| Description | Third interview with Sir Fraser Noble at his house, on Sunday, 14 July by John Hargreaves.
Interview transcript:
H. Sir Fraser, when you came back to Aberdeen as Vice-Chancellor and Principal in 1976, what were you're your thoughts and what were your hopes? Had you any hesitation about accepting the University's invitation to return?
N. Yes, I had a fair amount of hesitation because I had virtually made up my mind what I was going to do. I was going to stay in Leicester for sixteen year and then retire at 60, 61. I argued that by that time I would have been a Vice-Chancellor for over sixteen years and I thought that was amply long enough for anybody to do the job and particularly to do the job in one place. I had actually approaches from other places - I won't go into details but I'd turned down the first three of these approaches very quickly on the grounds that I still had so much to do in Leicester and I was very happy there. The fourth one did in fact make me think very very hard indeed, and I was almost on the point of accepting a move, but I argued that I couldn't possibly go as quickly as they would have liked me to move and I wanted, in fact, to see through the next stage of the development of the Leicester Medical School. So, in a sense, I had been softened up when a couple of years later I was asked if I would be interested in going back to Aberdeen. I suppose the essential thing to remember is that Aberdeen was Aberdeen and unique in my own thoughts about other universities. I think it was one of our well known alumnus playwrights, George Rowntree Harvey, who once wrote: "I love this place all seasons of the year" and that's the kind of sentiment that made me say yes to the approach, would I like to go to Aberdeen, and then nothing happened for months until I got a letter from the Secretary of State asking me, by which time I had begun to conceive second thoughts, I am afraid.
H. How far had you kept in touch with developments in Aberdeen? What sort of standing did the University of Aberdeen have in the Committee of Vice-Chancellors at the time of your return?
N. I hadn't kept terribly closely in touch with what was happening specifically in Aberdeen, and I think it might be fair to say that Aberdeen wasn't very prominently in the minds of Vice-Chancellors in their collective deliberations. I suppose my predecessor was personally not terribly disposed to take an active role on the Committee of Vice-Chancellors. When I became chairman, I invited him to serve on the Steering Committee, or the Executive Committee - I have forgotten what it was called at that precise time - and he did for a year serve on that, but it was partly because of his health and partly for other reasons that he was not, except in one of two specific areas, very much involved; and on the Committee as such I don't think Aberdeen figured a great deal in discussion.
H. When you returned, what were your impressions of the University? How had it changed? How had it responded to the oil development in the city?
N. Of course, the oil development in the city was one of the reasons why I thought it would both be terribly interesting for me to come back and also that I might have something to contribute, because I had already formed some impression that the University hadn't quite taken the initiative in responding to the development of oil that I might have wished. I had been visiting California in I think it was 1973, and I remember spending a day at one of the great maritime technology institutes, and in the course of conversation, North Sea Oil development was a topic, and the Americans were saying that if the opportunities were not taken quickly by Scottish enterprise and by institutions like the Scottish universities, the Americans would simply have to do all the jobs for themselves, which otherwise the Scots might take full advantage of; and I felt when I got back to Aberdeen that, although there were certain very clear exceptions, not enough of the departments of the university had got themselves fully involved in the opportunities and the challenges. I felt that if they continued to neglect these opportunities it would in the long run be unhealthy for the University and I regarded that as one of the objectives that I must overcome. I spent a fair bit of time in my first two years trying to resuscitate a Committee on Industrial Liaison which I think George Burnett had perhaps taken the initiative in forming at one stage, and Ken Walton was a great help to me in that because he had been very much interested in it and involved in it. But in the early stages I think a certain amount of time was, I won't say wasted but spent in re-cultivating links with Aberdeen-based enterprises, some of which were, shall we say, not in the expanding world of modern technology and it took some time to build the links with the oil industry or at least to get them more firmly established. I was helped enormously in that, for example, by the fact that certain departments had taken the initiatives, had established themselves in close relationship with oil and had contributed through their research interests to the interests of the oil companies
H. Would this be the point at which to comment on relationships between the University and Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology? How far were you conscious of being rivals and how far of being partners in those days?
N. Well, I was very conscious of the sense of rivalry which existed on the other side, the Robert Gordon's side. My own view about the matter was that we should be partners and that it wasn't a question of rivalry, because what the two institutions were doing and ought to be doing were complimentary not competitive. I don't blame Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology in the slightest for the line they were taking. They were making a considerable success of developing their own interests. If there's blame I think part of the blame at any rate must rest with the Scottish Education Department's failure to see, and the failure of the Ministry of Education in England to see, how to overcome the difficulties that the introduction of the binary system into the whole system of higher education had produced.
H. But your own relationships with Gordon's were harmonious?
N. Yes, I think they were fairly harmonious. I used to go fairly regularly as a Governor to meetings. I wasn't able to play much part in their subsidiary committees. My personal relations with the Principal were good and friendly, though not warm or close; and although I made an attempt on one or two occasions to get him to talk more intimately about co-ordination of our efforts, I could see why he found difficulties on his side. I think I was able to promote certain developments, but there were undoubtedly suspicions at departmental level. On the side of Engineering, for example, I did promote a certain co-operation on the Electrical Engineering side but on other sides it was very difficult to secure anything like a partnership, and this was a great pity. I felt myself that the Scottish Education Department ought to have helped to overcome these difficulties and one of the last occasions at which I took part in a meeting with the Senior officials of the Scottish Education Department and the Scottish Principals saw an outburst from me against the dilatory attitude of the Scottish Education Department in neglecting these issues, and I am afraid they continued to neglect them.
H. So one of your priorities was to bring the University into closer contact with the city and particularly the oil industry. Did you have any other specific aims or priorities? What did you hope to achieve during you Principalship?
N. I don't know that I had any specific objectives. I think when I came to Aberdeen I was given the feeling that it would be a period of five or six years which was all I was committed to because I was determined to retire certainly no later than 65, possibly a little earlier than that, and I knew that there would not be a great deal of scope for growth and development, partly for demographic reasons but primarily for financial reasons; and it was more likely to be a questions of tidying up and possibly making slight alterations in the system of government in the University rather than any major development. In fact, of course, the financial situation worsened rather that improved, although one had emerged from the initial impact for the oil crisis. When I arrived in 1976 it was in a period of rather belated annual settlements of university grants, the old Quinquennial system having been thrown overboard, and it was extremely difficult to take a long-term view. There were one or two areas in which forward thinking and development was possible or at least was called for, one of the most important of these being Medicine, where the University was committed to an expansion in numbers in the Medical intake and some solution had to be found to the problem of how to find places for clinical training for this expanding number of medical undergraduates. That was a questions that had been under consideration for some time and I was from the beginning persuaded that the thing to do was to make the development of a clinical out-station, so to speak, in Inverness, partly in order to re-establish the University's influence in that part of its province which lay north of the Highland line. I hope it's been a successful experiment - I think it certainly was.
H. Did you have any notion in that connection that the Inverness medical outpost might develop into anything more than that, in that other Faculties might become involved in work in the north?
N. No, I didn't think of that except in terms of a further development in extra-mural work. But when I had been a youngster, north of Inverness schools tended to think either of Aberdeen or of either Glasgow or Edinburgh, and I was getting the feeling that schools weren't thinking of Aberdeen in the 1970s as much as they had done in earlier days, and since I felt that Aberdeen was the University best place to study the problems of the Highlands and Islands in terms of research, and it had been a research interest of my own as a young lecturer, I felt that somehow or other we could re-establish the role of the University but not that we could develop subsidiary departments or branches of departments up there.
H. Did you feel the Institute for the Study of Sparsely-Populated Areas was a promising beginning in that context?
N. Well, I don't want to sound critical but I feel that that Institute was almost becoming too concerned with the Middle East and other parts of the world to the neglect of the sparsely-populated areas on its own doorstep. That's unfair, because it's not a generalised criticism but it was where I felt the emphasis and the work of that Institute was maybe going wrong.
H. You came back in 1976 conscious of coming financial constraints. Is it possible to say any more about this? How far in advance did you have a sense of the near-disaster which struck in 1981, or how far were you thinking largely about a tapering-off rather than a necessity for cutting back?
N. The extent of the setback of 1981 took even me by total surprise because I had been in negotiation with the Chairman of the UGC less than two months before the July letter arrived, and nothing in what he had said to me indicated the extent to which the blow was going to hit Aberdeen. On the other hand, from the very beginning I had a very strong feeling that Aberdeen was unaware of how well off it had been and how relatively well it had been treated in the build-up after 1962. I think, still, that partly what went wrong was that in the earlier stages of the planning the Aberdeen target was set probably too high; there was a commitment virtually expansion to 8,000 and a subsidiary commitment virtually to the idea of growth to 10,000 or more. And I frankly think that these figures were probably not very well considered, but the University Grants Committee had underwritten them, particularly in the sense that they had been prepared to allow building programmes to go ahead which had these numbers in mind: and it's all very well having very commodious space for the departments that are not yet anything like big enough to fill the space, but if that space is wasted it costs money, and I think the University's recurrent grant was sustained at a fairly high level when student numbers were not really going to justify that. At the same time, of course, it was the University Grants Committee's formal policy certainly right up till the early 1970s and in the 1970s to encourage universities to make appointments in advance of the need. Aberdeen, I think, in many respects had done that. I felt that the University was numerically well provided with staff but the provision of staff was not, if you like, very evenly spread between the different Faculties or between different departments, in individual departments. Now, this was partly, I think, the consequence of Aberdeen's admissions system which was based, of course, on Faculty admissions and the Ordinary MA, allowing students a fairly free range of choice of subject; and that meant there had be a response to student fashion and when there was a demand for certain subjects the staffing in these departments was very quickly expanded; and very often if student fashion changed these departments which then came under pressure of student demand were either under-staffed or could only be staffed at the cost of further inputs of money. Until 1973-74 period, the further input of money was usually forthcoming but after that it certainly was not forthcoming but after that it certainly was not forthcoming and the University was finding it very difficult to adjust quickly enough to this situation so as to move resources from areas where they were no longer needed. It's an inherent problem in a situation in which you have got staff with tenure and particularly where the buildings existed but the accommodation was allocated to specific departments and these departmental areas were equipped and staffed up to suit the need that no longer existed in some areas.
H. As far as the expansion and the projected expansion which never took place in the early 70s was concerned, the communications which reached the Senate suggest that it was the UGC that was taking the lead and was pressing Aberdeen specifically to accept these targets. I don't know whether with hindsight you would say we were well advised to accept because the position in Senate seemed to be that if we failed to agree to go on growing we would somehow get stuck and suffer, as in the long run we did. Could you say with hindsight how you…?
N. I don't think I could comment on how decisions were made in the late 60s or early 70s. I'd like to generalise what I say, rather. I did feel when I got back to Aberdeen that the active role of the Senate in making policy was not as firm and precise and definite as it should have been. Now, this was partly history and tradition. The governing body was the University Court, and while there always was an important academic participation in the work of the University Court, the relatively small number involved I used to feel consisted of men whom members of Senate hardly looked on as still members of Senate: they were looked on rather as though these chaps had become members of the Court. I had grown up in Leicester with a system where the Court, or rather the Council as it was called in Leicester, was undoubtedly the governing body but it divided the cake very precisely after very careful consideration into two parts, the major part being allocated direct to the Senate, 75 or 80% of the total available revenue of the University, and Senate had to take the decisions to make about how that share of the total cake was going to be used. The result was that in all the decisions that Senate made, or that Senate considered on the recommendation of Faculties, there was a financial sense of direct involvement and responsibility for the allocation of resources. This I found wasn't the case in Aberdeen, and I was very anxious to try to ensure that Senate was better informed, more directly involved in the discussion of policy making. That was quite a difficult problem because it involved interfering with tradition and history, and I have an enormous respect for the tradition and history of the University of Aberdeen.
H. Could we perhaps move on from there, and if I could put to you a general question with a very specific Aberdeen reference? How does a Vice-Chancellor work? How far has a Vice-Chancellor's role changed in your experience; and, linked with it specifically, how did you work in Aberdeen?
N. I regarded the role of the Vice-Chancellor as being that of a moderator or a facilitator or an inspirer or stimulator of ideas. The real work in a university is done by the academics and the decisions and the initiatives must essentially be those of the academics, but in order to develop and to make decisions appropriate to the needs of development the difficulties confronting the academics somehow have to be smoothed over, ways round them have to be found, resources have to be transferred in certain directions even if it means denying them to others who want to get their hands on them. And I always regarded the role of the Vice-Chancellor as that of trying to make it possible for this academic colleagues to perform to the best of their ability and to develop the soundest academic policies with the least difficulty in terms of scarce resources. In order to get to a situation where you can do that kind of job you require not only full co-operation from the academic staff as a whole but you require to be able to shunt resources around and I think in the period up to the early 1970s, certainly in my first ten years as a Vice-Chancellor, however scarce resources were ( and we never had enough resources to meet all our needs and all our plans, I don't think any university ever did) nevertheless, resources were growing all the time and it was always possible somehow to find ways round difficulties. I always remember a day in the early 1970's, after a meeting of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, when I happened to speak within a period of five minutes separately to the Principal of Glasgow University, Charles Wilson, and then to the then Principal of London University, Sir Douglas Logan, and each one said that for the first time in his long experience, he was finding it no longer possible to secure the allocation of resources to the chap who really deserved it and needed it, because he was no longer finding it possible to find ways of finding the money somehow. I used to think that that meant a major change in the opportunities at any rate, of discharging effectively the role of the Vice-Chancellor as I conceived it and it certainly was a great handicap to me to be back in Aberdeen, to see directions in which I wanted resources transferred, and to find it extremely difficult to get this done, partly because resources were already becoming very scarce and partly because the way ahead seemed to be even worse.
H. Does that mean, as seems to be the case since your retirement, that the role of Vice-Chancellor as fund-raiser is becoming a great deal more significant?
N. Yes, I think it is. It's not one that I relish very much or ever would have relished, and I always remember, I can't remember the context of it, but Tom Taylor in my hearing once said that he wasn't a fund-raiser, it wasn't what he was appointed to do. I think you are right, I think there is a major change now.
H. If we could come down from objectives to nuts and bolts of the actual way a Vice-Chancellor goes about it, would it be an impossible task to invite you to describe the division of work in a typical week as Vice-Chancellor of Aberdeen? How far are you in committees inside university or outside, how far are you dealing with academic questions, and how far with financial questions, so far as they can be separated?
N. I think that would be a very difficult one without giving a lot of thought to it, partly because although there's a pattern in the year that corresponds to some extent with the academic calendar, and the pressures correspondingly vary, to some extent one has to respond to issues that arise. I found one difference between Aberdeen and Leicester, and that was that I heard less in Aberdeen directly from departments about their problems. I think I had been accustomed for many years in Leicester to being involved in consultation both by heads of departments and members of their staffs in the identification of their problems and the consideration of ways round them, or it might well be advice from me that they had to drop an idea or change tack in some way; but I found that that wasn't, I think, a normal approach in Aberdeen and this may simply be that Aberdeen was a very mature, historically long-in-the-tooth university, perhaps reflecting the sense of departmental independence that grew up; indeed I feel myself that too strong a sense of departmental autonomy sometimes can lead to little barriers being set up, not between departments and Principals or Vice-Chancellors but between one department and another in the same Faculty, and one of the things that I had always been very keen on encouraging was inter-departmental consultation and co-operation, sometimes even co-ordination of research effort. I think all the great advances in research, both in the Sciences and indeed the Social Sciences, perhaps less so in the Humanities, are achieved by drawing on the ideas that are being developed in other subject-disciplines and using the lessons to be learnt from them in the study of one's own subject. That was something that I was always very keen on trying to encourage; I found it difficult to make a break-through in that in the structure of things at Aberdeen.
H. You found you had less contact with Heads of Departments, they were less frequently knocking at your door?
N. Yes, I would say that's undoubtedly the case. I was just as snowed under by paper, perhaps too snowed under by paper, as I always had bee. I think that's right, I saw a fair number of visitors, but I would guess I saw fewer visitors seeking interview than I had been accustomed to, in Aberdeen. It's difficult to say how one's day developed, it's partly a question of how many committees one actually attends or chairs. I think this was one reason why I had strongly round to the view before I left that it was time to have two Vice-Principals, which is what the University, I think, has very rightly instituted. Of course, the whole office of Vice-Principal took a long time to develop in Aberdeen itself.
H. I was going to ask you about that. How far did the role of Vice-Principal change in your period of office, and how far were you conscious of trying to change that role?
N. I think Robert Cross's interpretation of the role was simply to be as helpful as he could and to attend committees, but he tended, I think, not to want to interfere or to take too many initiatives. When I appointed, or at least got Senate to appoint, Ken Walton, Ken was, if you like, a much more active contributor to university policy-making. I think I am right in saying that, certainly in the early period of his Vice-Principalship, Robert Cross wasn't officially a member of the University Court; that had been put right. I may not have got this strictly accurately. Ken Walton, of course, had been on the Court before he was appointed Vice-Principal, and of course it was a great tragedy in many ways - in every way - that Ken Walton fell ill and in effect there was a period of about two terms when there was no Vice-Principal because of his last illness. The role of the Vice-Principal was becoming more important and more onerous, there was no doubt about that, and it continued to be so.
H. Clearly, the Vice-Chancellor relies heavily on the Vice-Principal for information and advice. What other sources of information and advice were particularly important to you at Aberdeen?
N. On the academic side, the Deans. The quality of advice you get from the Deans varies from one individual to another but one thing I would like to say is that right at the end of my period, when the extent of the great disaster dawned upon everybody, when the letter from the University Grants Committee eventually arrived just three months before I retired, the help I got from the Deans was very considerable. It was clear, I think it was very honest, and I got a great sense of being supported in preparing the documentation for the Planning Committee and for Senate and the Court to consider; so that at least from that point of view the initial impact of all his on my unfortunate successor was eased a little bit. Another source, of course, was the members of the Court, and in Aberdeen the tradition of the authority of the Court was most effectively upheld by its membership. The Court, nevertheless, I felt did require certain restructuring and I suppose partly because of the strong sense of history, to re-structure a mechanism like that is not an easy thing because one has to secure agreement and it took some time. I think I prepared two or three papers for the Court to consider and we made no very dramatic changes, but although the Court was perhaps slightly larger than the Senate some people might regard as the appropriate size for an effective governing body, I do feel that it emerged in structure at least stronger and through the number of co-options that were possible after the restructuring of the Court, it was open to the Principal, in consultation with other senior members of the Court, to try and secure members who were representative of the community at large, professions and, indeed in a very notable case, the trade unions.
H. What about the role of University Secretary and his staff? You might like to make some comparisons here between Tom Skinner and his staff and the earlier Secretaries who were cast, I think, in a very different mould.
N. I found the University Office a very efficient office, although I felt that once again tended to work along clearly established and defined lines and perhaps not to be too ready or too quick at undertaking roles outside the established lines or think about new ways of, for example, presenting information. Sometimes I used to feel that the documentation of for the Court was provided in a slightly outmoded style, although Tom Skinner himself had a marvellous command of English, he was a very good draughtsman indeed. It was perhaps just a question of the style, the system, being a little different from the one that I had been accustomed to , which was the one that I had, I suppose, over fourteen years really built up, and feeling that there were things that I would like to change but there wasn't going to be time to undertake it, and therefore perhaps in the best interests of the University the minimum of interference was the most desirable thing. I found, for example, that the budgeting ahead …
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…who had been Finance Convenor for a very long time and I was taking a very gloomy view of the figures and proposing some quite drastic measures to help to deal with the situation and finding no very ready response from either Court or the officers, and somebody said, "But it won't be as bad as the figures indicate" - and I burst out, "Are you telling me that I can't rely on the estimates that are being presented to the Court for consideration?" I think, again, you see, the University Office are not to blame here. Too often the Government had been dilatory in the mid 70s in giving out allocations which then held the UGC back, the UGC was well behind schedule quite often, and then too often although things looked terribly pessimistic for six months, supplementary grants would come through and deficits would be turned to surpluses at the end of the day. The abandonment of the old Quinquennial system really was very disastrous from the point of view of all the universities. I had a feeling that Aberdeen was clinging too long to the sense that they would be bailed out in the end of the day, and I could see an appalling risk that a day would come when they would not be bailed out, although I didn't imagine that it would be as disastrous, as it turned out to be in 1981.
H. Are there any specific episodes of your Principalship that you would like to recall? I remember, for example, the Open Day which was an innovation for the University, which was very much, I think, your own initiative. Would you like to say a little about your thinking in that context?
N. Yes, I think I put that idea forward because I did form the impression in my first year or so in Aberdeen that the University was in a sense a little more self-contained that in would like to see it, and I wanted to see whether there was public interest in what we were doing, because I was sure there was, and I wanted to stimulate colleagues to think of ways of putting themselves across to the general public. I had done this on two or three occasions in Leicester over a period of about fourteen years, and found that there was very considerable interest, even in a city where education and the presence of a university were not the significant thing they are in Aberdeen. I was delighted with the response that we achieved both from colleagues and from the general public. The amount of work involved was tremendous, and Ken Walton undertook the supervision of the organisation and carried it through very successfully. He had always had excellent relations with the technical heads of the departments, the senior technicians, throughout the University, and this, I think, enabled the enterprise to be mounted with a sense of enthusiastic co-operation by the technical and secretarial staff, and there was a sense of community in the enterprise - perhaps also a sense of a little inter-departmental rivalry which was a pretty healthy thing in my view - and the amount of interest shown by the general public was very considerable. On that scale, it would never be possible to repeat the undertaking, except infrequently, but it was, I think, agreed that there would perhaps be individual Faculty open days from time to time; and certainly the Science Faculty had one a year or two later which was also very successful. But it did seem to me important to involve the whole University together in some enterprise of this kind which would attract that attention of the general public.
H. Another rather less happy feature of your Principalship was the occupation of the Administrative Building by the students in the confrontation over South African investments. I wonder what your recollections of that are and perhaps you could relate them to the changing role of the SRC and the student body within the University?
N. Yes, it was an unhappy episode, perhaps taking us all a little bit by surprise. I often reflected that perhaps the reason for it was that the students in Aberdeen had a sense of having missed out a little bit at the time of the student revolution in 1967, 1968, 1969 and subsequent years. They had never done what every other university had done, which was to occupy the administration building or somewhere equally significant in the life and work of the University. On the other hand, Aberdeen had always been a city where the anti-apartheid movement was pretty strong and that was a movement that involved the interest of the general public, and many members of the academic and non-academic staff as well as the students, so that the choice of South African investments as the issue at stake from the point of view of a President of the SRC, who wanted to make a name for himself, was a very appropriate choice. And the whole thing coming right at the start of the session was partly, I think, sparked off by a minor administrative mistake which was that the use of Elphinstone Hall for a rather posh function given by Barclays International Bank, which was then, of course, one of the instruments of attention by the anti-apartheid movement, had been accepted - or a booking had been accepted - without any thought being given to any possible political implications. I think that helped to get the whole thing going, right at the beginning of a new term when newly arrived students, including, of course, many first-year students who don't know much about the background but think this is a great excuse for a lark - and of course many of those who participated in the occupation of the Administration Building were strongly opposed to the occupation but took part in it in order to try to ensure that the leadership of the enterprise did not get out of hand, and many of them were genuinely sympathetic to the cause of opposition to investment in South African enterprises; so the choice of topic was an opportune one from the point of view of the student leadership. Now, you mentioned the role of the SRC: I don't think the SRC was solid about this issue but I do think that the President at that time was an intelligent opportunist who saw his chance and took it, and I believe that there were some aspects of what happened which he probably personally came to regret, and relations with him I found quite difficult for a time afterwards, partly, I think, because he found it a rather uneasy business coming to see me in the way in which a I had established a relationship with his immediate predecessors and with his successors, because my own relations with student leaders have tended to be very good. I always remember after a similar episode at the time of the general student rebellions while I was in Leicester, when again the President of the SRC found that things were getting a bit out of hand from his own point of view and once again, as happened in Aberdeen, the general good sense of the student body as a whole, once they were allowed to express their views at a general meeting through a vote, brought the whole thing to an end and reconciliation became possible. Down in Leicester I was immediately taken out to lunch by the leaders of the rebellion. I think there was a little bit of shyness in Aberdeen that prevented that happening, but that was certainly not the long-term effect. If there were any long-term effect from this protest it was to strengthen my links with the student bodies and I found them very co-operative in all kinds of ways and extremely sensible and mature, much more mature than had generally been the case, I think, with the Leicester student body, in their attitude to the University's problems, very understanding of the difficulties that confronted the University. In the years that I spent in Aberdeen, my regard for the efficiency, kindliness and general maturity of the organisations representing the student body, particularly the SRC, but also the Athletic Association and the Student Union, my regard for these grew all the time and I am really rather proud of the good relations that were established and sustained with these bodies. I must say that that was just part of the tradition because I am quite certain that my predecessors' relations with these bodies were very very good, which might well have been one reason why Aberdeen missed out on the student revolt of 1968 when, of course, a great deal of immature behaviour was characteristic of the country at large.
H. It was at the time of that episode, in my recollections, that the phrase 'the campus unions' came into use in Aberdeen. I wonder if you would like to go on and comment on your relationship with 'the campus unions' and in particular with the changed role of the body we were talking about yesterday: the AUT?
N. The technical staff union and the clerical staff union had regular consultations with us. I think these became sharper, if you like, slightly more formalised, but also in my experience, in Aberdeen remained on a very friendly footing. I always remember one occasion when I invited the campus unions to a meal in the evening after the discussions that had been having, and it was one of the most hilarious evenings I think I have spent in Aberdeen, with everybody in the best of good humour. The leadership of these campus unions, the non-academic ones, in my time at Aberdeen I thought behaved in a very mature way: indeed, I felt that when the great crisis developed in the summer of 1981, they showed a much clearer understanding of the financial problem and the University's difficulties than the academic staff did, and they showed this in a number of very responsible ways although they were as opposed to redundancies as the academic staff; but their appreciation of what the problem was very sharp and from my point of view sympathetic, constructive and helpful. They were sometimes quite tough to negotiate with but even the toughest of them had a sense of belonging to the University: that was something that always came through in all my negotiations in Aberdeen, this sense of belonging to the University and owing some loyalty to the institution and because of that to those who directly employed them. Generally, I had the impression that relations between individual departments, heads of departments on the academic side and the non-academic side staff on the other side, in Aberdeen were extremely good. Now, returning to the AUT, similarly I felt from the beginning, on my arrival in Aberdeen, that the AUT was interested in doing things in the interests of the University as well as of their own members, and while bargaining with them could often be quite tough, it was always agreeably conducted. The AUT came up against a very serious difficulty in the summer of 1981, when the full implications of the UGC's letter dawned on them and I can't really comment on what happened after that, but what I can say is that certainly until that stage was reached, while I was there, the members of the Committee and the leaders in successive years were co-operative and helpful to the University while perfectly awake to the interests of their members. I had good relations generally with them all.
H. I wonder if there are any final reflections that you would like at this time to put on record. When the historians of the University come to deal with this period, and I must say the Editorial Board have no intention of trying to do it in 1995, but when they come to do it in the 21st century, is there anything you particularly hope they might say about your Principalship?
N. I think they are almost bound to regard my Principalship as in itself not a very significant element in the total history of the University. It was a period of uncertainty, in one sense of marking time. If I had achieved anything, it was perhaps to begin to get Senate more interested in the financial implications of academic policy-making and the consequences of financial decisions being taken by the Court on the Senate and on the Faculties. I found it quite difficult to stimulate really effective debates on Senate. That took me by surprise. You must remember I had never attended a Senate in Aberdeen while I was a lecturer, and I was accustomed to active, pretty sharp debates on the Leicester Senate, and the Senate in Leicester was the friendliest possible body of men and women, but their discussions were always sharp and to the point; sometimes a bit long drawn-out and long-winded and I think probably it was felt in Aberdeen that I was sometimes a big long drawn-out and long-winded because I kept maybe trying to prolong discussions simply because I felt there wasn't enough discussion being generated. There were exceptions to that; sometimes the exceptions seemed to me to be on matters that were of no great importance. And, of course, no one can blame Senate for not feeling well enough informed to discuss something that the Principal maybe came to think was a very important matter if there had not been a sufficient flow of information in advance or communication of statistics or communication of financial figures, budgeting figures and so on, to the Senate. This is always one of the difficulties when you have got two bodies involved in the government of a very complex institution like a university, and the common factor is finance but one is virtually excluded from the financial side of decisions and there is a danger that the other takes financial decisions without being sufficiently aware of the academic implications or the academic arguments for giving priorities to one set of proposals and lower priorities academically to other sets of proposals. I think, historically maybe, that period might be one in which it might be said that my role was to try to make members of staff, including less senior members of staff, being to think about matters in these terms even although nothing very much had been accomplished by the time I left.
H. Thank you very much, Fraser Noble.
END OF INTERVIEW
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