Titans of Science: Deborah Prentice
This week in The Naked Scientists, Titans of Science is back, and today we hear from the University of Cambridge’s new vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice.
In this episode
00:55 - Deborah Prentice: Cambridge University's new Vice-Chancellor
Deborah Prentice: Cambridge University's new Vice-Chancellor
Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge
Chris - Deborah Prentice was born on the 14th of November, 1961 in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were from the San Francisco Bay Area and she spent just a few years in L.A. while her father was writing music for television, and her mother worked in insurance. Debbie attended state schools and spent much of her time playing the piano for fun, and also for money. She did well academically, especially in maths and science. Went on to study at Stanford University, graduating with joint honours in human biology and music. And it was at Stanford that she discovered her interest in psychology, which became her lifelong passion and academic calling. After Stanford, she attended Yale and then Princeton, where she would stay for another 34 years, conducting pioneering work on alcohol abuse and ultimately serving as the provost between 2017 and 2023. Professor Prentice became the University of Cambridge's 347th vice-chancellor as of the 1st of July, 2023. And I'm delighted to say she's welcomed us to her home. Hello.
Deborah - Hello.
Chris - For people who don't know, what is a vice-chancellor? What does it say on your job description?
Deborah - The vice-chancellor has operational responsibility for the university, sort of like being a president of a university in the United States, but actually the vice-chancellor is a very distinctive role. It's kind of a president and provost combined. It's the outward facing representing the university, and the inward facing trying to make it work.
Chris - You are the first American to do this job, aren't you?
Deborah - I am, I am. There have been others who came out of the American Academy, as I did. Alison Richard, for example, who spent many years as provost of Yale and did her career in the United States. But I'm the first American-born vice-chancellor of Cambridge.
Chris - So how does the American University system differ from here?
Deborah - It's actually very different. The system differs a lot. The aspirations of Cambridge and the universities where I was educated and worked are very similar. They're about world-class research and education for societal and world benefit. They're very similar in their mission. They're very different in the way they carry it out. The education system is very different and the relationship to government and to society is very different.
Chris - How did you get the job?
Deborah - It's funny you should ask that because I met King Charles shortly after his coronation, and that was his question for me. He said, 'how did it happen? Did you apply?' <Laugh> Which is, I think, a natural question to ask. I did apply actually. I was contacted by a headhunter and I applied, like one would for any job and went through an extended process in which the university could decide if I was right for them. And I got to know the university well enough to decide whether this was the next step for me.
Chris - Did they ask you where you see yourself in five years?
Deborah - They did not ask me where I saw myself in five years. They didn't. And it's very interesting. I mean, I actually don't officially know why I was chosen, but obviously being an American, being from the American system and being able to bring that context and that sensibility, must have been part of it.
Chris - I'll come back a bit more to what you're going to do during your tenure here in a moment. But I'd like to sort of go back to the beginning of your life and start really by asking, if I presented your CV now, the person who's sitting next to me, to, say, the 18-year-old you, as an anonymous CV. Would you recognise the person that's now sitting next to me? Would you say, 'yes, I can immediately pick myself out of the pile.'
Deborah - No, not at all. In fact, I would think, 'who is this strange person?' But, you know, I'd be delighted. I didn't have a strong sense of where I wanted to go when I was 18 years old, just that I wanted to go somewhere interesting. And I've had such an interesting career. I would've been thrilled to see that that was how I turned out.
Chris - Tell us about the early days then.
Deborah - I was raised by my mum alone, really. And so I was always on the lookout for opportunities to make money. A natural entrepreneur, you might say. I had taken music, I'd taken piano since I was four years old, and by the time I was a teenager, I realised that, in fact, this was one of my better developed skills. And that as an accompanist, in fact, I could make quite a bit of money. As an accompanist in a church, as an accompanist for choirs, as an accompanist at musical theatre. It was actually where I could in fact make the best hourly rate. And so I took advantage of it.
Chris - And clearly you didn't want to walk away from that because you went to Stanford and did biology because you'd done science at school and you were good at it, but you hung onto the music.
Deborah - Yes. And actually one of the great virtues of the American system is that for kids like me, like I was when I started college and didn't really know what I wanted to do, you can find yourself along the way. That's much harder in the British system. It's all over more quickly, and you've got to slot yourself into your course of study from the get-go. I started out in science knowing that I loved science and was interested in science, but then picked up music because I missed it and realised that I wanted to do that in a very serious way as well. And then along the way found psychology and that was possible because the system was very open-ended and I had a lot of opportunity for choice. So I was developing along the way and figuring myself out. It was really a good system for me.
06:15 - Deborah Prentice: faking fun, and free speech
Deborah Prentice: faking fun, and free speech
Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge
Chris - You mentioned psychology because your particular forte was social psychology, wasn't it? Working out social norms and how we do and don't conform to them. What drew you into that?
Deborah - I was interested in science and maths broadly. Found my way into biology because I loved the systems thinking of biology. And then I discovered psychology by accident because I had had exposure to it in my coursework and realised that in fact you could apply the methods and the thinking of natural science, of biology, the experimental method, to understanding how people behaved in the social world. You could understand complex phenomena in social life through the same methods and thought processes that you use to understand complex processes in a cell or in an organism.
Chris - And was this at Yale? You began to think along those lines?
Deborah - Actually, it was still at Stanford. I mean, I was still an undergraduate and I took about five or six courses in psychology while I was still an undergraduate. And that's what got me into a PhD program in psychology at Yale. So I actually went to Yale claiming to know something about psychology when I'd had just a couple of courses and made up a lot along the side.
Chris - What did you do your PhD on?
Deborah - Really what I was interested in was how do we represent ourselves, and how is it like and unlike we represent other people. How we think of ourselves versus how we think of a close friend or how we think of a stranger. Trying to get at what is the essence of self.
Chris - And you finished that at Yale. Did you then take that with you to Princeton straight away?
Deborah - I brought it to Princeton with me, but very quickly discovered Princeton, which was a very different kind of place than Yale. It was a residential campus. It had a very strong social group ethos. There was nothing written down at Princeton. It was all informal social norms. If you didn't know, you didn't deserve to know, and none of the buildings had names on them because if you didn't already know what they were, then you didn't belong there anyway. It had that feel to it. And it was the first time in my life I had ever been in an environment that functioned like the social groups, like the face-to-face groups I had studied in my psychology classes on small groups. How they function and the norms of small groups, and the conformity pressures that exist and the ways in which people get their identity from the groups of which they're apart. And it was like this giant laboratory for the study of social groups all laid out before me and it was too good, right? It was just too good. And I started chatting with my students at Princeton. All undergraduate students work with academic staff on independent research. I had some fabulous students early in my career who came and were my informants about life at Princeton and about all of these social groups and that became then the core of my work at Princeton and really the core of my work in my career.
Chris - Where did the studies on alcohol come into it? Because that was something that you've become very well known for.
Deborah - One of my very first senior students, named Jenifer Lightdale, was the vice-president, I think, of her eating club. The eating clubs were the social clubs, the core of social life at Princeton at that time. And she came and explained to me about the drinking culture at Princeton, which involved heavy drinking, especially on Thursday and Saturday nights. Not Friday because there were sporting events on Saturday morning, so everybody had to abstain on Friday nights. But Thursday and Saturday nights were the big nights. And that in fact the drinking was worrisome to her. It wasn't like social drinking. It was very, very heavy drinking.
Chris - Men and women?
Deborah - Men and women. But she said she was the only one who felt that way, that she was the only one who was worried. Everybody else was having a great time, she was really concerned. And I said, 'how do you know they're not worried?' 'Well, they're having a good time.' I said, 'well, don't you look like you're having a good time?' 'Well, yes I do.' And that is a phenomenon. That disjunction between the behaviour that everybody's engaging in and assumes is authentic in everybody else, versus one's private thoughts and feelings about that behaviour, and perhaps misgivings. That I recognised as a psychological phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance. It happens very often when people conform publicly, if you will, to norms and conform willingly to norms that belie in some sense some of their private views. In the aggregate, what that creates is a social reality that diverges from private reality. So we started studying that in the context of alcohol use on campus. And in fact, we're part of a very early group of researchers recognising that heavy drinking, alcohol abuse among college students in particular, is very often not a medical or a clinical problem. It's actually a social problem. And that kind of social problem is not limited to alcohol use, although alcohol use typifies it.
Chris - Did you use that to inform policies after that?
Deborah - The existence of this phenomenon then lent itself to a particular approach to intervention, which involved dispelling the pluralistic ignorance. If their heavy drinking is driven by the sense that they have to do that in order to fit in socially. Then if you show them in fact, and that's how we do it, we show them with data, 'look, in fact, you think everybody else is more comfortable than you are with drinking, but see everybody thinks that, right?' You give them a chance to discuss with people in a group, why do we all think this? And in fact, it lessens the pressure people feel to drink in order to be a good member of the group. In order to fit in. And it reduces, it doesn't eliminate drinking but we were never about eliminating drinking. We were about enabling people to drink at the level that they felt comfortable. And that's in fact what we showed in our work.
Chris - There are many parallels with the world we find ourselves in now with social media. People saying something because they think it will get likes. They don't necessarily believe it. And you've been quite outspoken in interviews you've given before taking up this job about wanting to really push free speech and make sure it's safeguarded in universities plural, not just in Cambridge University. You must be seeing a sort of repetition, but in a slightly different way. The alcohol story playing out in a different way here.
Deborah - Social media cuts both ways. So although in social media, yes, people often expressed views that get a lot of likes and then that leads them to express an even more extreme view in order to get more likes. At the same time, social media has been the means through which people have found like-minded others who wouldn't have been able to find them in face-to-face social life, right? So there are plenty of communities around less frequent kinds of attributes or opinions that people in fact can find others online who feel the same way they do. Social media is just another lens through which the same kinds of self-censorship and self-expression phenomena around those. That's really what I'm interested in is how to get people to express themselves. When do they censor themselves? What licences them to say certain things? The social gauze through which people try to express themselves and get known by others. And all of those filters, if you will, on how we carry ourselves in the social world exist on social media as well as in face-to-face life.
Chris - What must we do though to make sure that we safeguard debate and free speech at universities? Because we have seen a pattern in a number of institutions where people have had a view on something and they have had the platform whipped out from under them and they haven't been able to share their views. And historically we would've had a debate about these sorts of things. People are rightly, I think, expressing alarm that this means we're not having a sensible debate and a discussion and reaching a consensus. We're just censoring people.
Deborah - Yes, that's right. And so this is one of the things that I've been working on.
Chris - It happened at this university.
Deborah - It's happened at all universities. I think the pandemic made it a lot worse, because in fact people no longer had ways that they could express themselves to each other and have an authentic kind of exchange with reactions that they could observe and respond to. It was getting bad already, with the polarisation that has arisen. There are many things that lead people to self-censor. And I think that the challenges around, not knowing who you're talking to, not knowing if it's going to get a positive reception lead people to hesitate to express themselves, to censor their own views, to look for cues about what kinds of opinions will be acceptable. It's just become very, very difficult, I think, to have the kinds of authentic sharing of views, perhaps half formed views, perhaps an exploratory conversation to try to get at the truth of something, that many of us remember from our college university days. I remember being able to talk much more freely than I see people able to talk now. So really one of my initial projects here at Cambridge is to look for ways to create spaces to give people experience listening to diverse views, expressing diverse views. It's not something that people come now to university with a lot of experience doing.
15:25 - Deborah Prentice: preparing for the jobs of the future
Deborah Prentice: preparing for the jobs of the future
Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge
Chris - When you went to university, and certainly when I went to university, it was still the case that we could probably look forward to counting on one hand the number of jobs or roles or careers that we're probably going to have. And I went to an event at a university in Australia a few years ago, and one of the researchers there stood up and she said, 'the reality is that your average student at university now, the job they're going to spend most of their life doing doesn't even exist yet.' And her second point was that you will need many hands to count how many jobs people will probably do. We're moving to a portfolio career type thing. What must universities like Cambridge do to be sufficiently agile so that we are training people with that in mind?
Deborah - I think we have to train people to in fact be flexible and agile themselves. And honestly, I think whatever course a student reads, whatever they study at Cambridge, that matters, I think, much less than learning some basic skills to analyse, to read, being numerate, right? Having some basic quantitative and general analytic skills, and then having the confidence and the curiosity and the openness to try new things and to go into new fields. I think we're looking at a situation in which lifelong learning is going to need to be a reality for many people. So learning to learn, learning to love learning, and establishing a really strong foundation and an expectation that in fact you are going to change and that change is good and you're going to learn throughout your life and ensuring that people have the personal and social skills and qualities that they need in order to succeed in that kind of a world.
Chris - The other change that's been very dramatic in the last about 30 years is that we went from about 5% of the population going to university to 45 to 50% of the population going to university. And now we are perhaps reversing that trend and people are saying, 'I'm accruing big debts. It's very expensive. It's hard to get services. So perhaps maybe I'll actually go into an apprenticeship or something.' So this whole kind of trend towards higher education is shifting. How are you going to react to that?
Deborah - It's a very interesting trend. There's a similar trend in the United States as well. College attendance is dropping in terms of percentage. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I know the aspiration was 50% of people should attend university. I don't know if that's somewhat arbitrary. I'm not sure if that's the right number. I'm not sure there is a right number. I think apprenticeships can be absolutely the right path for many students and for many, many different careers. So I'm not concerned necessarily about the students deciding that university isn't for them. I think the most important thing to us at Cambridge is to make sure that anybody who wants to come, anybody who wants to do this work and who in fact has achieved training and skills that they need in order to achieve, I think they should be able to come, regardless of their means, regardless of their background. So we focus very much on ensuring that our bursary scheme and other forms of support are adequate so that any student with the talent to succeed at Cambridge can make it to Cambridge.
Chris - What about people coming internationally? Because funding has always been tricky for higher education, but it's got more and more tricky as time has gone on and universities across the board have been forced to source their funding streams from students coming internationally and paying three times as much as a home student or more would to do those same courses. Is there a risk that they are taking up places that home students could have and therefore we are depriving British students of an education at Cambridge because we're educating the rest of the world? Or is that not the case?
Deborah - Our percentage of home students at the undergraduate level has remained fairly constant over time. I mean, it's 80% or 85%, I can't remember, so I shouldn't say a number. But the vast majority of our undergraduates are in fact home students. We do take in some international students, certainly, because they're extraordinarily talented, and we always take the most talented students in our applicant pools. More of our postgraduate students are international. That's always been true. And again, we're thrilled to have them. They bring talent and then they go back and our impact on the world is all the greater because we've got these incredible students who then go fan out into the rest of the world. So I'm delighted to have the international students. We don't have strict numbers driven by a budget model of the number of international students we need to get in. And so we're in fact still choosing the best from among our existing pools. We just tend to have more international students in our postgraduate pools compared to in our undergraduate pool.
Chris - Talking of internationals, you've made some points in the past about perhaps evaluating and reevaluating our relationship with China. Can you elaborate on that?
Deborah - China is a huge source of talent. Their higher education system is growing by leaps and bounds. And they're such an enormous system and such a large part of the science establishment, for example, that we still do work with China and will continue to do so. Of course, we have to be concerned about our security and the security of our intellectual property and other potential threats that can come from those kinds of collaborations. And so we have robust processes for vetting our engagements with China, with Chinese scholars and Chinese institutions to ensure that, in fact, intellectual property and just the humans involved are operating under secure circumstances. But China, it's a fifth of the population. If we're going to solve climate change, if we're going to tackle the world's most difficult problems, we're going to need the smarts, the knowledge, the help of our Chinese colleagues. And we'll welcome that.
21:53 - Deborah Prentice: what's in store for Cambridge University?
Deborah Prentice: what's in store for Cambridge University?
Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge
Chris - A very good friend of mine who used to run radio networks and things said, 'you're only really effective for your first few years in a job, because after that the problems become your friends.' So now's your chance to have a good shake-up. Are there any things that you are eager to shake up in your initial tenure?
Deborah - I mean, I think your friend is sort of right, although I'm hoping that the problems don't actually become my friends. But there's something to that, there definitely is. For me coming in, I think Cambridge does have some problems that I hope to solve. They're not existential. Cambridge is actually doing brilliantly, I think, honestly. But that said, it is a huge institution that has come through the pandemic and difficult financial circumstances in the sector and in the country. So yeah, we have some work to do. And I'm hoping that we can try to improve our employee value proposition, improve what we have on offer for our staff, for example, because we feel we've fallen behind in some areas. The industrial action that we faced is a good wake up call to that. So that's work that's under things like that, we're tackling. And then some incredible opportunities. Opportunities to bring together all that the university has to contribute to the climate crisis opportunities to grow our innovation ecosystem and partner export it in some sense. Partner with other institutions to grow that nationally in the country. So I see the opportunities are huge and I want to seize those too. It's not just the problems that I want to solve, but I do want to solve some problems.
Chris - How about doing more science communication? Something we try and strive to do?
Deborah - Science communication, we have a fabulous communications office actually that has been working hard on getting out the news of the incredible array of scientific discoveries that come out of Cambridge every day. I read the clips every day with my morning coffee. It's one of the best parts of the day to see what my colleagues across the university are producing. So yeah, I mean, science I think in general, telling Cambridge's story to the world, all of Cambridge's stories to the world is a huge priority. It meets so many of the goals that I've just described, right? It communicates to students that they should come, it communicates to researchers that we're open for partnering. It communicates what we care about and the problems that we want to help solve. So communication is actually at the heart of so much of what we do.
Chris - I'm delighted to hear that The Naked Scientists can therefore rely on your support going forward.
Deborah - Absolutely. You've got it.
Chris - Now, earlier on in this interview, I said 'would the 17-year-old, 18-year-old you recognise the you of today?' If we go back to that point, what would you say to 17 or 18-year-old you now, if you had them sitting here in front of you, would you give them any advice?
Deborah - Fortunately, because I have actually taught throughout my career and advise students throughout my career, I've very often have had the 17 or 18-year-old me in front of me. And I don't so much give them advice, except to tell them actually to do what they love. I tend to think that human motivation is the most valuable quality, certainly at a university, at an organisation like the University of Cambridge, it is. Because these are brilliant people and whatever it is that they want to apply their brilliance to, the most important thing is that they do it with their whole heart and their whole mind. And that's what I feel about our students as well. Whatever it is that gets you out of bed in the morning, whatever it is that to which you can bring your whole heart and your whole mind, go for it. Do it. And follow the path that leads from there. It may be a winding one. You may have jobs, it may send you off to a place you never expected to be but, hey, I'm in a place I never expected to be and I couldn't be happier.
Chris - Debbie Prentice, thank you very much.
Deborah - Thank you so much.
Comments
Add a comment