Oxford is a place of tradition and the tradition is that the chancellor of the university is a retired politician. So the chances are that Their Lordships William Hague or Peter Mandelson will succeed Chris Patten in a job which seems to date back to 1224.
There are other male politicians in the running, including the admirable Dominic Grieve and David Willetts. Voting in the first round—by an electorate of around 30,000—begins today and the likelihood is that one of the above will be anointed. They will be expected to wear fine gowns, make fine speeches, drink fine wine… and make nice with fabulously rich people who might want to bestow some of their worldly goods on the venerable institution.
But other brands are, as they say, on offer. And it seems particularly unfair that the people who know Oxford best—including two heads of house, Elish Angiolini and Jan Royall—are at some disadvantage because they simply don’t have the name recognition of some of the bigger beasts.
This feels like a flaw in the system. Most of those actually studying, teaching and researching at the university might prefer to be represented by someone intimately familiar with the living, breathing reality of modern Oxford. Which is how I came to be sitting with Jan Royall on a recent Friday morning to learn more about why she is putting herself forward.
We were in her airy office at Somerville College, one of the first colleges to admit women. She was dressed in jeans and All-Star Converse trainers, her distinctive russet hair mirroring the autumnal leaves outside.
Like most of the Oxford electorate, I had not really registered Jan until we were fellow heads of complementary houses—me of Lady Margaret Hall, she of Somerville—when she arrived in 2017. She was a breath of fresh air: warm, energetic, straight-talking, charming, no-nonsense, down-to-earth and interested in change.
Not all of those attributes endeared her to all her new colleagues, many of whom do not intrinsically believe in either change or straight-talking. But she also turned out to have remarkable skills of patient consensus-building (not to mention fund-raising).
All in all, her time at Somerville has been a remarkable success—matched by her willingness to get stuck into wider university projects, including volunteering to chair the body on which all heads of house sit. If there was a vote of Oxford insiders, the likelihood is that either she or Angiolini would walk it. Which is in itself interesting since neither of them is a stereotypical Oxford insider.
Jan was born in 1955 (she’s 69) and grew up working-class in the Forest of Dean, where she still has a house. She was a bright grammar school girl, but her teacher discouraged her from applying to Oxford or Cambridge—not for the likes of them. So she ended up studying languages at London before becoming a bilingual secretary in the European Union.
She joined something called the Young European Left—“my whole life has been entwined with the Labour party”—and ended up working for Barbara Castle. Castle was “amazing… the strengths of her commitment and her values. She didn’t waver. Quite tough to work for, she was exacting…”
By the time she was pregnant with her second child, it was becoming increasingly complicated to commute between London and Strasbourg, so she found a job working for the opposition leader, Neil Kinnock. She summarises the experience in one sentence: “‘89 [local] elections, high point; ‘92 election, disaster… and then everyone else left and I stayed on.”
She still thinks highly of Kinnock. “History will remember him kindly as a person who started the transformation of the Labour party into a party worthy of respect and of the votes in the street. I think he was very brave and did pave the way for Tony Blair.”
It was Blair who nominated her for the House of Lords, and she ended up as leader of the House under Gordon Brown. “It was a very difficult period, but I soon realised that as the leader of the House of Lords, you’re there as the leader of the government, but you’re also there as the leader of the House as a whole. So you ‘double hatted’. You had to try to find consensus.”
When it was suggested Royall—by now widowed with two sons and a daughter—might put her hat into the ring to become principal of Somerville, her instinctive reaction was, “Oxford is absolutely not for me. But the more I learned about it, the more I liked it. I believe in the power of education, so thought: ‘let’s give it a whirl.’”
The outsider is now the insider. “It’s an amazing place. I love research. There are so many challenges in our world, so many problems, and this is the place where solutions are being found. And it’s great to be with people on a day-to-day basis who are extraordinary scholars.”
She confessed she could also be exasperated by Oxford: “What frustrates me is the length of time it takes to get decisions; that everything has to go to 64,000 committees, and they discuss the same thing over and over again. Bringing about change takes such a long time.
“Having said that, I’ve seen enormous change over the last 10 years in terms of the student body being diverse. Diversity in terms of background as well as BAME diversity. Diversity of thought. That has changed a lot over the last seven years.” (Later, she texted me to give me the ratio of state to private school students at Somerville: a creditable 82 per cent.)
Royall has also tried to change the relationship between the university, the city and the county, chairing a body called the Oxford Strategic Partnership. “I said that I would do it, but only if it wasn’t just a talking shop. And what has staggered me was the disparity of wealth, the inequalities within the city of Oxford and the county of Oxfordshire, which I had no idea about.”
The initiative has been “slowly bearing fruit”, she said, rattling off achievements including early years support, working with primary schools and allowing local children to use college facilities. A few days later I met someone from Oxford city, not the university, and asked about Royall. His face brightened: “Absolutely top class!”
We moved on to free speech. The Times recently suggested that Somerville’s use of unconscious bias training “threatens to undermine her bid for chancellor”. What was that all about?
“It’s not ‘woke’,” she said, explaining that immediately after the murder of George Floyd it was suggested that unconscious bias training—which the staff already did—might be extended to the student body. “We did it for a year, just to address the fears of some of the students.
“It’s not trying to stop free speech. It’s just trying to get some understanding of other people’s views and other people’s feelings. I personally think it’s really important. We no longer do unconscious bias training, but we do lots of equality, diversity and inclusion training because it’s part of making people understand that there are differences of opinion, and those differences of opinion have got to be respected. I think 17 colleges now do some sort of training. I think it’s absolutely right and proper.”
In seven years at Somerville, Royall has never come across “cancel culture” in the college. “Anybody should be able to express their views as long as it’s within the law.”
What was wrong with the freedom of speech legislation that the Labour government scrapped shortly after coming into office? “I spoke against it [in the House of Lords] for two reasons. One is that it could have been interpreted as a means of enabling potential hate speech to flourish in universities.
“But also, it was horrendously bureaucratic, imposing a new system of bureaucracy on universities, which they can well do without. It could have led to fines, which in my view would not have been necessary.
“And I think that also it gave the Office for Students a huge new power in terms of freedom of speech, which I didn’t think was correct. We’ve got very good laws on freedom of speech already.”
On student finance she said: “I think that students are having a tough time of it. Two or three things concern me, one of which is the fact that interest rates on student loans are charged from the very first day they receive their loans. To start from day one seems to be utterly perverse to me.” She argued that tuition fees would have to rise—gradually, in line with inflation. And she would like the teaching grant, abolished in 2012, to be restored.
She would also like maintenance grants to return. “It’s perverse the way that if you’re a poor student at the moment, you leave university or college with a larger loan than your counterparts from wealthier backgrounds. And it can often take you a lot longer to pay it back, so you’re just worse off. And that can’t be right. So, there are many perversities in the system.”
While much of the higher education sector is facing a crisis of funding, Oxford is to some extent cushioned by endowments built up over centuries. “But it’s still not easy. What’s often not recognised is that the university’s research provides a kind of engine for growth in this country. Oxford university pumps in around £15.7bn into the UK economy.”
She was dismayed by the decline of students wanting to study the humanities. But why, I asked, should working-class taxpayers have to fund students wanting to study, say, English or history?
“Because I think studying, per se, is really, really important. It’s not just the subject that you study, it’s the way it teaches you to think that’s important. The Oxford tutorial system is superb at doing that. It’s the critical analysis that enables people to learn. And, actually, humanities underpin everything else. It’s the basis of our civilisation.”
She saw three main roles for the chancellor: supporting the vice chancellor and academics, advocacy and fund-raising. “Philanthropy is really important for Oxford. It is philanthropy that cushions us. It is philanthropy that enables certain types of research.”
She acknowledged that other candidates for the job have a higher profile. “I don’t think that profile equates with the ability to fulfil the role. Oxford has changed exponentially since most of them came here, God knows how long ago. Yes, they can read newspapers and talk to people, but they haven’t been an integral part of this university in the way I have.
“Most importantly, I think I’ve got a good understanding of the needs of academics. I don’t think there’s wide appreciation in our country about the importance of academics and what they do in terms of... teaching, yes, but also their scholarship, the research and the increasing responsibilities.
“People don’t understand the administrative burden on academics, the fact that in order to progress in their career they’ve got to publish, publish, publish. It takes a real toll on them. And then there’s the increase in pastoral care. The fact that we have students that are coming from more diverse backgrounds, and they do need more support. They do need more pastoral care. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s the truth.”
Working-class students are much likelier to suffer from imposter syndrome, she said. “They just don’t feel that they’re meant to be here. So I constantly say, ‘We chose you. You’re brilliant. We want you to be here.’
“We’ve had these great access and outreach programmes, but that can’t stop at the door when kids arrive, because you have to ensure that they feel welcome, that they feel comfortable. They have to understand that they don’t have to change in order to be here, that we have to change in order to ensure that they feel that they belong here. I think that’s really important.”
How would she sum up her style? Very different from Patten’s. “I love Chris. He’s got a huge intellect, and he is a superb speaker. I’m many things, but I do not have a huge intellect and I’m not a great speaker. And so, I would do it differently. I’m much more relaxed, I’m at ease in most situations. I’m very inclusive. I listen, I’m very consensual.
“I’m obviously political. I would never wish to hide my politics: I’m a socialist. I’m very proud of my politics—it’s been my life. But I’m still consensual.”
