Teaching
The outside world, like posterity, knows scholars from what they write. But inside a university, it is teaching that is most noticed, most remembered and most keenly judged. Vickers' teaching began with a Lectureship at Merton College, Oxford, covering for its tutor's leave.
University lectures followed swiftly, when he had been appointed to the Harrod Fellowship at Nuffield. That particular position did not actually oblige him to lecture. But he chose to. It was lucky for that generation of Oxford's postgraduate students that he did. They greatly enjoyed his lectures and rated him among Oxford's very best. At this point, word processing was in its infancy, and some lecturers, like their predecessors had done for seven centuries, simply talked. But Vickers then produced handouts, written in his crystal-clear Italic script and photocopied for everyone. Good final year undergraduates specialising in IO also attended and learnt much.As Drummond Professor, Vickers' lecture portfolio broadened. The MPhil course on Public Economics had eschewed environmental economics, for example; Vickers filled this lacuna himself. He had seven years in that position before his periods of leave, at the Bank of England and the OFT, and three after his return in 2005. One teaching activity he took outside Oxford in the latter period was to deliver a course of lectures for the RES Easter School. The audience was a highly selected thirty-four-strong group of PhD students and young lecturers, from all over the UK and beyond, who were specialising in IO; the numbers included a few specialists from the Treasury and the Bank of England. At the time, Vickers was suffering from a severe throat infection, and could barely speak. Most lecturers would have tried to get someone to deliver the material in their stead. But not Vickers. His dozen lectures were all carefully prepared, with handouts, copies of research papers and other documents, which were made available to everyone; he could supplement these by drawing diagrams and deriving equations on whiteboards, and somehow he was able to deliver short sentences in answer to questions and converse in whispers at coffee and meal breaks over the two days of his part of the school.
While President of the RES from 2007 to 2010, Vickers arranged that its annual Easter School could be supplemented by a new Autumn School, in order to strengthen the position of advanced research in macroeconomics in UK universities. The Autumn Schools thrived for three years, until a later President of the RES, the first for decades never to have observed or participated as an RES Easter School lecturer, decided that other priorities took precedence, so the Autumn Schools were sacrificed and the Easter Schools cut back.
After his return to Oxford, one lecture that Vickers undertook was the initial one for the first-year undergraduate course in Macroeconomics. The audience was large—well over 300. Most Drummond Professors restricted themselves to postgraduate teaching. At Cambridge, and in many distinguished US universities, it is traditional for many of the senior professoriate to welcome the daunting challenge of lecturing to beginners. The University of Oxford was not a place where something should be done for the first time, but Vickers thought that he should take it on. His students were fortunate.
10