ROWING would seem to be an ideal pastime for anyone preparing for a working life as a historian, less so as a research scientist and academic administrator. But the one sport in which participants spend their whole time looking backwards did help to launch the career of Quintin McKellar, principal of the Royal Veterinary College.
After growing up on the family sheep farm in Renfrewshire, Professor McKellar might have been expected to take up a position in large animal practice on graduating from the Glasgow veterinary school in 1981. Instead, he applied and was accepted for a PhD researching the biology of the bovine gut nematode Ostertagia ostertagi.
“I’d like to be able to give a different reason, but my main motivation for staying on was to continue as a member of the university rowing club, which I was deeply involved with at the time,” he explains.
Although his rationale for entering academia may have been idiosyncratic, Quintin found he was well suited to the role of a veterinary researcher. So on completing his PhD in 1984 he was offered a job in the department of pharmacology, working on parasite responses to anthelmintics. And it wasn’t long before he was required to test his skills as an administrator when, following the tragic death of Jim Bogan in 1988, he took over as head of department.
Professor McKellar remained at Glasgow until 1996 when he assumed much greater administrative responsibilities as director of the Moredun Institute. At that time, Moredun was coping with both the scientific and financial challenges presented by its move to its new laboratories on the Pentlands Science Park outside Edinburgh. So he was familiar with the pressures of justifying massive expenditure on new facilities when he moved to the RVC in August 2004.
At the Hawkshead campus, the RVC had recently built a new large animal clinical centre and was planning a project to double the size of the Queen Mother Hospital, the first phase of which was completed in March this year. There were further projects in the pipeline for the creation of two new research facilities: a controlled environment building for carrying out welfare research and a centre for research on locomotion and motion where researchers examine changes in anatomy and physiology in a broad range of domestic and wild animal species.
This emphasis on developing the Hawkshead site prompted a long debate on the future of the college’s original home in Camden Town. But, he says, the college authorities have now decided to retain the old buildings as the base for its pre-clinical veterinary students and for undergraduates on its veterinary science course.
“There are many reasons why we have chosen to stay there but the main one is the benefits for students of being in central London – the social and cultural aspects that they would miss out on if they had to spend all their time at the one campus.”
While recognising the need to support its research and clinical services work, the college has to remember its principal responsibility is to its students. So another major investment went into the LIVE building at Hawkshead which officially opened in February 2007.
That provides the facilities for undergraduates to carry out the sort of independent problem-based learning needed by today’s undergraduates and which it is hoped will equip them with the ability to continue expanding their clinical skills throughout their careers.
The new centre also helps those responsible for directing this teaching. “If you are trying to assess students who will be going out into a practice environment, then asking them to write essays is probably not the best way of going about it,” he notes.
Like the other UK veterinary schools, the RVC is reviewing the content of its undergraduate course to cope with the explosion in knowledge in the biological sciences. This process has been given added impetus by the opening of the new school in Nottingham, which had the luxury of designing its curriculum from scratch.
“Having another competitor on the scene has made us all sharpen our focus but it is reassuring to find that many of the teaching methodologies being used at the new school are essentially those that we have pioneered.”
Professor McKellar believes the emergence of a new school may also accelerate moves towards a more diverse approach at the different schools. “Within the constraints of the RCVS guidelines, I think the schools will head down the route towards some level of specialisation in their courses. Students will be tracked more robustly than in the past towards an interest in a particular species or clinical discipline. But hopefully we will still produce graduates with the potential to go into any branch of the profession.”
Wherever they decide to make their careers, one inescapable fact about the next generation of veterinary graduates is their gender. Nearly 90% of the current intake at the RVC is female but Prof. McKellar says that this imbalance reflects the numbers of students applying to the course and rejects any return to an entry system heavily biased in favour of male candidates.
A positive trend
He insists that the feminisation of the veterinary profession is largely a positive trend. Any resulting problems, such as the need to provide career breaks for childcare, are ones that should be addressed by the veterinary profession as a whole, and not just the school admissions tutors.
An aspect of the undergraduate intake that he believes the schools should address is their social mix – one that is increasingly white, middle class. The RVC is now in the second year of a one-year foundation programme allowing students from disadvantaged backgrounds to compete for a place on the course on an equal footing.
This programme is supported by generous bursaries and every one of the 30 students on the first course has been accepted at the RVC or another UK school and they are performing extremely well, he says.
But the schools should not be dropping their academic standards in an effort to attract the more practicallyminded students that many practitioners claim would be better suited than the current high-flyers to life in practice.
“My old gran used to say that if someone wasn’t any good at maths, it was all right because they would be good at woodwork. Sadly, that isn’t true because life isn’t fair. The people with the best academic skills are, more often than not, the same ones who have the best practical and social skills, so trying to disentangle them is just daft.”
He does, however, have more sympathy for that other perennial complaint made by older practitioners about new graduates: their lack of commercial acumen. He believes business skills should be learned before graduates begin life in practice.
“Yes, it is our responsibility and we have let them down.” So the RVC is considering the possibility of business studies electives for undergraduates and is also looking at offering postgraduate courses to both its own students and those from other schools.
In deciding the future direction of veterinary education in the UK, the schools will have to work within the framework of the existing legislation as there is little prospect of a replacement for the 1966 Veterinary Surgeons Act.
Prof. McKellar insists that there is plenty of scope within the existing rules to make positive changes to the British system. “My goal is to help in providing veterinary education that is second to none. If you ask most people which country provides the best system they would say the US. I want ours to be the best on offer: that isn’t pie-in-the-sky, I really think it can be achieved.”
Planning how to get there is another matter. But to meet the challenge, Prof. McKellar is making an early start, as he does every day. His daily routine involves getting up at 6am and spending half-an-hour on the rowing machine set up in his garage. “On cold winter mornings I open the doors and stare out into the darkness while I row. I find that really relaxing.”
