Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Polly Toynbee

Thank you very much. It’s a great and public honour that the university does me. Now the moment has come to confess that there’s a particular personal pleasure for me in standing here this afternoon. I have a rather guilty secret. It is that this is my first degree. Mine is a story, I am afraid, of laxer times, not at all what you hard working graduates would do these days.

Yes, I did go to Oxford University and I did read history. Luckily that’s all anyone ever asks. That’s all I am ever required to proffer when asked to produce a short biographical note. After all, it is rude to ask what degree someone got – and even ruder to enquire whether they got a degree at all. I didn’t. I’m afraid I didn’t stay to the end and never took my finals. Well, this was the 1960s and dropping out was something a lot of people did. I have trouble now explaining this to my own children while urging them to take and pass all their exams. Such is the hypocrisy of parenthood. But in those halcyon days of full employment there was so much less pressure and anxiety about whether you would get the qualifications to get a good enough job.

I abandoned Oxford for the hippy life in the Welsh hills, but being an urban creature to the core, the rural idyll didn’t last very long. Another romantic notion lead me to working in a factory for a while, it was Tate and Lyle’s in Wandsworth, packing sugar. Probably only a middle class girl with zero experience of the world could think it nobler to work with the hand than with the brain. Idealistically, I thought that simple honest manual work would leave the mind clear to write great literature in the evenings. Well, I learned pretty quickly why not many simple honest manual workers write great novels. Such soul destroying work exhausts the body and deadens the mind. But my six months in that factory gave me a lasting interest in social issues of all kinds. Later, as the public orator kindly said, I did travel around the country researching a book on unskilled work, and I took a number of manual jobs in order to write about the waste of human potential and intelligence in soul-destroying work and it is hardly a fashionable idea these days with a New Deal designed to treasure every job as a precious prize to be won, however empty and unfulfilling it might be. But from those beginnings I have spent most of my journalistic career reporting and commenting on social issues of all kinds.

That’s why I am particularly pleased to be honoured by a university with such an exceptional record in the social sciences. Time and again I have drawn upon excellent work from Essex University social scientists – invidious to name individuals – on  elections, polling, magnificent longitudinal surveys, social classifications. I cannot help but mention the Vice Chancellor and Tony King and that splendid contribution to contemporary history in their account of the SDP – even if their mention of me isn’t entirely flattering!

But I ought briefly to acknowledge also the division that persists between the academic and my world. Too much good and useful academic work seems to be written in a private language for the internal consumption of a monastic fraternity when it could and should be made available for public use – and stand a chance of influencing policy makers.

Social research has suffered badly in the last two decades from governments perversely uninterested in what it had to offer, indeed often suspicious and contemptuous of it. Perhaps that lack of interchange between social researchers and thinkers – and the policy makers in successive conservative governments caused some academics to retreat and turn in upon themselves. Even where the work is intrinsically important, too often academics don’t regard dissemination as a vital part of their work. It is.

Journalists could and should be more responsible, more assiduous recipients, it is true. So let me very quickly register my gratitude that you have extended a hand to someone who makes a living from daily journalism and commentary. I know how frustrating it can be for academics to have their work grotesquely distorted in the media, often eager to abuse it for their own biased ideological purposes. I know because I’ve done it during my time in broadcasting myself. I know how infuriating it must be when some impertinent interviewer seeking a twenty second sound bite for a news clip says “Briefly Professor, could you encapsulate your entire life’s work?”

But in an imperfect world, some academics could do more to navigate the treacherous seas of the media, and learn to use it better to get their work across. Essex, however, is one of the universities that is probably among the best at doing just that; feet firmly on the ground, well aware that research is only half the job,  the other half is getting it out to those who should be using it.

Now, I believe, we are entering a far more constructive era with a government with a huge new social programme, eager to discover all that it can about how society works in order to make it work better. We should be entering a new golden age for the social sciences – and indeed for social reporting in the media which has been so neglected in the Tory years that many newspapers don’t have a proper social affairs correspondent at all.

I hope now that there will be more and better reporting of social issues, and more respect for the work of social scientists who have so much to tell us.

Thank you again for this very great honour that you are bestowing on me, which I accept as a mark of the vital interplay between social science and social reporting. Thank you.