The University of Oxford is to appoint its first woman vice-chancellor since its records began nearly 800 years ago, after Prof Louise Richardson was nominated for the university's most senior office.
Prof Richardson, currently the principal and vice-chancellor of St Andrews University, is an expert on the growth of terrorist movements. She held a succession of high-profile positions at Harvard until she was appointed to lead St Andrews in 2009.
Students and staff hailed the nomination as a momentous event in Oxford's history. Prof Richardson (56) told the Guardian she hoped her nomination would inspire current and potential women undergraduates.
“I look forward to the day when a woman being appointed isn’t in itself news,” Prof Richardson said. “Unfortunately, academia like most professions is pyramid-shaped – the higher up you go the fewer women there are.”
Born in Co Waterford, she read history at Trinity College, as an undergraduate, before postgraduate study at UCLA and a doctorate at Harvard.
Prof Richardson said her priorities would be maintaining Oxford’s stellar reputation as one of the world’s top research and teaching universities, and that balancing the university’s admissions procedures was part of that effort.
“This has been a priority for me at St Andrews, where we have dramatically increased the proportion of poor kids we accept,” Prof Richardson said.
“My parents did not go to college, most of my siblings did not go to college. The trajectory of my life has been made possible by education. So I am utterly committed to others having the same opportunity I have had.”
Despite years of effort, more than 40 per cent of Oxford’s annual intake of undergraduates remain privately educated, far in excess of the proportion of the UK population as a whole, and only 45 per cent of undergraduates are women.
While some argue that Oxford’s admissions reflect the advantage in A-level grades enjoyed by pupils from independent schools, others point out that its ancient rival, Cambridge, has seen its proportion of state pupils grow in recent years.
Prof Richardson said she applied for the Oxford post as the culmination of a lifetime’s ambition, and paid tribute to the university’s international preeminence and successful fundraising campaigns.
But she warned that US universities such as Harvard have far deeper pockets. “They are our competition, we will need to continue fundraising because we operate in a global marketplace,” Prof Richardson said.
Similarly, Britain's exit from the European Union would be "very detrimental for a whole raft of reasons" for its universities, although Prof Richardson said that was her personal view.
The second of seven siblings, she was born in 1958 and later moved to the US to study international relations.
Her research on terrorism and its causes culminated in her acclaimed 2006 book What Terrorists Want, described by the New York Times as an "essential primer on terrorism and how to tackle it".
"I grew up in Ireland at a time when Northern Ireland was exploding. I became interested in how people who were upstanding in other walks of life would join an organisation that committed atrocities," Prof Richardson said.
In the book’s introduction, Prof Richardson describes her own brush with the IRA as a young student in Dublin in the 1970s: “My closest friend ... and I were recruited by the student branch of the IRA. By then I had concluded that killing people was not the right way to advance the cause of reuniting Ireland. I attended meetings and discussions but said I would not join as I could not endorse the use of violence.”
Prof Richardson's appointment to a seven-year term as vice-chancellor is subject to approval by the university's congregation, after which she will take over from Prof Andrew Hamilton at the end of the year.
"Appointing a woman is a historic moment for Oxford but appointing this woman is a huge investment in our future as well," said Josephine Quinn, vice-provost of Worcester College.
For Prof Richardson, it is not the first time she has filled a historic role: at St Andrews she was not only the first woman vice-chancellor in 600 years but also the first Roman Catholic.
Her parents still live in Tramore in Co Waterford, where she grew up and went to a convent school. “I think they are delighted and proud,” she said.
Oxford’s exact foundation is shrouded in uncertainty but the first recorded vice-chancellor was in 1230, according to the Encyclopaedia of Oxford.
Guardian Service