Prof Toni Williams

I suppose I have always been interested in communicating ideas and so I gravitated professionally towards research and teaching. My family background is one where teaching and education are highly valorised and I believe in a University education as an opportunity, an opportunity for people to change and develop, to get access to experiences that for many people aren’t available without a university education. I think that’s very important, and that’s why I wanted to become a university teacher.

Things have changed quite a lot in universities since I was a student but I think of higher education both in terms of learning and personal development that it gives you – the skills, knowledge and confidence, for example; and I also think that higher education is transformative so that you become a different type of person. That happens not only because of what you study, what goes on in the classroom, but also from that experience of kind of living in and navigating a community of strangers and developing from being a newcomer, a sort of outsider to this community of strangers, to becoming or at least knowing how to be in some respects an insider or part of that community over the period of your education. Obviously what you study at University creates new ways of understanding the world, of seeing the world, of being in the world, and of acting in the world; I think that’s really important. And then there are other transformative experiences, some depend on what you study, others not so much. I’m in a Law School, some people often see that very much as a kind of important, primarily as the route to professional qualification as about becoming a lawyer. I don’t think studying law was ever about that for me. I was the first one in my family to go to university, the first in my school to go to Oxford which was where I studied, so it was this sort of magical idea to be able to go to university in the first place. It was seen as an enormous privilege. I think access to education is an enormous privilege, and I suppose a large part of what I’ve been concerned about throughout my career is expanding that access to education, giving other people access to that information and privilege.

Ok so I did my first degree at Oxford University, and then I did my PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East. I took my first job as an academic at University College London, UCL. I then moved to Canada where I spent most of my career, 20 years, at a critical law school there, called Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto. I then came to Kent in 2007. Each place is distinctive in its own way, I mean far fewer people went to university back in the late 1970s and places like Oxford recruited from a particularly narrow pool so my experience as a student was of a university that was much less diverse, much more homogenous in all sorts of ways. The majority of Oxford colleges were then males only and the undergraduate student body and the staff were white. There was a much narrower range of people at the university; and student life was much more dominated by people who were obviously exceedingly wealthy and who had a lot of educational privilege before University. That may still be somewhat the case at Oxford today, but I think not on the scale it was then. Kent today feels more racially and ethnically diverse, more international and more democratic than other universities where I have worked or studied. The last place I taught, Osgoode Hall Law School, was in Toronto, which is a much more diverse city than Canterbury is and the law school and university to a large extent reflected the city as it tended to recruit local students. But Kent tends to recruit more from London and internationally so the university is more diverse than the city of Canterbury and I think that’s makes a really dynamic and exciting feeling around the campus.

Well, I’m quite old, so my career had been going for quite a long time before I moved to Kent. As you probably know about that every 5 to 6 years UK universities are audited to evaluate the quality of research they produce – it’s an external research assessment process. What tends to happen is that universities are often looking for different people to hire, or new people to hire whose work can be submitted for assessment. Kent Law School was interested in hiring new people in time for the research assessment exercise in 2008 and that coincided my sense that I’d probably been in Canada long enough and was interested in coming back to the UK; but there weren’t very many English universities I would have come back to. I mean Kent Law School has a reputation for being interdisciplinary, a critical law school, a place where students are encouraged to challenge accepted truths about the law, and where cutting edge critical research is done, and that is quite important in my discipline because Law can be very dull in terms of research and teaching and learning. Kent Law School (KLS) does have a very long history of challenging dull, technical and technocratic approaches to law. So I guess there was a conjunction of my desire to come back to the UK and Kent’s willingness to hire someone like me.

I think my family laid the foundations-- my birth family; our parents strongly supported me and my three siblings to go to university so that was really important. Everywhere I’ve worked there’s been a colleague who has supported me and kind of encouraged me. I think it’s the environment that really provides the support. Individual colleagues may have supported me and I think most people can identify with that, but I don’t think it is easy to single out any particular factor because you get helped in many different ways. It was my family who kind of laid the foundations by saying you can go to university, it’s very important, and they were excited about everything I did in education, which is a very positive feedback loop. But there would be particular individuals, when you work in particular places that would help show you the ropes and would help you when you mess up a bit. I have a partner who also is a university law professor which can help with many things but working in a university is a collaborative exercise so I think it really is hard to single out a particular individual.

At this stage of my career, it’s unusual to think of work as transforming for me, although what it has done I suppose is given me a senior leadership position within a university setting. Although I had various leadership positions both in work and through my volunteering work before, this is my first leadership role as a head of a law school. The law school is enormous so I guess the position of Head of School has transformed me in my having to learn all sorts of things I had no idea about, and having to develop skills to work with colleagues in different ways than you do in education and research. So yeah it is actually quite a large transformation, developing skills around working with colleagues in a different way when you are in that head of school role and being accountable for decisions, having to take lead on things. I suppose it’s meant that the last three years in particular I have had to develop new skills, new relationships. For example, I don’t enjoy networking very much and find it exceedingly difficult, but it’s something one has to do as part of the role and so you find ways to develop some rudimentary skills. The role of Head of School has also led me into new ways of thinking about universities as organisations and how they evolve and develop, which is something one does not have to focus on very much when your role is essentially teaching and research. As a teacher and researcher I think about my subjects and the particular areas I research in and teach, whereas in this role as Head of School, I need to think more about the wellbeing of staff and students, the development of the Kent Law School and the University of Kent and how does one foster an environment where the staff and students will flourish when they are all very different people with very different needs and expectations and experiences? - It’s quite hard actually. So I guess Kent has transformed me to think about these things and worry about more of these sort of things.

The truth is I don’t teach students these days very much except for supervision of PhD students because as head of school I have very little capacity. I love the communicative experience of supervising and teaching students and I find ideas really exciting so I like communicating with others and see them getting excited about these ideas so that’s what I love about teaching, I don’t do it enough of it is the truth.

Again, I think it’s just working with interesting ideas and this is very hokey but I think of research as sort of striving to say something that’s true, something that matters about questions that feel important. What is true and what matters and which questions are important mean lots of different things to different people but I’m talking about what I like about experience of research and it’s about trying to capture something that seems very complex in words that one can then communicate to people and awaken their curiosity or interest -- so that’s the process. In terms of the research I’ve done over my life I guess probably one of the most important projects was in Canada when I was on commission looking at racism in the criminal justice system. I ended up essentially leading the commission for part of its life and writing the reports. We investigated systemic racism throughout the criminal justice system from police contact on the streets, through the prison system and beyond into release and resettlement in the community. The report had quite a big impact at the time – it was reported in the New York Times as well as in local Canadian media and a good number of recommendations were implemented. It was I think quite a life changing project for me in a number of ways.

I think becoming head of a complex and diverse school and navigating all you need to learn around that. There’s just too much work for the time and capacity I have so I think coping with all of that and coping with other people’s stress and anxiety are challenges.

I think the way I approach what I do is to prioritise supporting staff and students to do things they want to do to make the place better. So there are some exciting things, that I’ve not necessarily done myself but I have supported others to do them. One example, I suppose, would be securing funding to support collaborative relations with a couple of universities in Brazil. These relationships have enabled some KLS students to go to Brazil and Brazilian students to come here. They’ve also allowed academic staff to develop new research networks in Brazil and to promote their work there. Another example could be the support for the Decolonising the Curriculum project. I haven’t done that work myself but I have supported students and staff in developing the project. I’m also very engaged with supporting the Student Success Project which I think is really important and so, again contributing to the development of that project is really important even though I don’t do the substantive delivery myself. What else? A large number of PhD students have graduated under my supervision and I’m pretty excited about that. I think when you are in a leadership position it is less about what you do and more about what your work might enable other people to do. I mean we’ve had some big successes: for example, whilst I’ve been head of school the law school has been ranked in the top 100 in the world which is a massive achievement for a university like Kent and although rankings are very problematic in lots of ways, a high ranking for the Law School tends to build a positive environment and the reputational benefits that rankings bring can create new opportunities for staff and students.

Well I have two more years as head of school and there are all sorts of changes going on in the university so it is hard to say anything too definitive. I think my ambitions are for the law school to continue to be a place for diverse people to gather and to thrive, both students and staff. It should be a place for people with very different backgrounds, with different ideas and aspirations to be, to become, and to develop without feeling as if they will be channelled into some ‘cookie cutter’ mould. It should be a place that students and staff feel that they want to contribute to, and they’ve also get a lot out of, a place that is personally transforming or rewarding or at least satisfying in some ways.

When I became a university student, access to university was exceedingly limited, but now around 45% of people go to universities which is a fantastic improvement. But I think the universities still have a lot to learn about education in that context. If universities are not just selecting the people with the most elite pre-university education but selecting and encouraging, opening up access for people who don’t have that elite kind of education we have to learn how to do a great job of educating students who may be fantastically talented and able but whose educational backgrounds are different to those that students were assumed to have 40 years ago.

When I do teaching and research, then I like ideas and communicating ideas. As head of school I don’t get much opportunity to do that, so I suppose trying to improve things motivates me -- making sure the colleagues have the right space, opportunity and environment for them to do the best teaching and research that they can and students have the best experience we can provide… so I guess trying to improve conditions that people work and study. That’s what you do as head of school so thinking about ‘how do we make this bit better’ and ‘how do we solve that problem’ is probably what motivates me.

That’s a tough one. I don’t know how to approach that- anything one says tends to sound a bit hokey, a bit pompous or both. I think what I would say is that, we live in times that feel quite challenging and quite overwhelming – not in a good way -- but there are still phenomenal opportunities available for many people who make an effort and enjoy a bit of luck. I think effort is really important in life and in terms of thinking about your own success and what you want to achieve in life, it’s important to focus on effort and how the work you put in maximises the experiences and opportunities that you have. I think when looking at other people’s success and thinking about how they got there, it’s important to remember what a significant role luck plays. Effort can help to create opportunities and help you take advantage of opportunities that come your way but success is often a matter of luck. I think as you go through your education and through your life the important thing is to position yourself to be as well-placed as possible to take advantage of opportunities, but to realise that being successful doesn’t make someone better than anybody else – sometimes it just means that they got the breaks – the luck fell their way. Because success depends significantly on luck as well as effort, the trick is to be in the position to take advantage of the luck, but not to be down in yourself if it doesn’t go your way. I guess that may not be massively inspirational but it’s the best I could come up with.