The formidable force that is driving Sir Duncan Rice

May 2010

Top Drawer: “My ambition is to have everyone we recruit smarter than myself. Therefore intellectual improvement would to an extent take care of itself”

by Gordon Casely

Sir Duncan Rice leaves me breathless. If someone in his 68th year displays as much energy, verve and enthusiasm as he does, what on earth was he like at 48? Or 28?

That’s just the physical side of him. His mental agility and intellectual range are constantly to the fore. And he completes the trinity by displaying extraordinary stamina in the many years in travelling the UK and the world in academic pursuit, fundraising and representing the rising place of Aberdeen as one of the world’s top universities.

His 14 years as principal have just ended, and in that time he has “grown” (his word) Aberdeen University upwards to the point where it now sits 126th of some 40,000 universities in the world. He departs our seat of learning leaving an institution charged with a will to go further – and his ambitious target for it to become a global player in the top 100.

It’s the quality of the range of his mind that fascinates. Here’s someone for whom “best” is not merely coming top in Scotland, but jousting alongside the Yales, Stanfords and Harvards of the academic world – and intriguingly he doesn’t mention Oxbridge.

Sir Duncan casts a substantial shadow everywhere he goes, and not just because of natural bulk that might create envy in a second-row forward. Fiercely promotive of universities and university research, this 30th holder of post of principal since foundation of the original King’s College in 1495 speaks at machine-gun speed, firing off facts, figures, ideas, beliefs and hypotheses at a rate that makes my hand ache with unaccustomed shorthand.

I fill 17 pages of my notebook before he pauses – at which I raise the point that for an educated man who rarely employs the same word twice, he engages in constant repetition of “success” and “achievement”.

Nature or nurture, what makes him tick? His explanation points to the vitality of how nature nurtures within solid family life. In his case, the Aberdeen-born Charles Duncan Rice was provided of “a standard Scottish middle-class background”. His father, a city GP, and grandfather, rector of Peterhead Academy, reflected the inherent Rice trait of ambition for improvement; and his parents met while students at King’s. His maternal grandfather was a blacksmith and granite artisan.

Growing up in a household immersed in belief that anything is possible, he headed for Aberdeen University, to emerge with an honours degree in history – though an early notion of going into business gave law a close run.

A master in deflecting pomposity

You don’t have to spend long with Duncan Rice to know that this man uses his brain in ways that most of us hadn’t known were invented. For all that, the fact remains that in his time at the university, he was captain of an enormous ocean-going educational liner, where his hand on the wheel determined direction ahead for a long time. Yet he had a reputation for knowing what goes on, sometimes to the surprise of colleagues in the university court and senate. Senior colleagues talk of his voracious reading beyond contemporary literature extended to mundane circulars and newsletters.

“A master in deflecting pomposity” is how one staff member affectionately styled him, mentioning how at a medical graduation, Professor Rice opened proceedings with an anecdote that echoed laughter round the Mitchell Hall, without lowering the tone of one of life’s great occasions.

Socially he moves easily, across and up and down, expert in creating links, and unashamedly trading on an Aberdeen upbringing where aabodie kent aabodie else. His trademark way of dealing with an issue he wants to discuss has been for a recipient to receive a note with a simple statement: “Let’s have a cup of tea about this”.

What is inescapably striking about him is his internationalism, and when he talks of his beloved Aberdeen University, this academic just can’t help himself as he rolls off evaluations of Aberdeen vis-a-vis universities across the world – and within these comparisons I hear the names of Stanford, Hong Kong and Beijing, as well as rhetoric on developing attributes of leadership and the never-ending hunt for niche staff of intellectual quality.

He genuinely finds the Royal Burgh of Aberdeen “arguably the most exciting city in the world”, and refuses to become apocalyptic about an end to oil and gas. He confidently expects engineering techniques to be able to find and extract from more reserves than we know about, while intellectual industries will become a huge factor of making both north-east Scotland and what he affectionately and proprietorially terms “this place” bigger. On this latter, he has expanded it to twice the size during his tenure of principalship. Intriguingly he casts the bait wider, bringing in Aberdeen College, the Robert Gordon University and the medical school as illustrative points for his thinking industries and life sciences.

He does what it says on the Rice tin, if the iconic £57m university library now nearing completion is anything to go by. My query that this extraordinary new building might be taken as a metaphor for his time at the helm gains a deaf ear; he patently doesn’t do vanity legacies. He’s on to the next track of how the university might in future be seen as a centre of art, music, dance, drama (what he terms “the Yale experience”), as well as ideas for a new home for the Marischal Museum and the collections from science, zoology and botany that require 21st-century interpretative housing.

The essential qualities of Scotland

So what made him come home? Why not an academic life where he would surely have excelled in his chosen discipline of history, and writing books? He’s blunt about it: “The first was that I was being asked to lead one of Scotland’s ancient universities, and the one from which I had graduated. I saw that as a tremendous honour. The second was Scotland itself, where I knew that the quality of life, especially cultural and environment life, was superb. The third was that it seemed to me that Scotland was entering one of the most exciting times in its modern history”.

He adds: “The time we’re at in Scotland and the quality of our national life are essential parts of Scotland’s attraction as a place to study, to do business and simply to live”.

He communicates his case of Scotland’s “glorious intellectual history” through our universities having created modern social science, invented the moral philosophy that defined the ethics of the American Republic, and forged a reputation for excellence in medical and chemical research, adding ever so slightly possessively: “What was my own university is over 500 years old. At one stage during the Renaissance, we had two universities in Aberdeen alone, five in Scotland, when the whole of England only had two”.

To his critics, Rice is not modest, with little room for meekness and reticence. Such as: “My great ambition has always been to have everyone we recruit smarter than myself. Therefore intellectual improvement would to an extent take care of itself”.

To his touchstones of ‘success’ and ‘achievement’, he adds ‘fundraising’. If this last sounds a little out of place to the conservative Aberdeen mien, then it’s worth recalling his vaulting ambition when he returned to his native city to take up this post in 1996: that he would raise nothing less than £150m. The measure of the man is that £145m is already in the bag, with promises of more to follow.

Prior to Aberdeen when he was vice-chancellor of New York University, he played no small role in cornering some $1bn inside a decade, one of the most successful higher education fundraising campaigns in the world. The Rice view of fundraising is two-fold: it secures monetary foundation, and in doing so blazes the university name to audiences where it otherwise might never be heard.

Seven years into his bus pass, he parks contentedly on a settee patently too small for his considerable frame, looking faintly donnish behind ample spectacles. In a decade, he could well become positively grandfatherly.

But right now, his ferocious intellect is looking for new challenges – and he doesn’t easily let you forget it.

What of Sir Duncan Rice FRSE MA DLitt LLD PhD FRHistS FRSA, the contented husband happily married to his equally high-achieving wife Susan (Lady Rice CBE FRSE AB MLitt DBA DHC DLitt DUniv FCIBS CCMI FRSA, chief executive of Lloyds TSB Scotland), and their two sons and daughter?

What will he do now that he’s walked out through the university gate for the last time? And how much time will he spend as a family in his beloved other home in Harris?

As open as he is about what was “his” university, Sir Duncan remains reticent about personal plans post-university. What is certain is that his formidable grey matter is going to be applied with continuing force to “new ideas”, his favourite lifetime activity.

If Gordon Casely were to choose a university from which to graduate, it would be Aberdeen.

This is an article from the May 2010 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.