Professor Alison Treadwell was installed as the University’s thirty-seventh Rector on Friday 8 October, at a Congregation attended by 340 members of staff, students and guests. A legal historian, she was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor of a university in the Midlands, and taught for twenty years at universities in Scotland and the north of England.
In her address she spoke of the University’s “long habit of keeping things”: books, records, buildings and arguments. “The Academy was founded to keep learning on this bank of the river when there was a good deal of pressure to let it go elsewhere,” she said. “Keeping is not the same as hoarding. We keep things so that they can be used.”
The installation was the first ceremony since 2019 at which the Academy bell was rung, after a two-year delay to the repair of its frame.