University has lost a high proportion of its very senior people, say the over fifty-fives, and the result is that we now have in the University a very narrow age band of people, which is going to make appointments and positions very difficult over the new few years. There are gong to be, as far as we can see, very very few appointments at the bottom end of the scale and I think this interference with the natural turnover of age groups in the University will be a major problem. There'll be bunches, or there'll be humps or troughs which will be just around for the next twenty years I would think. Apart from that, I think the early retirements that have been produced and the, I've forgotten the term they used for the resignations,
JH Voluntary redundancies ...?
EF Voluntary redundancies or whatever, have not necessarily taken place in the right, or have not necessarily taken out the right people. I think if there had been a much more selective set of voluntary redundancies or encouragement to leave or whatever, the effect on departments would have been less noticeable.
JH Have there been any positive effects from the cuts?
EF Yes, I think there have. I think it has forced the University to examine its costings in a way that it would never have been willing to do otherwise. I think if you don't have the information, as we didn't, about where your money is going, there's not encouragement to re-allocate the resources in a sensible way. For example, in the halls and residencies, halls and catering and residencies, I was concerned with, there were extravagances, there was waste of money which no one was really aware of, and sometimes a very, very simple decision could save hundreds of thousands of pounds. Now, I don't think that should be the case in a public institution like the University, and if this letter encourages the universities to examine where the money is going and how they're using their income, then it has had some good effects.
JH Finally, how do you feel, as you retire, about the future of the University? Hopeful?
EF Oh, the long period yes. This is only a ripple after all in five hundred years of its existence nearly. What has happened in the last, what, four years is a very, very small blip on the screen of the University's history. It will recover quite certainly from this and I've no doubt that in another five hundred years there will some kind of University here, so I don't feel pessimistic at all. I think this has been a very considerable shake, upheaval, for the people involved at the moment, but it will have its good points and its painful points certainly, but over the long term it's a very, very, small thing in its long history.
End of Interview
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