Role as Dean

If I looked at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, that is a great state university by any standards. Huge, tremendous commitment to academia. I still think that the American graduate schools, be they private or the best state schools, are the best in the world. There are a few exceptions in Britain like Cambridge or Oxford, Imperial University College, London School of Economics and so on. But generally speaking, that was a well-run, well-oiled machine, tremendously strong mathematics department, engineering department and Computer Science at that time, Larry Smarr was there, we had the center of super-computing applications, Marc Andreessen was there as a research assistant and started up Netscape. I mean it was a science-oriented Valhalla in many ways but with great Arts and great Social Sciences faculty. Its business school was strong, very strong, number one public accounting school. And so on and so forth. It was easy to run the business school because the place was well-oiled. There were resource constraints in state universities but if you wanted to get somebody really good, you know, there were billion dollar campaigns Illinois had every five or seven years, which generated endowment money, that generated ways to pay very good faculty. So the rules and regulations there were well established; Americans worked incredibly hard too, and there was no compromise with regard to academic quality there at all. None at all. But a very different way of working. I mean very open conversations. The heated debates took place in committees, they never took place elsewhere. And I think that's healthy. Warwick is more British, and people say one thing to your face and knife you in the back when you are standing in the toilet. Do not get me wrong. It's a very different culture. So you have to be more political. So you have to understand the underlying politics very much more closely. Warwick was more political. Great school but affecting change there, you really had to understand the political system. There was a very different operation of what one may call the Council of Deans. It was more ritual rain-dancing then actually getting anything done. And the university Council was a load of worthies like the House of Lords who you need to kick awake to make sure they were still listening to you. So two very very different cultures but very good school that had strong academic traditions. And I don't think I'd fit a school that didn't have a strong academic tradition cause I have always done research, and I have always believed that if I can do it, then other people would see me as the wrong model and do it themselves. So Warwick was good but different.