Would the real Vernon McClure please step forward...

Where were you born and brought up?

I was born in Neasden, before Private Eye invented a university there, and went to school fairly locally in Highgate. I read History in the University of London, at Westfield College, where Marion was. I did a PGCE at Oxford afterwards, it was quite interesting. When I came to do my teaching practice I had a super school, discipline wasn’t a problem, but I thought there was no way I wanted to teach History until I’m 65. When I was at college I was secretary of the union for a year, I tended to be a reasonably organised sort of person so I started looking for jobs in education administration.

I was out of work for six months after leaving Oxford but then within a week, I think it was November ’71, I was offered two jobs a the same time. One was in the Education and Training Directorate of the CBI, and the other to work as an administrative assistant in the private office of the College Secretary at University College. I chose the latter and there are two reasons why. One was that I couldn’t see the career path was with the CBI and it wasn’t as strong as it is these days and it was more politically conservative than it is now, and the other was that at University College the post was on an incremental scale, of three, and they were offering me a Ł100 a year more to start. So I started on Ł1600 in 1971.

What does your job as Academic Registrar entail?

I think the one place where universities and companies are different is that we have a registry. Our one starts with schools liaison and we have an office that is involved with admissions - this is the Wembley Arena that Simon Baker so fondly remembers. Once you’ve come we have an office that looks after students records, people will come and get their Council Tax certificates or to get a transcript of what they have done while they have been here. There is another big office called the student finance office, and that gives out peoples maintenance grant cheques. That office also deals with student loans and Access funds.

That’s very much the nuts and bolts of things but there’s also the policy side so all of the major academic committees are serviced by me or one of the deputy registrars. Most of these are involved in making sure that above departmental level proposals that individual parts of the College want to put together are considered in an informed way by the College community and that decisions are made for the best interests of the community as well as in the interests of the department.

You mentioned Access funds, isn’t there a Hardship fund as well?

Yep. The Hardship fund we have greater control over to whom that can be given. For the Access fund we have a template which we are provided by the government in effect, and this year the template has changed in a significant way where unless a student has taken out a student loan, you can’t have any access funds. You may agree with that or you may disagree with that but, but, we’ve got no control over that so we have to apply the rules.

Do you get many applications?

I think that students hit the ground running and there seem so many to begin, perhaps it has increased with greater knowledge of its availability but its a major exercise each year to determine that for Tony Cullen, the deputy registrar. He provides me with his proposals and I sample 20 or 30 and satisfy myself that those who get more are more deserving than those who get less, but it’s not an exact science.

You deal with applications to College. Can you tell me the breakdown between state schools and non-state schools successful applications?

Let me not answer that by going back a step. If you look in the prospectus and some of our other publications, you will see an equal opportunities policy for students, and to paraphrase what that statement says is that IC wants to recruit the best students no matter where they come from.

We know through our schools liaison office which schools frequently provide us with pupils and we can track how well they perform when they come. I joke sometimes that here at IC people crave for statistics and if it moves then put it down on a piece of paper, but we certainly haven’t studied the link between students’ origins and their success.

When, if ever, you leave here, what would you like to be remembered for?

When I came here, the perception was that undergraduate teaching was not taken seriously enough and as the first secretary of the undergraduate careers committee I think I provided a catalyst for raising the profile of teaching skills and learning skills in a variety of ways.

Secondly, whereas the teaching quality assessment visits for each department have ownership in that department, when the College as a whole was subject to this academic audit in the early- to mid-nineties, there wasn’t ownership, we didn’t have a Pro-Rector educational quality, and for nearly three years, I lived and breathed trying to make sure that it was transparent that we did have quality assurance procedures which for an institution that is really quite good in many of its provisions, where the means of demonstrating that we were and so we could monitor that we were.

Was a Managing Director here a good idea?

I personally think the experiment didn’t work. It was because the administration at that time was perceived not to be fulfiling the academic mission of the institution; that some parts of the administration had an agenda that was not in step with what the majority of the college community wanted to achieve and that caused serious tensions. I think it has taken up time, but we are back to a model with a college secretary and, I would say it wouldn’t I, but I would say that the heads of administrative divisions do understand what the college is trying to achieve and they do work rather well together. Well, you can judge better than me, you have interviewed almost all of them. I think that they are human.

What has had the biggest influence on your life?

I’ve got a father, who is 92, who is still going but not quite going strong. He probably had the greatest impact because he is such a reasonable person except when it comes to the Irish Question. He’s an Ulsterman and he has got no sense when it comes to that. My wife keeps me on the straight and narrow.

What do you do in your spare time?

I play tennis, I play squash. I’ve got a son who is 14, he and I particularly like a particular Megadrive game, which is called EA Hockey, which is an ice hockey game. I’m not bad at that either, I enjoy it.

What make and model was the first car you bought?

I inherited a mini from my brother who had been given one for his 21st birthday. He was seven years older than me so he then went to Ceylon to work, when I was 15. This thing was put into mothballs and I used to start it up religiously every week until I was 17 and was allowed to drive it. It was almost the first version of the mini, creamy white. I had a succession of minis which got progressively more powerful until I progressed to a Fiesta which was a fiasco. It was painful. I bought that without having test-driven it, and I have never bought a car since that I haven’t test-driven.

Could you describe an anecdote typical of you time as a student.

We used to have to write an essay for a weekly tutorials, and instead of reading this out and sending everyone else to sleep, my tutor, Mrs Anderson, said that we should prepare a resume to be read from notes or off the top of our heads. I can remember vividly Vernon being very big headed in those days and I decided to do it off the top of my head and it was not very good, and at the end I said ‘I’m awfully sorry Mrs Anderson, that was a bit woolly wasn’t it.’ She looked at me over her half glasses and in front of all my friends and peers she said "Mr McClure, you flatter yourself.