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Welcome to the July Pembrokian.

For this issue we have turned to the Humanities. Pembroke’s Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow in English, Professor Helen Small, recently published the highly acclaimed The Value of Humanities (Oxford University Press) - nominated by Universities Minister, the Rt Hon David Willetts, as one of his most inspirational reads of 2013. She talks about her own experience of evaluating the ‘impact’ of the work of Oxford’s English Department in her role as Coordinator of the recent REF (Research Excellence Framework). As a starting point for the issue, it provided an unbeatable opportunity to look at the diverse yet impressive impact of several of our alumni (and friends), who have made careers in the Humanities. Iain King CBE (1989) discusses his Philosophy, and its impact on Government Strategy; Mark Ellen (1973) shares anecdotes and insights from his career as a music journalist; Juliet Haysom (1998), sculptor, discusses her creative processes, and ahead of his Conference (to be held at Pembroke in August) Tim Richardson (1986), writer, opens up the world of poet and early pioneer of landscape gardening, eighteenth century alumnus, William Shenstone (1732). We are particularly delighted to feature Dr Tim Brindley - our new ‘First Gentleman’ of Pembroke - who gives his perspective on aspects of Oxford’s modern architecture. For our ‘Highly Recommended’ back page feature, Oliver Baggaley (2006), one of this year’s winners of the University’s Inspirational Teacher Awards, offers up his recommendations of how to spend the Summer Vac. ‘60 Seconds With’ on the preceding page takes the form of a ‘token nod’ to the Sciences, with the highly entertaining and highly regarded Roger Highfield (1976).

As ever, it has been an utter privilege to draw these elements together and to appropriate a quote from Tim Brindley’s piece, the job of Editor is like “being given the run of a sweetie shop”. I am so richly spoiled for choice when devising features, and the help and cooperation of all our contributors is greatly valued.

Please let me know if you have any comments, criticisms or questions – all feedback is sincerely appreciated.

SophieAlumni Communications Editor

Gaudy 1958-1964, March 2014

Students join our Legators for the Tesdale Lunch, March 2014

Paddy Boyle (1990) advises students at the Careers Fest, March 2014

The Master, Dame Lynne Brindley, with guests at the Singapore Reception, March 2014

Listening to the Master speak at the New York Reception, April 2014

Attendees enjoying the balmy evening of the 1986-1991 Gaudy in June 2014

Magazine edited and written by Sophie Elkan

Magazine design by Helen Moss

Cover: Garden PartyMay 2014

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art iN the real worldJuliet haYSom (1998)

marbled material, with a lot of irregular faults making it difficult to cut, has meant that is has become less commercially viable. The quarry uses it only to crush for aggregate, but by the end of the project they were investigating the possibility of cutting it for dimension stone. That was hugely gratifying, and it was exciting to be engaged with something of real material use and to have the space to question, re-evaluate and celebrate a distinctive and undervalued local material.

You won the highly prestigious Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2007 with Spring at ragley hall. What does being awarded the prize mean to you, personally and professionally?

To be given a huge budget to make a permanent, site-specific sculpture commission is a rare thing- particularly for a recent graduate, so the Jerwood Sculpture Prize offered me an amazing opportunity. The experience of going through the

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Juliet Haysom (1998) followed her BA in Fine Art with an MPhil in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art. Her work has received critical acclaim. She discusses how the artistic process translates when it is confronted with the practical restrictions of the material world.

how important is it to you to be able to convey the process behind your work?

It is important – although hopefully not essential – to convey the process behind my work. I like to work site-specifically and to engage with research, and so it makes sense to present the project as a whole rather than simply as a finished object. I therefore aim to make work that has immediacy and is visually engaging, but which also reveals more on further investigation.

When your work is in a public space, it becomes part of the landscape. how does that affect your creative decisions?

An art gallery creates a space and protects the objects it contains both physically and conceptually. They’re safe from vandalism and the elements, but also from a more broad critique from outside art’s boundaries. It is a rarefied space, which you enter into only to consider art. It’s a very different thing from a public square where the artwork needs to exist permanently and to argue for its existence within the social

and political context of the city. It’s very easy to be based in the studio, and make comments about your experience of being alive through your work, but it’s a very closed conversation held only with the people who subscribe to that world.

One of the first conversations I had with the design team in Torquay was regarding my brief from the council, which asked for a project that had a relationship with the geology of the site. However, the drawings showed the landscape architect intended to specify kerbs made of Chinese granite throughout the whole scheme. The idea that we would source stone from halfway round the world because it is cheaper than using locally-produced concrete- let alone stone- was staggering, and in itself says a great deal about the current economics and politics of production. Luckily, I was able to put some of my sculpture budget into researching, sourcing, testing and specifying local stone. That probably says a lot about commissioning art, in that the privilege of research and critique is encouraged and supported in a way that it might not be for the other professions within a design team.

how important is sustainability?

It was great to work with a local quarry. I think Devon Limestone is pretty fabulous - and imagine the Edwardians thought was fantastic - but today a pink,

tendering processes, researching the technical aspects of the installation, applying for planning consent and working within a budget was enormously valuable, and I’m very grateful to the Jerwood Foundation for their encouragement and support. Two organisations commissioned me subsequently, both with larger budgets. I think if I’d only shown them gallery-based work, it would have been a very big leap of faith for them to think I’d be capable of completing projects on a much larger scale.

in what way does your work being judged impact on the creative process?

Quite apart from the financial freedom, they inevitably raise your profile and create a larger audience for your work. As a recent graduate it can be hard finding the necessary budget to make anything, especially something quite substantial and site-specific. It’s hard to make those first few steps in your career and to have your work seen. If you’ve won a prize, inevitably people are more likely to take you seriously, or think that what you’re doing is of value. And they might be more likely to want to collect your work!

Your work ranges widely. is there a

constant?

I think there is, but I don’t know if I can sum it up very neatly! What I do has a particular focus on materials and processes. I’m really interested in ‘making’; from the hand-made drawing right through to using a computer to carve a block of marble and how that has a relationship with a history of handmade objects and other mechanised processes. And, I think, an interest in place

and landscape relating to my experience as a British woman living in a huge cosmopolitan city in the early part of the twenty first century.

Hopefully there is an attention to that in all that I do, even if it may not be the first thing you think of when you see one of my drawings or an object that I’ve made. So an enquiry into the relationship between traditional and contemporary processes, materials, and their relationship with place, is as much as I can sum up.

Drawing after ‘Military Service’, photographed by Norbert Shoerner, British Vogue, October 2005From the series ‘Studies in a Second Hand

Silver Piece, medalsCommissioned by the British Art Medal Society, 2009

(left) Spring, at Ragley HallJuliet worked to open one of Britains’ most significant subterranean water resource to create a ‘mist’ in the grounds of Ragley Hall. The permanence of the sculpture is enhanced by the way it naturally changes according to light and weather conditions.

(left) Juliet’s work for the Royah Garden Terrace in Torquay, being enjoyed by locals and visitors

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aSSeSSiNG the impact of the humaNitieS

by Professor Helen Small

Arriving in Oxford as a recently retired Lecturer in Architecture felt like being given the run of the

sweetie shop – so many treasures of English architecture to enjoy, so much beauty to delight in! For me, as a specialist in modern architecture and town planning, it is a double bonus: not only do I get to live amongst the works of heroes like Wren, Hawksmoor and Gibbs; I can also revel in the astonishing modern architecture built between about 1960 and the late 70s that is, shall we say, rather less well regarded – what Bill Bryson once denigrated as Oxford’s ‘mad seizure’ but was described by John G Stewart in The Oxford Art Journal in 1978, as “perhaps the finest collection of buildings of the Modern Movement in Britain.”

Much of the reaction against modern architecture was driven by its destructive impact on cities, especially large-scale concrete buildings, urban motorways, formless open spaces, and the erosion of streets. However, since the 70s there has been a growing emphasis on the urban context of contemporary architecture. So how have more recent designs in Oxford, built since 2000, been received? Inspired by Pembroke’s new Rokos Quad (Berman

architecture & the citY oXford’S moderN coNtriButioN

by Dr Tim Brindley

Guedes Stretton, 2013), below right, I have embarked on a project to record and review new architecture in the city. I am interested in seeing if the Colleges and the University have been able to sustain their tradition of high quality architecture in a densely packed urban fabric.

The dominant architectural style might be described as ‘contemporary contextual’,

2013-14 was, for me and for many other colleagues, the year of Impact. Michaelmas Term saw the end of a three-year process

in which universities completed their first formal reports to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) on social benefits created by their academic research. All ‘submitting units’ to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) had to describe the institutional strategies and support through which Impact was achieved. They also had to produce case studies detailing particular impacts on particular beneficiaries. Ours (the English Faculty’s) included, ‘improving public understanding of the relationship between gender and language use’, ‘enhancing curatorship of, and public access to, the manuscripts of Jane Austen’, and ‘achieving public benefits through provision of open educational resources’.

We have learned a great deal in the pro-cess—about the uses to which our research is put, often previously unknown to the researcher, let alone to the Faculty. We dis-covered, inter alia, the value of technical support being given by an external benefac-tor for the Digital Miscellanies project and the huge investments of other institutions in extending the success of the ‘Manifold Greatness’ exhibition exploring the mak-ing of the King James Bible. Much of what we found will be gratefully touted on the Faculty’s website. At time of writing, these submissions are in the process of being judged by the REF panels, with assistance from external advisors. That adjudication will contribute to the HEFCE’s decision regarding the next distribution of research funding to universities.

Was it worth it? Bluntly, no. There is some irony here, given that the Humanities and Social Sciences have been insisting for years that the calibre and value of the scholar-ship they produce cannot be satisfactorily captured by quantitative measures. They have urged, with good reason, their pref-erence for qualitative judgements, sensitive to the longer time scales on which work in these fields may reveal its influence, and attuned to the greater subjectivity of deci-sions about quality than one finds in more technical fields.

However, qualitative accounting - we can now say from experience - is immensely onerous. Internal agreement is still being worked out within Wellington Square on the institutional labour cost of the exercise, estimated at between 6,800 and 10,600 days. Those figures include detection of the best impact, locating the evidence, drafting, reviewing, (redrafting), and every hour spent in a workshop. Nationwide, numerous administrative appointments have been made, hundreds of teaching hours have been bought out, contracts outsourced: time and money that would have been better spent on teaching and research.HEFCE and the higher education policy makers are not entirely to blame. Universities have, undoubtedly, over-engineered a process never conceived as requiring this level of work, although an intelligent observer of the cultures of universities should have been able to predict what would happen. When high internal requirements for proof combine with the economically competitive rationale of the REF, over-elaboration is probably inevitable.

There is, genuinely, an understanding that universities are now large businesses, and that they have to account for the return on large investments of public funds: in

recent years far fewer academics take the view that we should pursue our research without accounting for its value. But a sensible conversation is needed about what a reasonable accounting burden looks like. Impact is by definition a description of perceived benefits which requires qualitative, not quantitive assessment models. The fact that the REF panels will convert the quality description into an ordinal number judgment is therefore a problem for the plausibility of the exercise. But, I suspect, it will not be the objection that attracts the ear, and - one hopes - the understanding of policy makers. A simpler objection is that Impact accounting fails any reasonable cost-benefit test. By all means ask universities to consider the creation of wider social benefits part of their public remit, but don’t bind them up in reporting procedures that substantially cramp their ability to make those benefits a priority.

Submissions to the ref were judged on their ability to:• generate new ways of thinking which influence creative practice• create, inspire and support new forms of artistic, literary, linguistic, social, and other expression• contribute to economic prosperity via the creative sector • inform or influence government practice or policy.• help professionals and organisations adapt to changing cultural values• help to conserve and present the cultural heritage• demonstrate the design and delivery of curricula in schools or other educational institutions

of distinctly modern appearance but respectful of the urban context and local character. While many of the completed projects I have identified so far (plus more under development), have been squeezed into the existing College sites, substantial areas have been redeveloped, including the Said Business School, and the former hospital site that has been transformed into the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter. Projects reflect the growth and development of the University and its Colleges. Leading UK and international architects have been commissioned and some outstanding buildings have appeared in the city.

While most recent projects follow similar principles, others fall more in the category of ‘Architecture That Shook Oxford’, to quote Oxford Today: at one extreme, St Antony’s Middle East Centre on the Woodstock Road (Zaha Hadid, nearing completion), below left, and the Blavatnik School of Government emerging on Walton Street (Herzog & de Meuron, under construction) challenge convention with their form, colour and materials; while at the other, an ornate classical clock tower and gate for Harris Manchester (Yiangou Architects, 2014), above, and an equally classical, if more restrained, group of buildings for Lady Margaret Hall (John Simpson, under construction) question our sense of time and place.

Whether your preference is for the ‘responsive’ or the ‘disruptive’, Oxford is still undoubtedly the place to enjoy stimulating architecture.

Professor Helen Small,Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow in English, is author of The Value of the humanities (Oxford University Press 2013)

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Fresh from his recent national tour – promoting his memoir, Rock Stars Stole My Life, (available in hardback, eBook and audio formats and published by Hodder) – Mark Ellen (1973) shares his own perception and experience of a life in music.

You’ve made a great success of what can be a perilous career path - how?

Very kind of you! Well I was lucky enough to leave College with a clear idea of what I wanted to do – which was to write for a living, ideally about music – so that helped get me started. And back then ‘rock journalism’ wasn’t a recognised career so I applied myself very hard to prove it was. I ended up as the editor of a number of magazines principally because I was open-minded, I think, and tried to see the merit in everything. And it helps in journalism – and in broadcast media – if you’re interested in people and can work in

teams so I was hired to contribute to Radio One, and that got me a job as a frontman for a TV show called Old Grey Whistle Test, and that was how I wound up co-presenting Live Aid in 1985. Absurd and chaotic events from my time at the NME, Smash Hits, MOJO, The Word and my TV work feature in my book. Live Aid was hilarious looking back on it, though terrifying at the time. And *so* chaotic – Bob Dylan’s opening line to a global audience of uncountable millions was ‘I’d like to bring on Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood but I don’t know where they are’. Not promising.

What sort of music were people listening to when you arrived at Pembroke?

The classical and opera crowds kept themselves to themselves but the rock gangs were split into two factions. You had the glam-rock mob who wore high-waisted ‘baggies’ and clomping great platform heels and liked David Bowie, Mott The Hoople and Slade. And you had the American rock connoisseurs (like me) who had yards of unconditioned hair, flared jeans and cowboy boots and listening to the rambling excursions of The Allman Brothers or West Coast swing like Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks. Both

factions sat around on the Chap-el Quad strumming guitars and eyeing each other cautiously.

…and who were the big student bands at the time?

There were three main attractions in 1975, all playing at parties and student protests. The first was Flying Wedge lead by John Walsh, who was at Exeter College and is now a celebrated author, Fleet Street writer and columnist. The second was the unappetisingly-named Frothy Green Stools whose frontman was Lincoln’s Robert Sandall who went onto to be a highly successful broadcaster and Sunday Times rock critic. The third was Ugly Rumours (I was the bass player) who did songs by the Rolling Stones, Free, Crazy Horse, Chuck Berry and The Doobie Brothers. Our charismatic lead singer from St John’s called Tony Blair rather upstaged the rest of us 20 years later by becoming the Labour Party’s longest-serving Prime Minister. I suppose the point I’m making is that even those who don’t spend every available minute in the library can forge quite interesting careers.

how did being at oxford help your career?

Oxford made me read a lot of books in the company of some very clever people and both those things raised my game, but I knew that simply ‘being at Oxford’ wasn’t enough. Some of my contemporar-ies thought they’d step into the job market and the whole world would beat a path to their door. Not true. Oxford helps a great deal but success takes a huge amount of

effort and self-education. If you’re lucky enough to find a line of work that’s absorb-ing then neither of those things are a prob-lem.

is music tribal? What is your favourite genre of music?

Well it *was* tribal in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Music was the driving force in youth culture (now I suspect that’s technology). Back then peo-ple used music as a way of broadcasting their identity and defining their personal-ity – glam-rockers, reggae fans, heavy-met-allers, punks, new romantics, indie kids etc all roamed around in self-contained tribes. Now people have five or six decades of recorded music to choose from and feel less attached to any one era. But your strongest bonds with music tend to be formed in the white-heat of adolescence. I drove to a literary festival in Scarborough the other day with the crime writer Mark Billingham and we put the entire Beatles back-catalogue on ‘random play’, ten hours of music, the exact length of the return journey. And we couldn’t have been happier. Apart from when we got ‘Mr Moonlight’ from ‘Beatles For Sale’ of course. And obviously ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. And maybe ‘Michelle’....

how did it feel to interview so many music legends?

Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t! All sorts of people appear in my book – from Rod Stewart and Led Zeppelin to The Damned, Oasis, a stark naked Lady Gaga and Rihanna on a private aircraft. I advance the theory that there two types of

M A R K E L L E N

people in the world: those that *like* Van Morrison and those that have *met* him - which, in that case, rather gives the game away.

Where does your love of music come from?

Partly from having parents who detested pop and rock, partly through having three elder sisters who loved it. Both things made me want to hear as much of the stuff as pos-sible.

What was your first single? and what’s currently on your playlist?

The first record I ever bought – in 1962 when I was eight, a four-way purchase with my sisters – was called ‘The Hole In The Ground’ by Bernard Cribbins. It’s on YouTube – I *implore* you to have a listen. It’s only one minute 45 seconds long and positively bristles with drama, melody and comic invention. And it’s about the class-war collision of the early Sixties so you could probably call it satire too: it’s genius! This afternoon I listened to the new Arcade Fire album, a folk record by The Moulettes and a jazz box-set by the magnificent Duke Ellington, all wonderful.

R O C K S(1 9 7 3)

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Rock Stars Stole my Life (Coronet, 2014), for more information and picktures visit www.rockstarsstolemylife.com

“Tragic I know. Me in 1974 when I was 20”

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Everyone has heard of ‘Capability’ Brown, the tercentenary of whose birth will be celebrated with great

fanfare in 2016, but Pembroke alumnus William Shenstone was probably the most influential garden maker in the decades preceding Brown’s meteoric rise in the 1850s. I would like to think that his name might ring a bell with some alumni, especially those who studied English Literature, but I suspect the truth is his name will be familiar to few. In his day, however, Shenstone was a figure of international renown, feted by future US president Thomas Jefferson and many other visitors to the garden he created at his small farm, The Leasowes, at Halesowen near Birmingham. In terms of our own College history, Shenstone (1732) has been eclipsed by the great Samuel Johnson (1728), who wrote a critical account of the life of his fellow Pembrokian, accusing him of indolence and a lack of seriousness.

Arguably, it was precisely these qualities which enabled Shenstone (1714-63) to make, over the course of 20 years, a garden which was much-admired and emulated internationally. What he achieved was utterly original: a fusion of poetry and gardening which inspired, not only his contemporaries, but also modern artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), creator of the garden Little Sparta near Edinburgh, whose own reputation has soared in recent years.

Shenstone did not set out to make his name by means of outdoor work. His ambition was to be a poet. Soon after leaving

Pembroke he scored an early hit with ‘The School Mistress’ (which he described as ‘written at College’) and appeared destined for literary success, but it was not to be: Shenstone never quite managed to capitalise on his first success and instead found himself forced into a kind of self-imposed exile in the Midlands. Always strapped for cash and afflicted at intervals by depression, he turned to garden-making for solace and a creative outlet.

It may sound odd today, when gardening occupies such a low place in the hierarchy of the arts, viewed as a kind of outdoor version of DIY, but at the time Shenstone’s creation was at the cutting edge of international avant-garde art. He first became interested in the possibilities of landscape after 1742, when he spent extended periods at Mickleton in Gloucestershire, the seat of Morgan Graves, who was the brother of his great friend from Pembroke, the writer Richard Graves. Shenstone set about making a landscape garden that was a living embodiment of pastoral poetry in the spirit of Virgil.

Melding inscribed poetry - on placards, seats and monuments - with evocative architectural experiments in a garden setting was in the vanguard of landscape design in the mid-18th-century. That is why the soon-to-be President Jefferson visited The Leasowes with John Adams on a tour of the cultural highlights of Britain. The garden certainly had an impact on Jefferson’s plans for his Monticello estate, back in Virginia. Many others have been influenced over the centuries by the practical-poetic aphorisms in Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, a posthumous gathering-up of his notes and bon mots.

The garden became celebrated for its originality and the intensity with which the ‘poetic’ effects were conceived. William Pitt (the elder) was an early visitor and did much to spread the word, and it soon became a fixture on the itineraries of country-house tourists. A varied, circular walk along two wooded combes, relieved by open pasture, lakes and poetically inspired buildings and features, the garden was a solid realisation of Shenstone’s fanciful verse, in which forest denizens cavort in a dreamlike and energetically melancholy pastoral setting, with the poet centre-stage as a swain of Arcady.

Shenstone was adamant that his interventions should enhance rather than obscure the true genius of the place. He insisted: ‘The shape of the ground, the site of the trees, and the fall of water, nature’s

province. Whatever thwarts her is treason.’ On the other hand he also opined, ‘A rural scene to me is never perfect without the addition of some kind of building’, and The Leasowes was filled with such distractions including the gothick Ruined Priory and associated pool, a Temple of Pan and numerous inscribed memorial urns and benches. The circuit walk, which Shenstone insisted visitors should experience in the correct order, took you through wooded areas, past streams and tranquil waters and then up and on to the open hillside with expansive views, ‘ornamented’ by livestock as if the poet had made his farm into a work of art. As Shenstone describes in his poem ‘Hope’:

‘My banks they are furnish’d with Bees,Where murmur invites us to sleep;My Grottos are shaded with Trees,And my hills are white-over with sheep.’

The conceptual and artistic heart of The Leasowes garden was Virgil’s Grove, a pleasant confluence of streams in the woods and, in Shenstone’s imagination, a meeting place of woodland nymphs. It exemplifies Shenstone’s credo that the poetic imagination is the greatest tool in the kit-bag of the modern garden maker, for the educated visitor was effectively asked to conjure up the dramatis personae.

The Leasowes was open to casual visitors and local people every Sunday in season, when atmospheric night visits were also permitted, and Shenstone took great pleasure in escorting guests - particularly the high-born or notable - round his prescribed tour. On one Sunday in 1749 he counted with evident satisfaction some 150 people in his garden. He had some problems with vandalism, and concocted some verses in an effort to circumvent this:

william SheNStoNe (1723)poet, deSiGNer, ViSioNarY

by Tim Richardson (1986)

‘And tread with awe these favour’d bowers, Nor wound the shrubs, nor bruise the flowers’.

His habitually melancholy air, shyness and fixed expression of glumness, made him a difficult prospect socially but those who persevered grew to love him, and he returned their affection with loyalty and any amount of playful teasing. As he noted in a letter in 1755: ‘Though I first embellished my farm, with an Eye to the satisfaction I should receive from its Beauty, I am now

william SheNStoNe: a terceNteNarY coNfereNceA strong affection for the character of Shenstone, coupled with the desire to honour his memory and undeniable influence, has inspired me to organise a tercentenary conference, to be held here at Pembroke next month (16/17th August 2014]) As a landscape historian and critic I have made a special study of the early 18th-century landscape garden, principally through my book Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden - the College connection is simply a very happy coincidence. The first day will be spent at Pembroke attending the symposium element, with scholars from both the literary side and the garden side making presentations aimed at an educated general audience. We shall be visiting The Leasowes on the second day of the conference. For more information please visit www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/news-events/college-events.

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grown dependent upon the Friends it brings me... I am pleased to find them pleased’.

The remains of the garden at The Leasowes is now part public park, owned and maintained by Dudley Council, and partly on land owned by Halesowen Golf Club - which makes access to the pasture element of the garden problematic but on the other hand has ensured that the estate has not built over (the old village of Halesowen is now effectively a suburb of Birmingham). I do hope that anyone with an interest in the history of gardens might consider attending the Conference in August.

Tim Richardson writes a gardens column for the Daily Telegraph and is Founder-Director of the Chelsea Fringe Festival which runs in parallel with the Chelsea Flower Show

Artist’s impression of The Leasowes

The Garden at Leasowes today

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direction, so they are compatible. My ethics tries to offer advice which is possi-ble, not just ideal. I’ve certainly lowered my personal aims since Pembroke – from try-ing to change the world to making sure my kids do their homework. But I aspire to be more idealistic again soon.

What was your path to PPe at oxford and your future career?

Neither of my parents went to university, and my comprehensive didn’t have a track record of getting people to Oxbridge. Fortunately I was already enough of a misfit not to worry about being the only person in the sixth form to apply. I was expelled when I took time out to try and write a book about 3D mazes, so I paid the £87 entry fee for my A-level exams myself.

Everybody has their own theory about Oxbridge entry statistics. My own hunch is that Pembroke has opened up just as social mobility in Britain is closing down. Big improvements in accessibility are very welcome, but they may not yield big improvements in access rates.

I’ve had day jobs working in politics, writing philosophy and helping shape economic policy in Kosovo and Libya, so PPE turned out to be unexpectedly vocational for me, as well as fascinating. The degree encourages you to bring insights from one discipline into another, and makes you think broadly about a problem, which should be appreciated more than it is.

S i n c e l e a v i n g Pembroke , philosopher, Iain King has been busy: he was one of the first people to n e g o t i a t e

with Sinn Féin leaders after the IRA ceasefire; he helped introduce a new currency into Kosovo and was Head of Planning for the UN mission; he went on to advise UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Africa and was then deployed to Afghanistan to more frontline bases than any other civilian; Iain was sent Benghazi (with 12 hours notice) during the Libyan civil war, where he was nearly killed by a car bomb. He has led the UK’s conflict research programme. Further, his philosophy has had influence on both the Liberal Democrats and the Buddhist community, and has been taught on some undergraduate courses. A former Fellow at Cambridge, Iain is one of the youngest people to ever be awarded the CBE.

What have been the greatest influences on your philosophy; would you describe yourself as a pragmatist?

First year philosophy at Pembroke was all about utilitarianism (the Enlightenment theory which advises doing whatever maximises total happiness). Despite its many flaws, utilitarianism has something intuitively appealing about it, and it still lurks within many public and economic decisions. It’s the starting point for my philosophy. Some critics say it’s the endpoint, too.

Pragmatism is about lowering your sights; idealism is about looking in the right

ethicS, philoSophY & GoVerNmeNt

Iain King CBE (1989)

My career may lack strategy, but there is a logic to it: I’ve always taken what seemed like the best of the options available at the time, which is probably what everybody does, although definitions of ‘best’ may vary. I’ve never been attracted to big money jobs, which is lucky, because big money jobs have never been attracted to me.

how did a year of ‘busking around eu-rope’ enhance your skill set?

Busking forces you to step outside yourself and engage with strangers. Also, you soon learn what the public wants – which is why mediocre buskers always murder the same tunes, like Pachelbel’s Canon and the Bea-tles. To make enough to live on, terrible buskers, like me, need gimmicks too.

What provided the ‘compulsive kick’ to write your book, How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time?

My first visit to Oxford, in 1985. The opulence and wasted wealth of the city jarred with TV pictures of famine in Africa. Then, in 1997, I left my job in politics, dismayed at how public policy was determined by fickle focus groups of target voters rather than a conception of right and wrong. It actually took ten years to write the book, from 1997-2007, although I wasn’t working on it full time for the whole decade.

In it, I offer reasons why one ethical system would be better than another – reasons which most people should find acceptable, regardless of their culture or background. I then use those criteria to develop a system of decision-making before expanding it, to show what the established framework recommends - first in an ideal situation, then again, when ‘best

options’ aren’t available. (To find out more, buy the book… buy the book…)

I hoped the book would solve ethics and improve the world. Obviously, it’s done neither. Nobody’s proved it wrong yet, with-out recourse to religion (although the reason for that may lie in the readership figures).

To what extent has ‘the help Principle’ been at the forefront of both your professional and personal life?

The Help Principle – help someone if your help is worth more to them than it is to you – can be very useful in small groups, such as in small teams, or at home. I use it to settle disputes between my kids, and at work, when I’m allowed. Other ideas in the book, such as the theories on promises and lying, and on the balance between human rights and the greater good, I have managed to use with the EU and the UN, and in Afghanistan. I really do try to live by it. The trouble with it – as with most advice – is that so many of our decisions are involuntary in one way or another. I think all big organisations get stuck in their ways until they’re jolted, and all the ones I’ve worked for have been staffed

by surprisingly broad mix of cynics and idealists. I found the UN was frustratingly rigid on some petty things - the procedures invented to restrict the use of fax machines were simply astonishing. They’d seem far-fetched in a sitcom.

Given the current importance attached to the ‘impact’ of research, do you believe that academics change the behaviour of politicians?

Good research can certainly lead to political shifts – the removal of lead from petrol, and laws on smoking in public buildings were both inspired by evidence. But other evidence – such as how putting our clocks forward an hour would prevent some 450 road deaths a year – has not been implemented. There are studies on what makes research effective: it has a much better chance if it is clear, simple, and agreed within academia. When evidence confronts a vested interest, the political inertia can only be overcome by generating an equal and opposite political momentum. That means lobbying, publicity, changing opinions and exposing the vested interest for what it is.

who would comprise your fantasy dinner guests from the worlds of politics, philosophy and/or economics (living or dead), and what’s on the playlist?

I’d love to tape a conversation between Thomas Jefferson, Hume and Keynes – with Ken Mayhew in attendance to help explain the complicated bits through his anecdotes about the college finances. The playlist: the 90s dance classic move any mountain by the Shamen, to motivate them sort out the world’s problems, or at least make them dance.

and what about your relationship with old and new media?

I’m a fuddy-duddy when it comes to new media: too old to learn quickly, and hoping lamely each new ‘thing’ will just be a fad not worth investing my time in. I just about managed Facebook, but Twitter was beyond me. I do think journalists need to improve their act: they still dominate the means by which the public forms their views, and they could do it much better than they do.

if we all followed your guidelines, would we be happy?

We’d have a happier, more equal society, for sure; and many problems in our societies would be tackled. But we may not be more content. Smaller things would upset us more than they do now, just as people worry more nowadays about dental hygiene, litter and sunburn than they did a century ago. And people always have a tendency to make problems, especially when things become easy for them.

The Pembrokian 13

How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time (2008) Bloomsbury Press

“I’ve never been attracted to the big money jobs, which is lucky, because big money jobs have never been attracted to me”

“help someone if your help is worth more to them than it is to you”

The Pembrokian 14 The Pembrokian 15

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This page is for alum

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hereabouts and life events. Further, if anyone is interested in prom

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A War of Peoples: 1914-1919 by Pembroke Fellow in History, Dr Adrian Gregory has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Considering the sources of our information on this subject, the book offers a fresh perspective on the War, incorporating perceptions from the Eastern Europe, Balkan and Italian fronts.

@AdrianGregory20

Simon Palethorpe is launching two new online businesses: FreeGo.com and CocoaRunners.com. The former offers tasty hand-picked gluten-free food, delivered to your door, and the latter promises a sumptuous and diverse choice of international artisan chocolate. Alumni are offered £5 off a minimum order of £15 from CocoaRunners, (use discount code PEMBROKE), and the same code will give

a £10 discount off a minimum order of £40 at FreeGo.

Michael Picardie (1958) has made his PhD dissertation/portfolio, ‘Towards A Philosophy of Theatre Inspired by Aristotle’s Poetics and Post-Structuralist Aesthetics in Relation to Three South African Plays’, available on his website, michaelpicardie.co.uk (click on ‘Research’). The PhD attempts to apply Greek, structuralist and post-structuralist ideas on performative drama and theatre as theoria in the context of post-apartheid and post-colonialism in Africa. In addition to his work as an actor and playwright Michael was Lecturer in Applied Social Studies in the University’s Department of Social

Policy and Intervention between 1968 and 1973.

Can you help? We want to make a montage of sports photos for the Sports Lobby in our new(ish) Henderson building. If you have any

photos of sporting activity from your time at Pembroke please email sophie.elkan@pmb.ox.ac.uk.

DR ADRIAN GREGORY@AdrianGregory20

SIMON PALETHORPE(1987) @Freego@cocoaRunners

If you aren’t yet following us on Twitter: (@Pembrokeoxford)then please do! Plus who knows who you may find following Pembroke?

ROGER HIGHFIELD (1976) @ROGERHIGHFIELD

60 SEcONDS wITH...

Soap or shower gel? I like big, fragrant bars. I used heavy soap in my doctorate, when it used

to cost more than gold, weight for weight.

Believe in magic or educate with science?

I believe in our remarkable ability to deceive ourselves, and the reason

I have faith in the human propensity to be superstitious is down to

insights from science.

team player or go it alone?Museum life is social and great fun - but I get huge satisfaction from the

solitary pursuit of writing.

Global warming or change denier?Climate change is a reality. The tricky part is the crystal ball gazing about

what happens next.

inspiration or perspiration?Blood, perspiration and tears.

article or tweet?I have used it to ‘chat’ with a comedy writer during a TV ad break before

one of his sitcom characters burnt a pile of New Scientist magazines,

which I was editing it at the time. I moaned it was our worst product

placement ever. Fellow tweeps have helped me find socca in Nice, and

pasties in Cornwall. I discovered that can be faster than the news media

in the 2011 riots.

Dream scientific breakthrough.A teleportation device to get me around or perhaps an invisibility

cloak – a remarkable idea that only recently became feasible, thanks to

mathematical wizardry and metamaterials.

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MIcHAEL PIcARDIE(1958)

“There are many reasons people join the teaching profession. For me it was the desire to really make a

difference - to impart my passion and knowledge of my subject to those around me and inspire the leaders of tomorrow. However, like many teachers, I would be lying if I said the holidays hadn’t played a part in my choice of career. Who wouldn’t be attracted by 13 weeks off a year? Experience has shown me that the best holidays are those where you feel you’ve accomplished something. So - given my expertise in delivering lessons, and the numerous long breaks I have enjoyed while the rest of you are working hard - I present you with my summer-holiday recommendations. Try something new: a new part of the world, a new activity, or a new dish. Last summer I was lucky enough to travel around Southeast Asia: the paradisiacal

hiGhlY recommeNdedOliver Baggaley (2006) was in the news recently as one of ten recipients of this year’s

Oxford University Inspirational Teacher Awards. Oliver, who was nominated by Kenny Dada (2013) who describes her former teacher, and now fellow ‘Pembrokian’ as

“really instrumental… in challenging me to aim higher”. Oliver here considers the best use of the summer break.

Spend time with those closest to you: teaching can be a physically and mentally exhausting occupation (as I’m sure many of your jobs are). I enjoy using my holidays reconnecting with those I haven’t seen for a while and was lucky enough to spend much of last summer with other Pembrokians. So, make plans, try something new, do something active you enjoy, but most importantly make sure you spend it with friends.”

beaches of Bali, sightseeing in the urban metropolis of Singapore, and trying regional delicacies in Malaysia. My experiences ranged from swimming with turtles and sharks (amazing), being driven by Malaysian bus drivers (terrifying), and memorably, trying the local delicacy of kachang - a Malaysian dessert consisting of jelly, red beans, sweet corn and attap chee (palm seeds), topped with shaved ice, coloured syrups and condensed milk; unfortunately, this was not a case where the whole was better than the sum of its parts. Combine your travels with exercise: the sunny weather will tempt you to spend your days lounging around drinking and eating, which can have dangerous side-effects! I hiked through the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and this year plan to dust off my walking boots for the Lake District and Slovenia. I also use the summer to go running and play tennis at my local courts (free to use).

HELP NEEDED@PembrokeOxford

Roger was Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for twenty years and Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011. Today, he is the Director of External Affairs at the Science Museum Group. He is also the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble

Pembroke CollegeOxfordOX1 1DWwww.pmb.ox.ac.uk01865 276 501

Registered Charity No. 1137498

LonDon reCePTion text & pics to come....