When Covid-19 engulfed Europe in spring 2020, Louise Richardson mobilised the University of Oxford to fight the pandemic. As vice-chancellor — in effect the institution’s chief executive, though no one in academia would dream of using that term — she set up formal and informal crisis management teams to look after all aspects of academic life, from teaching and assessment to research, from university finances to student welfare.
A conventional crisis management framework has a gold team at the top followed by silver and bronze. But Richardson called the first team silver and then the next one bronze — an indication both of her imaginative management and the challenge in leading a sprawling and disputatious organisation like an ancient university.
“This being an institution which has a visceral reaction to leadership, I thought if something were named gold it would immediately incur opposition — and by calling the leading group silver and letting people surmise among themselves where gold was, that would be helpful,” she says.