Interview
Nicola Padfield Master of Fitzwilliam College (Diploma in Criminology 1976)
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ecently elected an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, Nicola Padfield made history on October 1, 2013, when she became the first woman Master of Fitzwilliam. Although she became a fellow in 1991, she had spent many years elsewhere, and, hence, was not the typical ‘internal’ candidate, as will shortly become clear. Her relationship to Darwin was not dissimilar: she had spent the academic year of 1976-77 studying for the Diploma in Criminology, as it was then known. The Cambridge University Institute for Criminology was the leading British educational institute for such a degree. Not only did Nicky find the course and her time at Darwin immensely rewarding, she also met her husband here, Christopher, a PhD student in engineering. They met on her first day, and have been married for 36 years. The diploma in criminology was, she recalled, simply a fantastic course. Both the course and Darwin College were markedly international, with people from dozens of countries coming together to teach and to study. Senior practitioners from related professions were fellow students, including an Australian judge and a Kansas policeman. This internationalism was to become a character not only of Nicky’s life, but of her husband’s – he had already spent several months in Mississippi in 1974, doing field work for his engineering doctorate. Nicky continued her law studies in London, and was called to the Bar in 1978. After this, for nearly a decade she and her husband were out of England, before returning and finally settling down, she to a successful academic career (interspersed with legal work), and he to a career in liaison work between the University and business (he is now a fellow of Trinity Hall.). Her first overseas period was spent studying French law on a French government scholarship at Aix-en-Provence, where she received the Diplome des Etudes Superieures. Her husband
Darwinian THE
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