Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Stanley Cohen
Oration given on Wednesday 9 July 2003
Chancellor, The Senate has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the
University be conferred upon STANLEY COHEN.
Stanley Cohen is a prominent world leader in sociology, criminology, and
human rights. Born in Johannesburg, he moved to England in 1963 and became a
psychiatric social worker before doing his PhD at the London School of
Economics. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Middlesex and Durham,
and was Senior Lecturer and Professor of Sociology at this university between
1972 and 1981. In 1981, Stan left for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with
his wife Ruth and their two daughters, Judith and Jessica. He returned to the UK
in the mid 1990's and is currently the Martin White Professor of Sociology at
the London School of Economics.
Stan's work has always shown a deep concern for the oppression and suffering
of others. In South Africa as child and youth, he saw the horrors of apartheid
at first hand. In England and the United States he witnessed the inhumanities of
a so called advanced criminal justice system. And in Israel he came to detest
the atrocities generated through the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The thread
that holds all his work together is a passionate preoccupation with the often
unnecessary sufferings of people living under systems of social control - from
the smallest regulations in our everyday lives, through the workings of courts
and prisons, and on to mass systems of torture and genocide. An intellectual
maverick, he has always been radically critical of orthodox criminology and has
- over the past forty years - been consistently at the forefront of its
re-thinking.
His earliest research-published in 1972 as Folk Devils and Moral Panics- was
on youthful delinquencies and vandalism. This was a study of the big English
youth phenomena of the 1960's - which many of us slightly older members might
well recall - the rise of the so-called 'Mods and Rockers'. After the teddy boys
of the 1950's these were the first major youth phenomenon of the post war era,
and sparked off a great deal of controversy. They seemed to turn the local
beaches of Clacton - just down the road from this university- into a battle
ground. But Stan had an unusual take on all this: for him the Mods and Rockers
came into being, at least in part, because of the very responses of media,
police, and courts -- who helped define and shape them. It is in this book that
Stan introduces the term 'moral panic' - to capture the heightened awareness of
certain problems at key moments. It is an idea now widely used and known to
every A level student of sociology, as well as many members of the public. The
core idea of the book is that interventions - usually in the name of benevolence
or 'doing good' - can sometimes actually make situations worse not better.
After this, Stan's work turned more and more to the explicit study of social
control. With his colleague Laurie Taylor, he taught in the maximum security
wing of Durham Prison and studied how people survive under such extreme
conditions. He looked at prison life, and it was not unusual during this period
to find him with big time criminals- like the Great Train Robbers and the Krays
- some of whom he would arrange to have speak in his university seminars. This
was a period of active involvement in various prison reform movements, and it
led him to a much wider concern with the ways in which control systems were
changing across the world. During his time at Essex, this was the prime focus of
his research. His 1984 book Visions of Social Control mapped out the extensive
growth of modern systems of social control: the old penal system of prisons
remained and indeed got larger, whilst a whole new system - surveillance,
community programmes, therapies and medicalization was now mapped on top of it.
In all of this, we were witnessing a major extension of social control over our
lives.
Stan's work has always been committed to the underdog; but it took his move
to Israel for him to enter a much more overtly political and radical stance. As
I see it, this was one of the most unhappy periods of his life - although he
loved the country, he and Ruth came to hate the surrounding politics and
increasingly saw and felt despair. This period resulted in his most recent book
States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering, which was the winner
of the British Academy Book Prize in 2002. Here he charts the ways in which
man's continuing ghastly inhumanity to man - all over the world - can happen
because so many people deny its existence, refuse to see it and carry on as if
nothing terrible has happened. This has taken Stan further and further into the
field of human rights.
The world Stan sees is a world full of sufferings: wars, torture, wrongful
and dreadful imprisonment, genocide. Whilst there are both people who are the
victims of this, and others who victimize, Stan's concern is with a third group:
those who turn a blind eye and refuse to see what is going on. Stan asks: Why do
people not see, fail to see, persistently deny the horrors that are going on all
around them? Why do they say 'there is nothing I can do about it'? Across the
world, millions of lives are ravaged on a daily basis; and most people simply do
not want to know. In this there is an ironic twists to his research. Whereas
thirty years ago he saw issues like 'mods and rockers' as media events that
gained an exaggerated importance, his work these days looks at events like
torture and genocide which seem to be given too little attention in the media.
Although Stan is an intellectual pessimist who agonises over the state of the
modern world, he is also a remarkably kind, warm and humane man. He treats
people as people should be treated. So, although the world that Stan Cohen has
studied and campaigned over during the past forty years may be a brutal one, he
does find consolations. His great joy, outside of the intellect, is for jokes.
He collects jokes, pursues web sites for jokes, and it is hard to stop him
telling a joke (I suspect he might even tell you one later on!). Indeed, one day
he hopes to write a book about jokes. In the midst of so much pain and
suffering, Stan looks to the absurd and the humorous to find a certain comfort.
When asked recently what he considered the most important things in life he
replied without hesitation: friendships. In the delightful Christmas film by
Frank Capra, It's a Wonderful Life, the hero (played by Jimmy Stewart) is taken
back by his guardian angel to see just what life and the world would have been
like if he had not lived. As Clarence, the guardian angel says : ' Each person's
life touches so many other lives. If they were not around, it would leave an
awful hole'. So with Stan Cohen, it is not just through the big books that he
has published over the years that change has been affected; it is also in the
small acts of kindness, the little refusals to go along with the crowd's
inhumanities, the small joys of everyday life. Stan's presence has had a
pronounced impact on many people's lives. Indeed, he was my first teacher of
sociology, as he has been for many others, so I know at first hand his gentle,
humorous touch that brings inspiration and comes with a profound wisdom and
concern.
Stanley Cohen is a man who has made a difference. He has touched many lives
through his teaching, his research, his writing, his activism and the manner in
which he conducts his day to day life. It is a privilege for me to give this
oration and for this university to honour him today.
Chancellor, I present to you STANLEY COHEN
Orator: Professor Ken Plummer