‘Universities are the last bastions of optimists’ Trinity Today catches up with Louise Richardson, the Waterford-born political scientist and Trinity graduate, who has enjoyed an extraordinary career in academia and philanthropy W hen Louise Richardson became the President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in January 2023, with responsibility for overseeing the philanthropic allocation of $200 million annually, she was the first female president in the Carnegie Corporation’s 112- year old history. If she, and media commentators, took this in their stride, it is perhaps because that phrase ‘first female’ has followed her through her career. She was the first female principal of St Andrew’s University in its 600-year history, the first female vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford in its 900-year history and among the first academics (of either gender) in the emerging global field of terrorism studies. Richardson authored What Terrorists Want (2006), which helped reset the narrative during the Bush Administration’s ‘war on terror’ and was described by the Financial Times as ‘that rare thing in academic publishing – a bestseller with no trade-off between accessibility and scholarly rigour.’ This trailblazing – though Richardson doesn’t use that word, preferring the term ‘outsider’ – goes back to the start of her student life when she arrived at Trinity in 1975, the first (that word again) in her family to attend university. Archbishop McQuaid’s ban on Catholics attending Trinity had only been lifted two years previously and the college was still small and enclosed, with a high proportion of students coming from private schools and from UK and Northern Ireland. ‘It was a very different cultural experience,’ recalls Richardson, ‘especially for me, coming from Tramore and especially studying history and politics.’ Many of her lecturers were experts in the Unionist and Anglo-Irish traditions on the island, like the legendary RB McDowell, whom she counts as a mentor, and they gave her a perspective on Irish history very different to what she calls ‘the simplified view I got at school’. Her parents were not political, but she was a youthful radical and had to be locked in her bedroom after Bloody Sunday to prevent her joining civil rights marches. Richardson admitted, in the introduction to What Terrorists Want , that, aged 14, she would have joined the IRA ‘in a heartbeat’ which caused consternation in the charged environment after 9/11 with some interviewers demanding that she retract. She refused to be held to account for adolescent views. Far from being troubled by the experience of being an outsider in Trinity, she ‘thrived on it’: ‘I became fascinated by how people on a small island could have such diametrically opposed views of the same events. I can’t say it was comfortable, but I don’t think education should really be comfortable. I think it’s good to engage with ideas you find yourself in profound disagreement with.’ In an interview with the Financial Times in 2017, when she was vice-chancellor of Oxford, she insisted that ‘students should be exposed to extreme views in a space where orthodoxies can be challenged’, making the point that ‘we are educating students to go into the real world where you are not protected from views you don’t like. Every day we hear Trump saying things we find deeply objectionable, so the notion you can have a space free from hearing views you find objectionable has surely exploded.’ As she points out, it is not only students trying to cancel those they disagree with. The so-called ‘ Prevent Duty ’ in the UK Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 places the duty to monitor ‘the upholding of British Values’ on schools and universities. As Principal of St Andrews, Richardson spoke out publicly, if unsuccessfully, against this and she remains of the view that ‘I would prefer that governments not get into the business of regulating what universities can and cannot allow and I think it should be left to universities to come up with their own definitions of free speech.’ This issue of free speech is central to democracy. She admits to being ‘deeply concerned about the current polarisation of opinions in US and elsewhere’ but shutting down opinions is not the solution. Before he died, Andrew
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