Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Professor Michael Podro

Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen I am deeply grateful to the Senate and to my colleagues in this University for their generosity in this,  and indeed for their generosity and companionship over many years.

For thirty years I have had the opportunity of working with art historians who have been among the most interesting in this country and indeed interesting in the world.  And over this time we have read and criticised each other’s manuscripts, we have, you might say, taken in each other’s washing.  And we have argued.  We have argued at length.  We have not only argued about what we have written, about lectures that we have given, but we have argued over many bottles about how the subject should be taught. And as we have argued so our students have chipped in their halfpennyworth - often !

A group of us came together, as the public orator said, we came from other universities in Britain, from the United States and from Germany.  We came together at an extremely propitious moment for the subject, in the late sixties.  It was a point at which our own field of art history but also literature, history, indeed the humanities in general and indeed psychology  (we didn’t have a psychology department then and its terribly good that we have got one now, its as if we are now getting fully-grown) - but all these subjects at the time were dominated by what we might call, with due respectfulness, bit-by-bit empirical enquiries.  More general theories or extended comparative studies were scarce and they were rather frowned upon - they were  not quite academically appropriate.  Now one reaction to this,  from the up-and-coming generation of the sixties,  was the eruption of heady structuralist theories: theories of all and everything,  magic theories.  As though the literary and historical studies were a matter of playing a game of chess with a few very simple rules, or simple mantras.  Many of you, among the students and among their parents, will be familiar with these.  They depended upon the fact that the meaning of our words depended not on a direct simple relation between our words and things but the relation of words to other words.  And this lead to thinking that when we disagreed with each other it was because our languages divided the world up differently, rather than the fact that, as it were, the facts made them different.  A sad result of this was that disagreements were unresolvable by reference to the facts.  Well,  that is all in the past,  though such theories have hung on in the atmosphere,  in the cobwebbed corners of intellectual life. 

At Essex this, I might say had only marginal impact, and I think that this in itself is very interesting.  This was perhaps because the cool winds of the east coast didn’t really fit with that particular caste of mind but really because from the start our first Vice Chancellor  Albert Sloman, and those around him, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the poet and critic, Donald Davie, encouraged a break from the isolated specialisms as the public orator explained.  They brought together in working relations philosophers, historians, sociologists and literary critics,   indeed students of European, Latin American and Russian literatures.  And for those of us who came to Essex in their time this interaction of disciplines was a crucial part of our education -  education for the staff as well as the students. 

I have vivid memories of sharing seminars with sociologists among others and a large number of first year students in what some of you still follow -  the Enlightenment course.  Each of us who joined in this used material offered by those from the other departments to pursue their own distinctive interests.  Students at the time said that it was half like a dog fight and half like an acrobatic display,  but they did come back for subsequent performances. 

Such interaction in the university made possible the development of the study of Latin American Art for which, among other fields,  the university is internationally pre-eminent.  It made possible a large number of other types of intellectual enterprise, which really weren’t being conducted elsewhere.  Now these may seem simply academic matters, well its not a bad thing since this is a academy that one should talk about academic matters,  but they aren’t merely academic,  they are not narrowly so.  They are part of a broader project of extending the human imagination, which we might contrast to the ‘grad’ grind conception of education and research, which is not after all uncommon.  The lack of imagination, the lack of faith in the imagination particularly of teachers but also students, in schools as well as in universities, has I think, been the fatal weakness of successive governments.

One recalls  what ‘the man that hath no music in his soul’ is fit for.  And it is with this in mind that one wishes those students who are graduating today , every success in exercising that imagination,  with as much exuberance as you can muster, perhaps as much bloody mindedness as you can muster. Because you will do so in a world where that exuberance and that bloody mindedness is much needed.