Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Alan Baddeley

Oration given on 16 July 1999

Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Professor Alan Baddeley.

When a new generation of British universities was being created in the early 1960s, of which Essex was one, the then vice-chancellor – Dr Albert Sloman – and his colleagues were faced with taking a strategic decision. Each of the new universities had more or less the same financial resources and each had to decide whether to have a pie consisting of a large number of small slices (that is to say departments, and disciplines), or a small number of large slices.

Essex made the second choice. It would have a limited number of large departments and would aim to move quickly to securing a high reputation for research and teaching, backed by substantial resources such as computing, and library holdings.

It is true, there was a downside to this choice. There were times when it might have been better to have had a wider range of intellectual pursuits, but, overall, the strategy paid off.

Since then, Essex has broadened the range of academic disciplines taught at the University, with the addition of new, to us, subjects, including, fairly recently, psychology. It is now an intellectually well-balanced institution with a deserved reputation for academic excellence.

None of this should be taken as self-advertisement or self-congratulation (well, not entirely anyway). It is, rather, by way of saying that when a relatively new discipline is introduced into a relatively new academic institution, it is bound to draw for its inspiration on a wide variety of sources. And that is one reason why today the University is honouring one of Britain’s leading academic psychologists, Professor Alan Baddeley.

A quick glance down the lists of research interests of members of the Department of Psychology at Essex reveals that in over half of them memory figures as a major research topic. The main focus of Professor Baddeley’s work has been memory (indeed, it was for his services to the study of human memory that the award of a CBE was announced in the recent honours list). A prolific author, he has published numerous articles, research papers and books in the course of his career, there can be very few who can match his prodigious output, remarks a former colleague, and these in turn have stimulated and inspired others to follow trails that he has blazed.

Alan Baddeley read psychology at University College, London, graduating in 1956. A year later, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree by Princeton University in the United States of America, before returning to the United Kingdom, where in 1962 he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he remained as a researcher at the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit for the next five years.

In 1969, Alan Baddeley was a lecturer, then reader, at Sussex University, before moving on to Stirling University as professor of psychology. Both these universities – Sussex and Stirling – belong to the same generation as Essex, so it is  likely that he is familiar with the tribulations, rewards and excitement generated by working in a new institution.

This is something that permeates the Department of Psychology here, where there are scholars who feel themselves to be creators of a new, exciting enterprise involving a new, exciting discipline. It was striking how many colleagues mentioned the stimulus provided by Alan Baddeley’s work. Words such as “innovative”, “inspirational” and “leadership” recur in any conversation about him. So, what in particular has been his principle contribution?

Memory is a human attribute that appears to be distributed unequally. Some are blessed (a very unscientific term) with an acute memory; others of us are forgetful – a condition that often appears to get worse with age. But these are very crude generalisations. What is important to try to understand is the nature of memory. Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why do we retain certain memories permanently, while jettisoning other memories after only a short time? Do we have a finite memory store? Or is memory limitless, thus making it at least theoretically possible to recall apparently forgotten experience? Why can we remember some sequences of numbers (such as, for example, telephone numbers), and yet not others?

It is on trying to find the scientific answers to these and other questions that Professor Baddeley’s work has been focussed and much of his activity as Director of the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge between 1974 and 1995 was dedicated to that end, as is evidenced by a series of distinguished books, the titles of which speak for themselves: The Psychology of Memory (1976); Your Memory: A User’s Guide (1982); Working Memory (1986); Human Memory: Theory and Practice (1990).

And incidentally, the University is delighted that Professor Baddeleys wife, Dr Hilary Baddeley is with us today, a research psychologist herself, she works with her husband on a project investigating Alzheimer's disease.

Memory, however, has not been Professor Baddeley’s sole interest. He has also made valuable contributions in the fields of language development and breakdown, developmental disorders, cognitive aspects of rehabilitation, and ageing and diving.

Yes, ageing and diving – NOT ageing and dying! As one former colleague remarked: he has spent many any hour on the bottom of some tank or other, assessing the effects of changing pressures on divers and trying to evaluate the impact on their general awareness. It is not hard to imagine how this kind of research could mesh in with the rehabilitation of brain and head injury patients.

Marks of the esteem in which Professor Baddeley is held by his peers internationally are the numerous invitations to visit universities throughout the world. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Queensland, Australia, and the University of Texas, Austin. He has been president of the Experimental Psychology Society and the European Society for Cognitive Psychology and he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 1989. Since 1995, he has been Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol. And last, but very far from least, he was accorded one of the highest honours in the world of scholarship, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

We are honoured that Professor Baddeley is with us today. And we seek to honour him as an inspirational scholar, a trail-blazer in his field of research, and as an outstanding scientist of world repute. Not least, he serves as an exemplar to our own community of academic psychologists.

Chancellor, I present to you ALAN DAVID BADDELEY.