Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Professor Stanley Cohen
I am deeply grateful to the University of
Essex for awarding me this honour. Thanks especially to the Vice
Chancellor, Ivor Crewe; the Department of Sociology; and my ex
colleagues and friends throughout the university.
As for Ken Plummer’s Public Oration, I
only express the public part of my private thanks to him: how much I was
moved by everything he said, especially by his final comments. It’s
possible,Ken, that at Enfield College in 1967, I might have marked one
of your essays or exams with a begrudging "69" ("Borderline First –
External Examiner can rise if merit elsewhere"). If so, forgive me. Your
oration gets a clear First, well, a solid First.
I end my thanks on a sad note - over the
25 years since I left, three of my contemporaries in the department have
died before their time – Harold Wolpe, Ian Craib and Colin Bell.
The first Graduation Ceremony I attended
at Essex was close to thirty years ago – July 1975. At the reception (on
the lawn, near the lake), I was standing with the University’s founding
Vice-Chancellor, Dr (now Sir) Albert Sloman, looking at the familiar
tableau of new graduates with their parents – taking photos, embracing,
eating strawberries. This had been another year of "troubles" (intense
replays of the Sixties’ originals): marches on the V-C’s house; sit-ins;
broken windows, police on campus. In his matter-of-fact, rather wistful
voice, Dr Sloman remarked to me (a personal observation out of character
for such a private person) "Strange how normal they all look today."
During the troubles these same students were so angry, bitter and
truculent; always dressed in that scruffy way. It was hard to imagine,
Albert mused, that they even HAD parents at all. "They never looked
lovable, you couldn’t imagine a mother or father hugging them."
I knew what he meant. A mere two months
earlier, even close observers of these students would not have made
cognitive associations such as ‘mother’ and ‘affection’. But this is
sociologically obvious. The discontinuities in our identities; the
different ways we look to different audiences; the extent to which
morality is situational; the fragmentations and inconsistencies in our
lives - these are normal features of everyday life.
It’s more disturbing when these same
features appear in the study of radical evil. To understand the
atrocities of our times, we now ask not only about bad people who do bad
things for bad reasons, but "How do ordinary people do bad things for
good reasons?" In this sense, goodness is also banal. Altruism,
helping, saving and rescuing are not the properties of special
altruistic personalities, but ‘the extraordinary acts of ordinary
people.
Somewhere in the Sixties many of us (at
places like Essex and LSE) made a strange intellectual mistake. Rather
than being content with linking the private/personal with the political/
public, we claimed that these things were actually the same as
each other! The slogans were accordingly silly: "the personal is
political" …. "knowledge is power"…"the private is the public." We
looked for integration; all parts must fit; inconsistencies and
messiness had to be ironed out.
This kitsch theoretical synthesis was
matched by the demand to "integrate" our personal, political and working
lives. This was an impossibly romantic, even totalitarian
programme – and helped to discredit the progressive visions behind each
separate element. I am still a strong defender of these visions. And I’m
totally unsympathetic to the clichéd "theory" that becoming older makes
us less idealistic. It certainly does make us aware that each
vision in itself – forget about gluing them together - is full of
cracks, contradictions and splits. Universities should be the last
places to encourage a cover up of all this. Yet not even the mildest
uncertainty appears in our recruitment brochures, websites, funding
submissions or mission statements. (Universities, needless to say,
should not have "Mission Statements" – a preposterous aim for anyone who
is not a missionary. And anyone who writes the word "CLOSURE," should be
instantly expelled.)
Yes, indeed our job in the social
sciences is to notice and study inconsistencies, gaps and
contradictions. But this is for the intellectual purpose of locating
them on a wider socio-political map – which can then be criticized from
the standpoint of social justice. This means tolerating messy, even
opposite educational "outcomes:" Simple things will look complicated;
complicated things will look simple.
Three more messy issues lie ahead for
social science graduates:
Immediacy and accessibility
There is a tension between responding to
the immediate - today’s banner headlines, the journalist on the
telephone, the urgent e-mail query - and being thorough, reflexive and
theoretical. A related tension is often mentioned: theoretical
complexity requires sociological writing to be dense, difficult and
impenetrable to the ordinary public. In my opinion, this is not a
tension at all: the overriding requirement must always be accessibility.
Robert Park, (the founder of the Chicago
School of Sociology) suggested that sociology was ‘journalism with a
theory’ or ‘slow journalism’. We might also compare journalism and
academic sociology with human rights reports. All share principles that
can’t be compromised – honesty, reliability; not damaging your subjects.
Each faces the temptation of becoming dependent on the confessional
mode, the glib resort to subjectivity and authenticity. But all the
voices of all the victims, perpetrators and bystanders will not add up
to the story of an atrocity.
Commitment
The question of commitment ("values") is
as bothersome as ever. The answers to Howard Becker’s famous 1968
question "Whose side are you on?" now sound like unconvincing "mission
statements". Surely – to cite some conventional answers - you are not
always on the side of "Whoever you are studying" (a very strange
idea!) nor of "The underdog" (who soon becomes a top dog) and
certainly not "Those who can reach
the levers of power."
"Committed scholarship" is not an
oxymoron, but is certainly a delicate task. There is a difference, as I
have to explain to my most committed students, between a PhD thesis and
a human rights report. Even when you are sure who are the goodies and
baddies; even when (especially when) you are "inside" the situation,
real sociological understanding requires distance, even detachment, from
your subject. You must precisely stand on the side. This gives
you knowledge which should never be compromised for the sake of "taking
sides" in the ideological sense.
Pessimism
Ken may be right in seeing me as a
pessimist, a "miserabilist," even a depressive. (The jokes, however, are
not escapes from depression but are part of the diagnosis. There is a
clinical syndrome officially termed "smiling depression"). But I‘ve come
to distrust the opposition between optimism and pessimism. The golden
rule is this: be suspicious whenever both sides claim to be
"realists". The world is full of what Saul Bellow calls "reality
instructors:" people who tell you that everything is bad and getting
worse. So: wise up, get tough buddy, the world is even worse than it
seems.
Yes, indeed. It’s only because social
institutions don’t work quite the way they’re supposed to work that we
have sociology at all. If things worked – if schools educated, medicine
healed and criminal justice were just; if the United Nations were
united, if regulations regulated, if community care cared – then there
would be no need for sociology. And Brecht was right: "He who laughs has
not heard the bad news." Or, as the recording on a Jewish answer-phone
announces: "At the sound of the beep, please leave your bad news."
Similarly, the Jewish telegram : ‘Start worrying, details to follow’
We have courses on "Sociological Research
Methods" that teach our students how to find out and record the details
of this bad news. Good. But what does all this information do to us?
This worry, as Ken Plummer said, has been my own intellectual interest
for a very long time.
When people are informed about horrors,
atrocities and suffering (or see these images) they do not deny the
facts; they already know the bad news. It becomes worrying, however,
when too many people frame their response to this news within a type of
Thatcherite Darwinianism: "that’s the way that things are…that’s how
people like them behave…in places like that…. So what’s the point of
doing anything?" The meta-message is "Look after your own people
first…not the distant others in distant places."
I am doing a study now of the contours of
these moral boundaries: the relationships between social space and
communities of moral obligation. Asylum seekers and refugees will soon
be the objects of a massive moral panic in Britain. They challenge the
boundary – the distant other from "out there" crosses into our social
space.
As you leave this university to go "out
there," you’ll encounter a special graduate’s version of the world view
I have just described: "Time to say good-bye to the ivory towers, you’re
now going into the real world…. Be tough; it’s a jungle out there." I
hope that you will regard this advice as complete rubbish. In what sense
are this lecture room, your lecturers, your books, your fellow students
and your three years at Essex somehow "less" real than say, a BBC
newsroom, reality television or a House of Parliament debate on fox
hunting? Don’t listen to the reality-instructors who talk to you this
way. They want you to give up and forget what you learnt here –
tolerance; the value of ideas, however messy; idealism; critical
vigilance; the cosmopolitanism that your new Chancellor just mentioned.
I hope that my host, the Vice-Chancellor,
will forgive me for sounding ungrateful if I end with an ungracious
criticism. British universities have given up too much. They have tried
too hard (and even with zeal) to make universities conform to the
demands of so-called real world: performance indicators, transparency,
RAE, Teaching Quality Control; endless assessment, evaluation,
appraisal; regimes of compliance and surveillance. I’ll quote Brecht
again. He is referring to the Soviet Union, but this could be any
British University:
"What alarms me about that place is not
the disorder actually achieved there, but the order actually aimed for."
In the name of a slight amount of
disorder, I am proud and privileged to accept this Honorary Degree. I
urge you, my fellow graduates, to do everything you can to stay out of
the real world for as long as I have.
Stanley Cohen
9 July 2003