Professor Judy Simons, currently Pro Vice Chancellor at De Montfort University and until recently, chair of the English Subject Centre’s Advisory Board will be well known to Newsletter readers for her distinguished career in university leadership roles and as author of books such as Diaries and Journals of Literary Women: From Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (Macmillan 1990) and What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of Classic Stories for Girls 1850 -1920 (MacMillan 1995; with Shirley Foster). Simons is a woman who is constantly on the go, so those of you who have not had the chance to sit down with her for an hour’s conversation may not realize what a passionate teacher of English she is nor what surprising things she has to say about management posts in academia.
We spoke in Simons’ spacious, De Montfort office on a rainy Friday morning. Her large desk had the expected piles of paper and folders interspersed between three litre bottles of water, a large cup of freshly made coffee and her lap top. Petite and athletic-looking, Simons—who has struck me in previous brief encounters as being reserved—has eyes that sparkle and a smile which broadens to a grin when she talks about literature and working in higher education. When I asked her why she became a teacher and why she chose literature she replied earnestly, ‘It is not anything I have ever questioned. It just seemed a natural progression to me. I couldn’t believe when I was an undergraduate that somebody was going to pay me for three years just to read books. I thought that was the jammiest thing that had ever happened!’ she smiled. ‘And reading to me is still a favourite activity, I can’t get enough of it, I just devour books. So then to be able to go and teach literature and just spend all day talking about it—I just felt fortunate. I remember when I read Paradise Lost –it was on the syllabus at university—I couldn’t put it down! I stayed up all night reading because it was just so incredibly overpowering and absorbing. Reading was just superb, and writing about it was really just reading in a more advanced way, it just enabled you to articulate your thoughts about what you had read. I think if you’ve got a natural interest in your subject and in communicating and enjoying your interactions with students, then teaching is automatically something you do well. I’ve just always had a wonderful time talking about ideas with students, and in preparing classes it forces you to reflect on your own practice and on the way the subject is developing. I still teach actually’ she remarks in a tone that manages to be both serious and wistful at the same time. ‘I still teach.’
Simons began her career in Sheffield just after she finished her first degree. Simons received a first class Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Manchester and went on to do a Masters degree there, finishing in 1972. ‘I started in higher education in a rather odd way in that I started teaching when I was only 21, on a part-time basis, almost immediately I had graduated. I stopped doing that when I had children and my family responsibilities really took priority. And then I was offered a full-time post at [Sheffield] Hallam almost by accident in a way that I really don’t think would happen now. I do not think that anybody with the sort of qualifications I had would now get a post in academia. I am always so impressed when I interview young people for jobs in universities now to see how wonderful they are. They have all got brilliant degrees, higher degrees, publications and teaching experience. And I think if it were me nobody would ever employ me—given what I started with. I just think I was really fortunate in that climate, in the sixties, in terms of someone taking me on, being prepared to hire me.’ The 1970s in academia were a time of few women lecturers and fewer still that had attained the position of power and influence that Simons herself now holds. Sisterhood was powerful, however, as she recalls:
‘No there certainly weren’t many women lecturers. And they certainly did not rise to significant positions. And we were put down. I remember one appointments panel I attended where I had applied for promotion. There was only one position available and it went to a male colleague. I was told by my head of department subsequently that somebody on the appointments panel had said, ‘she doesn’t need a job because her husband has got a high paid job and she doesn’t need the extra money, it should go to so and so who has been here longer than she has anyway.’ And the chair of the panel, had, I know, wanted to promote me but was overruled by other people who were swayed by that other argument. That was what the climate was like in the early 1970s. And the person who told it to me was a senior woman, who said ‘you need to know, that this is the sort of thing you will come up against as you progress and you will just have to manage that as part of your career if you are interested in your career. I was incredibly demoralized by that experience; it really was very dispiriting and I thought shall I give up now? But I didn’t give up, I continued. Every stage of the career has been hard in that way in terms of seeking promotional opportunities. And because of my family commitments [Simons has two daughters] I didn’t have a lot of flexibility or freedom in terms of moving.’
The sage advice that Simons received from her senior colleague was supplemented by support she found amongst her peers. ‘It was that early feminist wave and I learned an awful lot from a group of women who are now all very distinguished scholars, who at that time were just young new lecturers like myself. There was a group called Network, which started probably in about 1975. Some of the people whom I met in that Network group are now in professorial positions at other universities, people such as Lyn Pykett, Vivien Jones and Ann Thompson. It was a very strong and mutually supportive group at a time when there weren’t opportunities to get together with other women scholars and talk not just about women’s literature—however you interpret that phrase—but also about some of the issues we faced working in what was then a heavily male dominated hierarchy.’
I was quite surprised to learn that as the author, co-author and editor of nine books, and stacks of articles, chapters, and reviews, Simons did not ‘start to take research seriously at all until mid or late career.’ The crucial turning point came in the early 1980s after she helped organise what she remembers as the first women’s writing conference in the UK at which she gave a paper on the writer Fanny Burney.
‘I have always been interested in women’s voices in writing—public voices and private voices and the distinctions between them. Fanny Burney was an eighteenth century novelist but she also wrote these extraordinary diaries, which at that time were largely unpublished. There is an episode in her diary where she describes with great graphic detail and tremendous power a mastectomy operation that she had in 1811, in Paris, without anaesthetic. It is the most extraordinary and powerful description. I was talking about that and the way she writes about it and how different it is from the quite conventional voice which she has in the fiction. At that point somebody said to me, you should write a book about this, a publisher got interested, and that was where my first book came from (Fanny Burney, 1987). Once I started working on that book everything else just fell into place. The book-length publications followed and I went on to do some student guides to Jane Austen and then a big book I did on diaries (Diaries and Journals of Literary Women: From Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf, 1990) and that became all-absorbing. That part of the career—which hadn’t really surfaced before where I had just concentrated on the teaching—came in and my teaching took off in new directions and it sort of went on from there.’
Simons’ easy wave of a hand as she says this is sincere but misleading. The career that ‘went on from there’ includes her ascension to Professor, to Department Chair, to Dean and to Pro Vice Chancellor of a university with an undergraduate population of 24,000.
While she says she didn’t have the pressures that young academics today must contend with (such as the RAE and league tables) she was nevertheless working in a climate where her notable research activity was ‘less usual’ than it would be today. ‘Everything was my own initiative’ she says to me. I am impressed and suggest that this sounds quite desirable, that her career was able to develop organically and follow the path and pace set by her interests alone, she corrects me, ‘Nobody really cared, nobody really cared’ she shakes her head dismissively. As the interview progresses, I learn that this notion of care and thoughtful, planned career progression is quite important to Simons, who rose through the ranks at Sheffield City Polytechnic and helped usher in the post-’92 era, when Sheffield City became Sheffield Hallam.
So, I wondered, what advice does Simons have for academics as they attempt to ‘manage’ their careers? Some, she declares, should consider the attractions of management itself. ‘Even [for] mid career academics, our profession has really not got to grips with the idea of academia as offering a proper career and supported career path. I think the career options are great but at the moment what happens is either you stick with your subject and progress to a chair and then it can just stop. Or, you make a decision to go into management but you often lose touch with your subject. I didn’t lose touch however, and when I went into management I found it tremendously rewarding and I found that management can offer you a new outlet for your own creativity. I found it a wonderfully creative job. People tend to think it’s filling in boring reports and sitting on boring committees and talking about boring issues. And actually it isn’t about that at all. It is about seeing new directions; it is about helping and facilitating other people to release their own talents. It’s about designing new programmes in order to keep up with the new generation of students.
And, it is about building and maintaining high standards and giving academic staff, a renewed sense of purpose so they don’t get stale. There are so many things that you can do. So when I came into management I found it wonderfully liberating. It was really a new lease on life. I absolutely loved it.’
In our conversation Simons demonstrated a passion for her current and previous management work that I didn’t realise was possible. She spoke of her staff (across De Montfort) with an air that combined zealousness with deep affection: ‘[My job is about] helping staff and heads of departments or heads of schools or deans to know/manage their programmes and see the new opportunities. It is trying, as well, as a Pro Vice Chancellor to get some sense into the system. So that if people are weighed down by bureaucracy- one tries to strip out that overwhelming administration and make things as simple as possible. It is actually changing the culture at the institution towards wanting to improve rather than thinking all the time that we have got to do certain things because otherwise somebody will come down and police us. . .’
Simons’ career of over three decades has been carried out exclusively at new universities and she is their unabashed champion. ‘I am very committed to new universities because I think that we are an absolutely remarkable, unsung success story. We tend not to get students who have got brilliant A Level grades, and when our students leave, they leave with very respectable and sometimes outstanding degrees. You mustn’t lower standards, obviously, you’ve got to put more thoughtful techniques in place in order to help students get to the standard that you want by the time they leave at the end of their three years. And I think we are remarkably good at it. We commit our time in extraordinary ways and I go into other universities and I think people don’t know they’re born, actually, in terms of what they have to do with students. They don’t know they’re born!’ One imagines that given the opportunity, Simons would set them straight immediately. Indeed, while she may admire the clutch of qualifications and advanced degrees that today’s new lecturers have, she pulls no punches when it comes to their intellectual fussiness in the classroom. Speaking of her early career, she remembers:
‘Well I taught on the literature programme, invariably fictions of different periods,—but at that time if you were a literature teacher, you taught the syllabus. I find now that young people coming in are much more precious about their own specialisms and say ‘I’m sorry I can’t teach that, it’s not my period!’ And you think, come on, you are a teacher of literature and if you’re required to go in and teach a class on the lyric you do it! And if you have to then go teach Shakespeare, you do it!’ Another wide grin appears, as she realises I can be fussy in that way myself so I am relieved when the conversation turns to A Level students and what Simons understands as the challenges facing the subject from the direction of secondary schools.
‘I think what is interesting about undergraduates who come to do English is that their expectations of what an English degree programme consists of—whether it’s single honours or joint honours or combined—are changing and I think that has to do with what they now do in the 14-19 age range. I have to say that I regret what has happened to English in schools and in colleges because it has become very functionalist in approach, to assessment, particularly. Students do not come in with the same love of reading that I did. We must not lose touch with those really strong values of what the subject is: which is text and textual engagement, however that is configured . . . If one of the things that we are instilling in our students is the ability to think independently and develop their critical skills and to challenge received knowledge, which I do think is what we are about, you do this by giving them a text. You give somebody a text and you open them up to diverse interpretations whether these be published or whether these be the opinions of their peer group, and their tutors—that in itself is something that we must not lose, I just think that that is at the heart of the subject and I believe that quite passionately. They get enthusiastic (if you are a reasonably good teacher) and that enthusiasm will feed their curiosity to want to learn more and learn for themselves.
There is a need to understand the ways in which Higher Education is changing and it is about the need to engage, have dialogue, much more with the secondary school sector. So that secondary school teachers understand what it now means to do a degree in English. Equally we need to understand where our students are coming from, what they know and what they need. If I could have some sort of project or post that would enable me to do that, I would really like to do that, I would welcome it; I just think it’s hugely important.’
Despite such canvassing for a new post, Simons tells me she is looking forward to retirement, and has gradually cut back her hours at de Montfort to a part-time basis. ‘I’m doing too many things; I always do because I find it quite difficult to say ‘no’ to things. . . What I would like to be doing is freeing up some time where I can do my own research and writing in a more sustained way than has been possible for me over the past few years. It is a very sad thing to think you have to retire in order to do that!’ What will you research?, I ask. ‘Well I’ve got a number of things. One of the things is I have been asked to do an edition of the letters of Rosamund Lehman, so that is a possibility. I’m in the middle of completing an article on popular writing for children in the 19th-mid 20th century, which I’ve found quite fascinating. And then, Nicole, you will find this comic, but I want to write a literary cook book!’
I protest that I don’t find that comic, but I doubt she believes me. I can’t tell you too much’ she worries, suddenly demure, ‘because somebody will grab the idea…’ I am only able to coax a few more details from her: ‘Well, I live in France part of the time so I am very interested in European cuisine—just using very simple, good ingredients. But I am interested in meals really, as a social activity, as a way of giving and being generous—like Mrs Ramsay—get everybody around the table— and like Dickens as well I suppose...’ her voice trails off and I realize I am not going to get any more information from her about this book project. I suppose I will either have to wrangle an invitation to one of her meals, perhaps offering her a literary reference (James Baldwin’s The Welcome Table comes to mind) or else queue with the rest of the world once this most intriguing book is published. One thing is for sure: retirement is not going to slow down Judy Simons.
