Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Professor David Lockwood

Chancellor and distinguished quests, fellow graduates and thank you Orator.  I came to Essex in 1968 looking for a quiet academic life.  Not loo long afterwards I became Dean of Social Sciences and the University erupted.  More precisely the school was the epicentre of large-scale student protest so I am not suggesting any cause or connection, though it would be immodest of me.  The protest was quite robust and prolonged, culminating in Senate being barricaded in the Mathematics common room on Guy Fawkes night.  And further protests continued in the 1970s, and not just at Essex of course, but nationally and internationally.  Essex became a special focus of hostile media and political attention.  And at one time closing the University was not the worst trait that was muted for it.  However, no-one suggested closing the University.  I had just left Cambridge, where if my memory served me right at one stage the protest took the form of attempting to burn down a garden house hotel.  The French sociologist and religion Emile Durkheim had a term for these highly excited and charged events.  He called them moments of collective effervesce.  When new ideas are born.  A view he derived from his study of the rituals of the Australia aborigines.  At Essex with substantial effort and wise leadership, the University came back together again and a decade later it was viewed in a completely different light.  An editorial in The Times Newspaper concluded that Essex was probably now the most distinguished academic University in Britain for its size.  So then what is the moral of this tale which goes back into my history but not into yours.  Surely not that the route to academic distinction is via student revolt though it’s true that the two things may have something in common.  What is that? Well, the last time I looked at the University of London PhD regulations, and it was sometime ago when positivism reigned, they decreed that the doctorate could be awarded on either of two grounds.  One was contributing to knowledge by discovery of new facts, that sounds fairly easy, the other required evidence of the exercise of the independent critical faculty.  Now in the case of the student protest I think it’s true to say that the critical faculty was exercised quite exhaustively, indeed exhaustingly, but predominately in relation to matters in the world outside university and not to the pursuit of knowledge.  So in this respect these events were not the moments of collective effervescence that gave rise to new ideals as Durkheim suggested.  In retrospect the impact in the way universities operate has been far less substantial than the external imposition of the research assessment, the Quality Assurance exercises.  So what is the real moral of all this?  Well, first of all while universities are very fragile things, they are also remarkable resilient and for this reason a decade is nothing in the life of a university.  The first student revolt in Paris occurred in the early thirteenth century and not being a historian, I can say with confidence that once founded universities don’t die. They actually might move around a bit and unlike all soldiers they don’t just fade away either.  It’s true that they have been known to go through periods of inactivity bordering on coma.

Now their fragility has a lot to do with their resilience. When you think about it, what a university essentially consists of is not the buildings and land but rather the ideas and values which are imparted and absorbed and augmented by those who pass through them, students and staff alike.  That’s why, in a sense, universities have a life of their own which goes on without too much regard for the momentary bearers of these ideas and values.  It also means that when we leave we are taking a bit of what is most precious about the university with us. Wherever we go and for as long we live.  In fact it’s a nice thought that if enough of us got together sometime one might have the makings of a new university, but it doesn’t quite happen these days - it happened once upon a time.  So I hope those graduating today will find this edifying and I hope you will look back on your time here at Essex with the same affection as I do on mine.  Thank you very much.