ABSTRACT
I decided in my late thirties to go for promotion. I had a Senior Lectureship in a College of Education that left me free each day after 4pm, every weekend and all the student holidays. Not a bad deal. I had plenty of time to concentrate on my house, husband and two small children. Now I have just retired at 65 from a senior management job in a new university. I have been responsible for the academic leadership and resource management of a school with over 2,000 students and 200 academic and support staff. In my earlier career I was Head of Department, first in the College of Education and then in the Polytechnic that later became the University. I have spent twenty-six years as Head of Department, Dean, Director of School. Over the past few years I have worked weekends and evenings and had thirty days holiday a year. I look back and think did I make the right choice? Yes, most definitely, I did. But how much of my career has been determined by free choice? Let’s say that I reacted to circumstance and tried to steer a course in roughly the direction that I wanted to take. This mode of travel seems to reflect the common experience. ‘It cannot be denied, but outward accidents conduce much to fortune’ wrote Frances Bacon’…but chiefly, the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands. Therefore if a man ‘look sharply
and attentively, he shall see Fortune: for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible’. I was fortunate to be an only child with a mother who had ambitions for me. I came from a working class family; my father was a compositor in a printing business: no one in the family had any experience of grammar school education, let alone university. My mother made sure that I went to a primary school in a middle class area, from which I gained a place in a girls’ grammar school and from there, at the suggestion of the headmistress, I applied to university. This came as a surprise to my family, who had teacher training college in mind for me. My father was reconciled to the idea when he found out that I could get a grant if I signed up for a degree course followed by a teacher training year. So was my future career decided.
