To enormous fanfare last week, the Dame Louise Richardson Chair of Global Security was established at the Blavatnik Business School in honour of the soon-departing Vice Chancellor. It was a remarkable event in a couple of respects – first, global security is frankly a dud subject for a chair at Oxford. More to the point, the Dame was appointed to this vanity project when she was still in office, which was an extraordinary departure from usual custom and protocol. Normally an honour of this sort would be proposed after the departure of the scholar it’s named after – normally an individual of exceptional distinction in an established field – and left to their successors to promote. In this case, she obtained it while she was actually in office.
The Chancellor, Lord Patten, who was instrumental in getting her appointed, did his best to justify the chair at its launch: ‘Before [Dame Louise] was a distinguished Vice Chancellor, she was a great teacher and a great scholar; through her work and her scholarship around terrorism and global security, she provided an extraordinary contribution to public policy.
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