Influential British magazine salutes Kiwi business leader
The latest issue of the British Spectator contains a touching tribute inspired by the final administrative appearance of the New Zealand businessman turned academic John Hood, who recently stepped down from his position as vice chancellor at the University of Oxford.
Author Justin Cartwright’s feelings are well summed up in his concluding paragraphs:
John Hood may not have that playful and caressing wit which is said to distinguish an Oxford man, but he was unmistakably the right man for the times.
I owe him an apology.
Oxford owes him both an apology and a debt of gratitude.
Too right. John Hood, 58, was the first person ever elected from beyond the institution’s academic body to head the English-speaking world’s oldest university, and as such, arguably, the most significant infusion of foreign blood that Oxford had experienced since Emo of Friesland became the institution’s first overseas student in 1190.
Few, if any, of his 269 predecessors experienced quite the degree of open hostility faced by Hood as he sought to modernise some of the ancient university’s baffling systems and archaic chains of command.
Oxford boasts a historically complicated web of governance. The time-baked British university acts as a sort of federal overlord responsible for providing the overall academic structure and resources, while its 39 constituent colleges function as self-governing member states, with their own traditions, codes of conduct, endowments, and libraries for the university's 17,000-strong student body.
Hood’s mission, as he saw it, was to modernise both aspects of the university, and find better ways of making the operation over all more competitive against its better-heeled American competitors, something he had enjoyed notable success in achieving at the University of Auckland.
Hood’s own background in engineering, the subject of his own PhD, was certainly put to apparent use as well. He oversaw ambitious building projects as large as any of the past century, including a programme to greatly expand the university’s “medicine hub,” new improvements in its facilities dedicated to the classics and business education, and the redevelopment of everything from Oxford’s now-swanky science facilities to the upgrade of the world’s oldest university museum, the Ashmolean.
In all, 30 new research centres, including the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the British Inter-University China Centre and the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance, were established or announced, along with several other significant new interdisciplinary sites.
Oxford has always been a research-led institution, of course, but, supporters point out, such developments are significantly forward looking, all the more so during an administration operating during challenging global economic conditions.
Journalistic verdicts on Hood’s tenure are of some interest to us, having been something of a go-to guy for various international media during the years he served at Oxford.
Of all the off-the-cuff appraisals we heard of the genial, lanky Aucklander — and there were plenty, not all of them printable — a favourite was from Nigel Haworth, a British-born scholar and unionist at Auckland who dealt frequently with Hood in his previous New Zealand post: “I wouldn’t imagine John has been remotely fazed by what he has encountered at a university like Oxford, whose capacity to confound reform is well known,” Haworth said with a chuckle.
The controversial Oxford chief “has always been a straight shooter, someone who speaks his mind, which is very much an engineering mind … he’s a leader, you know, who goes very logically from A to B, lining his ducks in a row before he moves.”
And now John Hood has moved again, onward, with at least one fitting media farewell.
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Comments and questions3
No doubt he's an amiable, "good guy", in the parlance of the day.....as, I'm sure, is Liddell, Sir Wilson Whineray, Sir Selwyn Cushing and others of that ilk.
They can afford to be.
Let's remember how they "turned our timber industry around", in the late 80s and early 90s, no doubt to the country's and their own benefit.
Small problem: the way they did it -- untreated timber -- with that huge "scientific" con, called the Cavanagh Report, to help them look their children in the eye at the dinner table.
Lest we forget........in our enthusiasm to see one of our "icons" hailed abroad
Clark as a sop to the Greens.
The Spectator may have finally appreciated Hood's 'contribution' to Oxford, but the Oxford Dons did not appreciate his managerialist model - the model that New Zealand universities suffer under.
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