12 minute read
Meet the New Mistress
from The Year 2023
Arabist Dr Elisabeth Kendall discusses her life and work and the impulse that drew her to step through the front door at Girton as Head of House. Interview
by E. Jane Dickson
Girton’s 20th Mistress was intrigued to find newspapers unopened in the Senior Combination Room. ‘Before I came here, I’d never been in an SCR where the papers are barely leafed through. It’s because everyone here is talking. The Fellows talk at lunch, they hang around to chat after dinner, and I get the impression they really enjoy each other’s company. It’s the first thing I noticed when I arrived.’
Dr Elisabeth Kendall never underestimates the ‘soft power’ of conversation. ‘I’ve got a very practical spirit,’ she says. ‘I like working out how to move things forward. But first I need to know what it is that people really aspire to. So, I’ve been trying to do a lot of listening and thinking in my first year in College, while keeping up some of the great momentum I inherited.’
Kendall, who relaxes by trail-running in the Alps, radiates high energy. She came to Girton in October 2022 from Pembroke College, Oxford, where she was Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies. Formerly Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) – a collaboration across the universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Manchester – she sits on numerous advisory boards and holds multiple trusteeships. Her field work in East Yemen, which includes working closely with desert tribes and analysing the role of poetry in al-Qaeda propaganda, has won the attention of governments around the world. With privileged insight into militant jihadi culture, she has advised, inter alia, the UN, Special Forces at home and abroad, NATO and the Pentagon.
Steering tribes towards consensus is not perhaps so different from steering a College and, a year into her Mistress-ship, Kendall has ambitious plans for students and Fellows at Girton:
‘We’ve begun a couple of projects aimed at demystifying Cambridge for applicants, keeping it special – we don’t want to make it sound as if it’s like everywhere else – but making sure people know they have access to this special thing. It’s important to understand that not everyone arrives with the benefit of a privileged education, but everyone arrives with bags of potential. Tapping into that from the get-go is really important. I’m thrilled that last October Girton hosted the week-long induction for the inaugural Foundation Year (an initiative to bridge the gap between school and university for less advantaged students) for the whole University. We’ve also been talking to our students to find out what it was that pushed them to apply here; quite often they’ll say things like “Well, we saw a video on YouTube that talked about how fantastic Girton is at Law,” or whatever. So it’s about finding the right medium for the message and scaling it up.’
Most Cambridge Colleges now offer well-developed – and highly competitive – access and bursary schemes. This, says Kendall, is an increasingly urgent issue within and beyond the University. But it is disingenuous, she argues, to assume that access issues disappear once you’re through the door. ‘We’re working hard to ensure that inequality doesn’t follow students through university. And students these days also want to know what happens next. We’ve got to find better ways of equalising chances for graduates, whether that’s mentoring by alumni, expanding horizons to include a wider range of careers, or sponsoring students to try out jobs over the vacations without having to rely on wealthy parents; fancy internships, for example, are often up for auction, and I find that obscene. We need to offer practical help with professionalisation, internships, presentation skills, managing your profile on social media –all those things that add value beyond excellent teaching.’
Kendall also believes that, to deliver excellent teaching, you must first ensure Fellows are fulfilled and well supported:
‘Life has got harder for Fellows. Back in the day, you became an academic because you enjoyed teaching, loved doing research and relished long breaks for reading and writing. That charmed life is barely recognisable today; it’s much more legalistic and there’s a significantly heavier administrative burden. We need to ensure Fellows get what they want out of the job, and I have a few ideas in that direction. First, we need to support them more financially – it’s insane that you need a mortgage many, many times your salary to buy a decent house in Cambridge. And of course both partners, in most households, now work. So, what are you going to do about childcare? And how do you help Fellows carve out blocks of time to get on with research, disseminate it broadly and build their networks? It’s on my agenda to tackle these and other issues so that Fellows aren’t trying to cram important research into evenings and weekends.’
Building Girton’s international presence is, she suggests, a way of enhancing Girton’s reputation and, ultimately, attracting support for the College. ‘Getting Fellows’ research out there is a relatively low-cost way of helping their careers. That could mean “translating” weighty, intense papers into pithy web articles, blogs or press releases. We’re also filming a video series showcasing Fellows and their work. There are different ways of packaging the same research for the public, for policy makers, and for experts in the field. It’s about building different pathways to take all that fantastic knowledge to the broadest audience possible. I really want us to become a household name internationally. I want Girton to be recognised not just for being the friendly, inclusive college, but for the hard-core academic excellence that happens here.’
Clear-sighted ambition, and a talent for forward planning, surfaced early in Kendall. Growing up, she chafed against her parents’ ideals. ‘My mum was an immigrant from post-war Germany and left school very young. My dad worked as an engineer in a tea factory before becoming a mathematician and early computer scientist, but when he was in his fifties, he and my mum decided to become missionaries. It was a strictly non-materialistic household: we had no social life outside the church, and television, when it arrived, was strictly rationed. In common, I guess, with many teenagers, I felt like an outsider, and I took refuge in travelling in my mind and through books. My parents were not particularly keen on me going to university, but when I gained a place at Pembroke College, Oxford, to read Arabic and Islamic Studies, they saved up and bought me the best Arabic dictionary.’
Her choice of subject was, she recalls, ‘part rebellion, part pragmatism’: ‘I was always very interested in the “other” –anything, really, that was the complete opposite to how I’d been brought up. Choosing Islamic Studies was a rejection of my restrictive, Christian-centric background, but it was also strategic. This was 1989. It was around the time of the Iran–Iraq War, and I had grown up listening to news about Israel and Palestine, and the Iran–US hostage crisis. It was all very interesting and even as a teenager, I felt the drivers of these conflicts were poorly understood. Also, I was worried that, coming from a state school, I might be at a disadvantage. I wanted the chance to excel, rather than be behind from the start. So, I thought, “I’ll choose a subject where everyone starts from scratch.”’
Initial insecurities notwithstanding, Kendall graduated from Oxford with the highest first in her subject in 30 years. She remains passionately concerned, however, to throw a bridge from the ‘ivory tower’ to the outside world:
‘I spent quite a lot of my academic career feeling slightly dissatisfied. My work, at one stage, was highly theoretical, centred on literary criticism and Arabic linguistics. I was going to conferences where it all started to feel a bit like an echo chamber and I thought, “I can’t see how I’m making a difference, except in a very small niche in a very small field.” Then 9/11 happened and I started to publish short language books I thought would be useful. When I published Media Arabic, I distinctly remember being told by some faculty colleagues, “Oh, I wouldn’t put your own name on that, if I were you, because it’s not a very theoretical work.” But students begged me to publish it, because this was before Google Translate and they wanted to know what most Arabic-speaking countries had settled on to express concepts like “global warming” or “intercontinental ballistic missile” and other terms that simply weren’t in any dictionary.’
Spurred by the immense success of Media Arabic, Kendall branched out to publish several other specialist volumes, including Intelligence Arabic and Diplomacy Arabic. ‘At the same time, the whole concept of militant jihad seemed to me one of the urgent issues of the day and I started to think, “How can I bring 20 years of literary training to bear on what’s going on in the world?” I took up the directorship of CASAW in Edinburgh and then used my research fellowship at Oxford as a springboard for field work in the Arabian Peninsula where the most active and aggressive branch of al-Qaeda was based. I thought, “If we are trying to understand why jihad has taken off, we could do worse than find out what local populations think.” So, I planned this huge survey and trained 70 grassroots workers to go out and speak to people in the Eastern tribes about what they really wanted. And they invariably said, “No one’s ever asked us that.”’
The results of Kendall’s survey showed little popular interest in a caliphate or, for that matter, in democracy. ‘If you’ve got a very religiously segmented society, or a society full of tribal loyalties, then Western-Style democracy and policy-based competition isn’t always that relevant. People don’t want to be “helped” in the sense of modernised or Westernised; they do want representation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean “one person, one vote.”’
Most strikingly, the survey confirmed the central role of poetry in jihadi propaganda: ‘74% of respondents said poetry was important, or very important, in their daily lives. And if you think about how hearts and minds are moved, it’s not necessarily by logical argument, it’s by directly addressing people’s emotions. It’s not surprising that militant jihad groups were using it, yet it was completely ignored by intelligence agencies. I’ve spent a lot of time analysing the winning “ingredients” of the most politically stirring poems or anthems, and I’ve succeeded in getting more attention onto this kind of material, but there’s more work to be done.’
Beyond literary research, Kendall has worked extensively to provide social and educational support to women and children in East Yemen: ‘It’s increasingly clear to me that peace and prosperity rely heavily on the quality and inclusiveness of education. The projects I’m proudest of are the ones that help women fulfil their literacy ambitions, which have fantastic knock-on effects for their children and communities. It’s also about bringing fun into the classroom, even if it’s just a tent, using activities that encourage attendance, inspire collaboration and develop a peace-building mindset.’
Kendall’s adventures in the field will surely make a riveting memoir when she has time to write it. She has kept detailed diaries. On one occasion she was bundled, mid-speech, out of a meeting and driven at speed overnight towards the border and safety. Days later, in a neighbouring governate, a local speaker addressing similar issues was assassinated. Another of her gatherings was disrupted by al-Qaeda who arrived in heavily-armed land cruisers to deliver a religious homily.
‘I rarely feel unsafe,’ she insists, ‘I’m generally travelling as the only woman with 20–50 tribesmen. A small group meets me at the border and the first thing we do is drive to a rusty old petrol station two miles down the road to pick up their weapons – it’s like a valet service for guns. The men are incredibly respectful and I go with the flow – I’ll eat camel nostrils, or drink debris-strewn water from a communal tin bowl, and it helps that I have a deep appreciation of their language and culture. It’s quite weird for them – and very weird for their wives – but we have fun. It’s a bit of a festive atmosphere when I cross the border and I’m protected as a guest. That’s very important, and it’s where journalists and others make mistakes: they engage fixers, but once money changes hands, you’re very vulnerable, because someone else will pay more to let them kidnap you.’
Will she miss the adrenaline, becalmed in Cambridge?Given the Mistress’s flying start, this seems unlikely. ‘My first thought when I was approached for the Girton role was, “Wow! This is my dream job!” I wondered briefly if the time was right for me, because I normally associate this kind of role with an older person. But then I took a moment to reflect and realised what a fantastic opportunity and privilege it is to lead the College while I’m still very energetic, with batteries fully charged.’
