Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Professor Patrick Collinson
Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Lord Bishop, Mr Deputy Mayor and other
distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: I thank the University for the
very great honour it has seen fit to confer. It is indelicate to make
the conventional disabling speech on such occasions, since to declare that
one is utterly unworthy of the honour is to call in question the judgement
of those who have been good enough to think otherwise. However, I can
only say that when something like this happens one wishes that one had done
more to deserve it. But at least I have not had to suffer the greater
embarrassment of a most generous benefactor of my own university who was
publicly informed by our Chancellor, on such an occasion as this, or at
least at the lunch that followed, that he had bought his degree, and that if
one or two others of substance whom he saw in the company were to play their
cards with sufficient care, they too might be similarly rewarded. It
was, of course, one of those pleasantries for which our Chancellor, Prince
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh is famous. But I had better make it
clear, given the standards now required in public life, and in the presence
of their author, Lord Nolan, that I have never contributed a penny to the
coffers to the University of Essex.
It is a sort of value added honour, and a great pleasure, to be standing on
this platform with Mr Charles Handy, whom I have not previously met, but whom I
have long admired. The ancient author Plutarch invented the clever device
of the double biography, which described and contrasted two very different
persons in such a way as to make each one play the foil, or straight man, for
the other. This is a Plutarchan occasion. Charles Handy has done a variety
of very different things in his life, courageously changing careers several
time, which exposes myself as having done the same thing more or less for ever,
but I have created an illusion on the move by regularly changing continents in
order to stay in the same place.
A lifetime spent in universities, seven in all, has at least ensured that I
would never have made the mistake, which Charles Handy told us about on ‘Desert
Island Discs’. He was about to become Warden of St George’s House,
Windsor, where his employer was that same Duke of Edinburgh who has already been
mentioned. When told about the salary which went with the job, he at first
thought that he must have been quoted the monthly rate. It is a source of
wonder, but also of encouragement, that so many of the brightest and best
products of our universities, like many of you receiving degrees today, are
above all ambitious for an academic career, where the financial rewards in a
year are less than a successful lawyer or accountant can earn in a month, or a
dot com entrepreneur in five minutes. Long gone are the days when an
Oxford professor told his students that the study of Greek not only elevated the
mind but not infrequently led to positions of considerable emolument.
Some of Charles Handy’s books have titles which sound like a litany for our
hard-pressed universities: Inside Organisations – The Age of Unreason – The
Hungry Spirit, and my favourite, The Empty Raincoat. But this is too
important a subject for feeble jokes. Universities have always been in
danger, and all institutions are said to be in crisis perpetually. But the
current university crisis is particularly acute, since if it is fundamentally
about resources (inadequate), it is exacerbated by well-intentioned efforts to
make what is already excellent better. As with our schools and other
professionlised institutions, universities are subjected to unrelenting
assessment and appraisal, at a time when the workload itself has been just as
relentlessly increased. In particular, the RAE, the Research Assessment
Exercise, has in my opinion become altogether too sacred a cow. I may make
myself unpopular by saying so in a university which is proud to stand 11th in
the RAE league tables, and where, I understand, 94% of academic staff work in
departments rated 4 or 5 or 5 star. And I have no wish to return to some
of the academic landscapes of the past, littered as they were with spent
volcanoes, not to speak of seismic potentialities which were never realised.
RAE can be beneficial and its to my important that until now at least both
that and the quality assessment of teaching have been in the hands of peer
groups, of fellow academics whose judgement is almost always to be respected.
But the model which is being applied, measurable, quantifiable productivity, is
I think inappropriate, certainly in the humanities where I live and almost
calculated to fill our libraries with the equivalent of unsold Rovers at
Longbridge. Both publishers and academics are, in various ways, feeling
the strain. Something has to give. We are about to witness the sad
death of the monograph, and how will university departments meet their RAE
targets when that happens? They will have to become their own desktop
publishers. But the publishers are not fools and if something is likely to
sell and to be read, they would be the first to publish it.
The real value and function of universities has recently been stated,
somewhat old fashionably even pompously, by Noel Annan in his book The Dons.
He doesn’t seem to hear of any universities except Oxford and Cambridge but
never mind. Everything that goes on in a university should be secondary to
the training and exercise of the intellect. ‘Universities should hold up
for admiration the intellectual life. The most precious gift they have is
to live and work among books or in laboratories and to enable the young to see
those rare sholars who have put on one side the world of material success in
order to study with single-minded devotion some topic because that above all
seems important to them.’
I am proud to have become a member of a university where I know that in spite
of all adversity these values are not neglected, if not as explicitly or
embarrassingly stated as by Annan. And as some kind of historian you will
allow me to take this opportunity to express my admiration for Essex History: by
which I mean both the many kinds of History which are done so well in the
University of Essex: America, Gender, Revolutionary Russia and China, early
modern Europe, 19th Century Europe, social history in all its expansiveness, the
macrocosm; but also the microcosm, the history of Essex itself and of those
neighbouring parts of Suffolk where I myself grew up. When I read, not so
long ago, John Walter’s account of how the Civil War began in Colchester, a book
called Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, I thought, here
at last is what G.K. Chesterton looked for many years ago: a history of the
people of England that never have spoken yet. But it turns out that those
people were speaking a complex and ambivalent language, which only Dr Walter
could have deciphered, even while he is unable to put a name to any of the
participants in those strange disorders. History is both the voices of the
past and our engagement with those voices: a strenuous and continuing dialogue
between then and now. The University of Essex is doing a great deal to
make those voices so audible and comprehensible that we can converse with them.
That’s what it’s all about.