| Description | Interview with Professor John Nisbet, OBE, recorded on 4 April 2003 by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of Interview :
JH Professor Nisbet, I think you came to Aberdeen as an assistant in 1949 in the Department of Education? What had you been doing before that?
JN I came directly from doing a Masters degree in Edinburgh. I had been in the Air Force during World War II and subsequently taught in secondary school in Fife, then took this Masters degree in Education in Edinburgh University and when I completed it in 1949 I was in fact offered three different jobs. Jobs were plentiful in those days. One was in administration, lots of money and lots of power! One was in the College of Education, or the Training College, as it was called, which had lots of money and one was in the University, which had no money and no power! But I decided that I would try out the University because I wanted to pick up a Ph.D. as quickly as possible and then go on to get a position of influence and power. And after I had been in Aberdeen University for a month, two or three months, I decided that was what I wanted to do, I wasn't interested in money or power. So I came here in 1949 as an assistant to Norman Walker who was the sole other member of the department in those days.
JH Well that suggests that you must have been quite well impressed by Aberdeen University.
JN Very much so. It wasn't particularly Aberdeen, but it was the university atmosphere that I took to and I think that Aberdeen in 1949 expressed it just exactly. It was small and relaxed and there was a great deal of freedom, I was surrounded by interesting colleagues and there wasn't a great deal of work to do. I had a great deal of free time, but I think that was true of many of the universities in the 1940's. But it was particularly true of Aberdeen.
JH On the Education Department perhaps, what was the role of the Education Department in the University at that time?
JN Its main function was to provide post-graduate study, leading to what was then called an Ed. B., but subsequently was renamed a Masters degree in Education. That was its main function. The University had tried, from the 1890's onwards, to get a foothold in teacher education but had never succeeded, for a variety of reasons, mainly because of the jealousy of the people who controlled the training of teachers.
JH Are you talking of the Scottish Education Department?
JN Yes, the Scottish Education Department and the Church of Scotland, which ran the training colleges, some of the training colleges, and the University had tried to get in to that but had not, but it had established a Department of Education and this department found a role in providing post-graduate study, but very, very few people came to it. I think we had something like 15 students in the first 20 years, but when I came in 1949 it was already picking up and we would have a much larger number, we would have about 10 students doing this Masters degree.
JH Was this a taught course or did it involve an element of research?
JN It was really ahead of its time in that it included both. This is why the "old guard" in the University refused to give it the official title of Masters when it was set up, because it wasn't a pure research degree, but it included a numbers of courses of study and a research thesis.
JH And on the whole you got a good set of applicants for it. Students who were keen on teaching as well as keen on other subjects?
JN Yes, indeed. Because there was so few I think we got some of the best students we could have possibly have got. I think I can justify that by saying that when I did a follow up in the 1970's I found that a very large proportion of the people who had got our degree now held senior posts either in educational administration or in the academic field and many of the people who staffed education departments, after the Robbins expansion in the 1960's, held this degree. It was shared by all four Scottish universities. The Scottish universities provided it and it was unique in that there wasn't a comparable degree elsewhere and they ended up in positions of authority. Not only in this country but also across the world.
JH I think Dr. Walker was also Director of Extra-Mural Studies. Did this play much of a part in the work of the Department?
JN This came much later. Extra-Mural teaching was something that wasn't done in the 1940's. A number of lecturers on the staff would occasionally give lectures to interested groups, public groups, but there was no formal structure and one of the things that Norman Walker did was to develop this extensively. First of all through an arrangement called University Weeks, on which 2 or 3 members of staff would go to a centre like Inverness, or Orkney or Shetland, or Stornoway and give a whole series of lectures in a week. It was more economical to do it that way. But sometime late in the 1950's, I rather think it was when Norman Walker retired in 1959, the actual Department of Extra-Mural Studies was set up and he was given the task of part-time Director.
JH What sort of a person, colleague, was Norman Walker?
JN He was a loveable man. Everybody liked him. He was a very gentle person. I was very fond of him and what I am about to say has to be seen in that light. He did practically no research work at all and I discovered that in the 1950's he was giving the same lecture about some of the educational philosophers as he had given in 1923. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a scholar, but he wouldn't have survived in today's world ….
JH Did he come in from teaching directly?
JN Well, actually no. He had trained as a teacher in 1918 in Glasgow but he went straight from his training as a teacher into academic work, into university. First into Glasgow University and then he came up to Aberdeen in 1923, because there were very few to choose from but the quality that he had above all that made up for this for what you would say this lack of interest in research, the quality he had was an interest in his students. He really knew the students and cared for them and went out of his way to look for them and this is what generated the goodwill that so many people had for him.
JH These students had began their Ed.B. whilst they were doing their teacher training at the college?
JN That is the other part I have to mention. I said that the main function of the Education Department in the 1950's was this post-graduate degree. The post-graduate degree had two stages. The first stage was called the Diploma stage and it was a stage that could be taken simultaneously with their teacher training and consequently many of the students who trained as teachers in Aberdeen opted to take the additional classes that gave them the first stage of the post-graduate degree, and then one or two of these, very few of them, would go on and complete the Degree afterwards.
JH Meanwhile probably holding a teaching appointment?
JN Well that was one of the developments that came in my time. In the 1950's it was very difficult to do the Degree part-time. It had to be done after school hours, so our classes were held 4.30 to 6.30pm.and on Saturday mornings from 9.00 to 12.30 pm. So we worked at different hours from all the rest, but a number of these students were able to do that at the same time as holding a teaching appointment. One of the changes that I managed to get, with difficulty, to get introduced in the 1960's was to get full recognition of part-time study for the Degree and of course that meant that a much larger number of people began to enrol.
JH If Norman Walker wasn't interested in research, I know that you were and you suggested earlier that you had reasonable time in which to pursue it. On what lines did you begin to work when you came to Aberdeen?
JN I think, talking about having time to do research, I can illustrate this from the fact that with a story. I used to deal with the resit examinations in September and at the end of the Degree examinations in June, Norman Walker would shake my hand and say "Well John, I hope you have a good vacation, you will look after the resits as usual" and I would say "Yes, we have got all that in order" and he would say, "well I'll see you at the beginning of next session in mid-October" and that was it. I had the entire summer to read and work. I completed my Ph.D in the three years without any feeling of pressure.
JH What was your Ph.D. about?
JN It was about environmental influences on intelligence actually. It was called the "Verbal Factor in Mental Development". At that time there was a very strong belief in the IQ as an innate quality that was genetically determined and I set about trying to illustrate that the results of an intelligence test were very substantially influenced by the environment in which people grow up. It is common- place now, but at the time, it was quite a thing.
JH You must have worked with the psychologists in the University in this?
JN Of course, yes. I should have said that the Degree that we are talking about, this post-graduate degree, was one that was shared between Psychology and Education. It wasn't wholly in the Education Department. Students did as many courses in Psychology as they did in Education, and they could do their research in either field. So I worked very closely indeed. In fact many people thought I was a member of the Psychology Department! I used to get letters addressed to me at that address! I worked particularly closely with Professor Rex Knight and with Betty Fraser, who was a contemporary, but for 30 years I worked very closely with the Psychology department and these were the days when the Psychology department was interested in education. After 1970 it became more interested in the behaviourist rats and things like that, and education was dumped, I think. There weren't very many people willing to do educational studies. It wasn't pure psychology to work in the educational field. But I call myself an Educational Psychologist and I am recognised as that and have been a fellow of the British Psychological Society for something like 40 years. I think I am the oldest surviving fellow. So yes, most of my research was in the field of educational psychology.
JH Perhaps we might come back to one or two other aspects of the University in the 1950's later, and move on to the period when you became Professor of Education in 1963. I think you had become Head of Department before that?
JN Yes. Walker retired in June 1960 and there were only two of us in the Department and when he retired I was the sole member of the Department for a year. I got permission to employ one or two people as assistants to help but for a year I was by myself running the department. The following year I was allowed to appoint Alastair Gammie as a Lecturer in Education so there were two of us, but the situation was one that I wasn't very happy about, because the University Court was not really concerned about developing the teaching of education. There was a strong body of opinion that thought that belonged to the Training College, to the schools and a level of academic work that wasn't really appropriate for a proper university. So that was one of the prejudices that I had to fight against and by 1963 when I had already had 2½ years acting as acting Head of Department, with no sign at all of any development of the department, I began to spread word among members of the Court, that I was getting invitations to go to London and Manchester and Bristol and also to the United States and that there were various people interested in offering me promotion, whereupon the Principal, or should I say the University Court, decided that it was time to go ahead with the appointment of a Professor. I wonder if they would have taken that action if I hadn't applied that pressure to them. The provision for the Professor of Education had been in existence for something like 50 years but the Court never took any action on it until I threatened to go away and then they hastened… I had to apply for the post and I remember being quite concerned about the fact that if I didn't get it I would be without a job, but fortunately, I imagine there wasn't much competition, I got the job and was appointed.
JH Yes, I suppose by 1963 they may have felt there was a little more money to put about on such departures. Do you think it was Principal Wright or was it Principal Taylor, who died in 1962, do you think one of these was persuaded to further your career.
JN I think it was Principal Wright who supported it. Perhaps my story is a personal one but yours is the more accurate. Principal Taylor was a very formal professor and I don't think he had a great deal of time for Education as a subject, but when Edward Wright took over as Principal and he had a real interest in the development of education. He served on one of the committees, the Hale Committee on university teaching and he talked to me a lot about that when he was on it. He'd got a genuine interest in education, and I think the development of the Education Department in the early, in the 1960's, after 1963 was the Robbins expansion. A lot of the credit for that must go to Principal Wright.
JH So when you got the Chair how did you deem to develop the department?
JN Well I had two ambitions. One was to make the department into one that was recognised as a centre of excellence in research and the other was to achieve some kind of merger with the College of Education, the college that trained teachers. I had lots of friends in the college and many of them members of staff in the college were people who had done our Degree. I knew them very well. We worked and we shared students in that Diploma class I was talking about, and I spent a great deal of time and so did my colleagues in the Education Department, working with what we called training college students, College of Education staff with research projects, so the two aspirations were to establish research excellence and to get a merger with the College of Education. Well the first of these perhaps we can talk about. The second wasn't achieved of course until the year 2002. But we got a degree of movement towards it when the Robbins proposals about a Batchelor of Education Degree as a first degree for all teachers. That was introduced into Aberdeen. Jimmy Scotland was the Principal of the Aberdeen College and he was very keen to have a Batchelor of Education Degree, that was a degree of the University of Aberdeen, and he Principal Wright pushed this through very quickly and Aberdeen was the first university in Britain to have this Batchelor of Education Degree, we got it through within 6 months, I think it was, and that was one move towards the merger of the two institutions.
JH Was it seen as ... I mean I remember well that degree coming in. I wasn't aware of it veering towards anything as formal as a merger.
JN Well perhaps I am being over-optimistic. There was no doubt in the minds of most of the members of University staff that the College was a kind of technical place, of inferior status. When the Batchelor of Education Degree was implemented all the members of the College became members of the University staff, but Principal Wright insisted that they should all occupy one step down, that if they were Principal Lecturers in the College, they were only recognised as Lecturers in the University. The Principal of the College was recognised as a Senior Lecturer, the ordinary lecturers in the College were not recognised at all except as recognised teachers. Everyone was brought down a grade, which of course caused a great deal of resentment. The lecturers said, "Well we were lecturers in the College, why should we not be lecturers in the University" and that tension that was implicit in the way the B.Ed. was introduced in 1964/65 thereabouts, that tension resulted in the College eventually deciding to move away from Aberdeen and to take up a degree that was sponsored by the C.N.A.A., the Council for National Academic Awards instead and that link with Aberdeen was broken. I worked as hard as I could to stop that, but unsuccessfully. So one of the aspirations I had about trying to bring the University and the College closer together, perhaps that is a better way of putting it, than saying merger.
JH I was going to say, surely at that time, thinking of Government and Colleges as you say were controlled by the Scottish Education Department, it was not really thinking in terms of mergers of this sort?
JN No. The reason was that the financings and this was the difficulty all along, the financing of it was completely separate. Teacher Training was financed by the Scottish Education Department, the Universities were financed by the University Grants Committee, and these were two totally separate groups and it was impossible to bring the two together. Nevertheless, what I worked for and was very disappointed that as the years passed it became increasingly unlikely that I would ever achieve, because to bring the work of the people in the College of Education and the work of ourselves in the Department of Education of the University closer together, where very close personal relations but .. under Principal Adams, David Adams, who followed Jimmy Scotland as Principal of the College, the two institutions moved apart. This was partly because David Adams and the Principal of the University, I have repressed his name because …. They didn't get on with each other.
JH Can you recover his name?
JN McNicol. McNicol, I am talking about!
JH Yes, it was in his time the movement apart became apparent?
JN I think so. I would probably have to check on that, but shortly after McNicol was appointed as Principal of Aberdeen University, he announced to the press that he was going to take over the Robert Gordon's College and the Northern College, the College of Education, and the first that either of these two institutions knew of this intention that the University was taking them over, was when they read about it in the Press & Journal in the morning! Needless to say they were very, very offended and from that time on relationships between the College of Education and the University were strained and were very, very unpleasant.
JHB Meanwhile how had the University Department been developing? You had been growing in numbers presumably?
JN That brings me to the other aspect, which is probably the more important one for me to talk about. From the 1960's, 1963 onwards, our Education Department became a research department and we gathered a number of very good colleagues and substantial grants. By the mid-1970's we had 17 members of staff and we had a research income that was very substantial. I am not sure, but at one time it reached £1 million per year.
JH Was that mostly research staff?
JN Well we still taught our post-graduate students. That was now becoming more and more of a research degree. At the time of our maximum size, when there was 17 of us, something like 12 of these would be employed on research grants and we, I think, had a very good record on research. We pioneered a lot studies, particularly ones on rural education, education in sparsely populated areas. We also had a big project on community schools. I myself did a number of international projects with OACD in Paris and with UNESCO and with one of two of the foundations in the United States. Most of the staff who were appointed in the 1950's ended up as professors of education ………
JH I was just asking Professor Nisbet whether in the research developments in the 1970's you were now working with other departments of the University. You mentioned for example, Sparely Populated Areas, which was the name an Institute.
JN That Institute was set up, but it didn't last very long. It involved a very difficult collaboration with Economics, Psychology, and I don't think there was a Sociology department at the time.
JH I think there was, I think the Sociology Department was growing out of the MRC Unit which was developing into a department.
JN We didn't work very closely with other departments. We had good relations with them. I mean we worked, particularly with the Psychology Department, as that was a long standing partnership, and we did some work on what as called "Teaching Machines Programme Learning" the early days of that one. In fact with the Psychology Department we had one of the first grants in that field anywhere in the United Kingdom. But most of our work was in collaboration with schools and with the Education authorities. The County of Aberdeenshire, the City of Aberdeen provided us with…. They were interested in research work, and were very glad to have our co-operation and we were very glad to have theirs.
JH One development I remember of the 1970's was that you began to take an interest in Higher Education and I think you were actually providing instruction for university teachers.
JN Yes, that is correct. I can trace that back to a meeting that was held in Manchester in 1965, when a number of us who had been involved with things like university teaching and student success and student drop-out, were brought together, we ran a little course for university teachers. Most of my research had been on student performance and the factors influencing that. The prediction of success in the student performance, but we were also interested in teaching and from that 1965 beginning we developed the Society for Research into Higher Education and also locally in Aberdeen a course of training for university teachers which was really thought of as totally outrageous by many of the members of staff, who insisted that they didn't need any training, but in fact if they were bad teachers that was all the better because then students had to work for themselves. But with Principal Wright's encouragement we ran this 3-day course and part of it involved the new technology of the television, that they had to give a lecture which was tape- recorded and played back to them. Later on that course which expanded in size, moved to the stage where we appointed Ray MacCleese to be concerned especially with it and he was then made Director of the University Teaching Centre, which became a separate little organisation within the Department of Education. It was a very rewarding period of work.
JH Rewarding you say. Hard to assess I know in terms of improving the rhetoric of lecturers in the University?
JN I think .. I wasn't thinking of it in these terms. I hope it was. I hope it did have some influence. What it did was to make people aware of the fact that there was such a thing as good teaching and bad teaching. I think if you go back to the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century, the idea that university teachers, that professors and lecturers should be concerned about making themselves clear, even making themselves heard in a lecture, was not regarded as terribly important. The important thing was that they should be scholars. The big change that took place after the 1960's, was that the responsibility of a university teacher of being able to teach came to be recognised. Whether our courses actually gave them the information, I hope it gave them some help, whether it did or not was secondary to the point that the existence of this course and of the Centre eventually and of the research we eventually did in that field, made people aware of the fact. Brought them face to face with the fact that it no longer possible to get away with reading a lecture that was a set of notes that you had prepared 20 years before or mumbling a lecture that the students couldn't hear.
JH I am sure that is true the work of the 1960's was innovatory, but I wonder if you are quite right in saying that teaching was not highly regarded before this time because one can recall in Aberdeen and other universities, and certainly in Oxford, the reputations of people, very small bodies of scholars, who within the university are revered by former students and colleagues as gifted teachers, but obviously not trained teachers and not having had the advantage of this sort of thing.
JN What we are talking about is a conflict of two very broad cultures. There is the Germanic culture, which was at the root of the development of the German universities in the 19th century, which saw the university's function as being a research function and the professor's job was to produce a work of scholarship. Perhaps only one book which he would spend his life working on. That was the Germanic tradition of universities as being essentially centres of scholarship. In contrast to that you have the Oxford/Cambridge tradition, which was one that the universities were centres for teaching.
JH Yes but it was being played out even in Oxford and Cambridge at that time. Between Jowett and Paterson, and so on.
JN But the conflict between the research idea and the teaching one was there.
JH The new thing was that teaching could be taught, rather than cultivated.
JN Yes, many people would say that was no use, it was really a matter of personality. Incidentally, that conflict between whether the main function of a member of staff in the university is to do research or to teach, is at the heart of one of the problems faced by the College of Education people who have always seen their roll as being primarily as one of teaching and are now being required to see it as one of research. But that is a contemporary argument.
JH Thank you. Well perhaps we might return to talk about the relations with the College which were broken off in the early 1980's with the advent of new personalities. But the 1980's were of course also difficult times from many points of view. How did the Department of Education fair in this period of stringency and new university cultures?
JN I can remember it well, and I can almost date it to 1981, we were told that we had to get rid some of the members of staff. That was a very, very hard time to know who to make redundant. We didn't need to make anyone redundant, as several of my staff moved to other jobs, but throughout the whole of the 1980's there was a constant battle between ourselves, or should I say myself, and the University Principal. At one stage the University Principal proposed to close the Department of Education. I think his grounds were that he wanted to close all the small departments. We were a small department. We had a very, very good research reputation and a lot of research money, but he was trying to balance the books …
JH This was UCG doctrine, I think, at the time, wasn't it? To lose small departments.
JN I think there were about ten departments on the list for closure and ours was one. Well I fought against that vigorously, and opposed it in the Senate, and the department survived right through until 1988 and in 1988 Principal McNicol sent for me and said, I remember the interview, he said "I have got two proposals to put you. One is that you resign your Chair, or you retire from your Chair, the other is that I will give you a guarantee that the Department of Education will not be closed down." I replied to him "are the two linked?" and he said "yes" and I said "Right in that case I will accept and I will take retirement". So I retired in 1988, 1989 perhaps, and he was true to his word, but subsequent Principals closed the Department eventually.
JH When was it closed?
JN Well it was transformed in 1996, I think it was, or 1997, into the Centre for Educational Research. At that time it had a huge research programme with lots and lots of research money, but the teaching side of it was uneconomic, according to the financial people, the number of students we had, the number of staff. When you added up the students' fees and the salaries, we were operating at a loss and so the teaching was withdrawn in order to save money and the research was continued in the Centre for Educational Research.
JH And was this was the end of the degree which began as really as the Ed.B. or whatever it was called, the M.Ed.
JN Yes, that was brought to a close. Over the next year or two there were one or two students who completed the sequence, but it was the end of a long, long, story.
JH But by this time was the merger with the College at last in view?
JN It must have been one of the factors in the mind of the Principal and the Univeristy Court at the time. It was still very much a private matter. It wasn't publicly discussed. I think perhaps getting rid of the Department of Education was seen as removing one of the obstacles to the merger and the notion of making it into a Centre of Educational Research seemed to resolve that teaching, because unfortunately the staff of that Centre all happened to retire, or in one case to die, all at the time with the one exception of one person who moved across into the Department of Sociology, and so there was nobody left to have it, and when the merger took place the Department of Education had virtually ceased to exist.
JH And the work of providing a taught Masters degree for practicing teachers is this carried on?
JN That was taken over by .. it had already been taken over by the Northern College, before the merger and it continues, after the merger. It was a point of some irritation to all of us who had been associated with the Department of Education, which had an international reputation for 50 years, but when the merger took place there was virtually no recognition to what the University had done in the field of educational research and post-graduate study. It may have been that that was a diplomatic way of handling the situation, but we had to protest that when a glossy pamphlet was issued about the merger and the excellent work done by the two institutions that were meeting together there was absolutely no statement in the first draft about the Department of Education. After our protests, a paragraph was added at the very end, recognising the existence of it, but it was as if the department of Education had been written out in the style of George Orwells' 1984, it had been written out of existence!
JH Well that must have been very sad for you, but it hasn't deterred you from continuing as a productive and noted researcher in the field of education and this interview isn't about your career as an educational researcher, but perhaps you might like to add a word or two about what you do.
JN Well I would be glad to do that, as I wouldn't like to finish on that note about the merger. The reason that I mentioned it right at the beginning of this interview was because it was an aspiration I had held for many, many years and it was a great pleasure for me to see that it was ultimately achieved, though I personally had nothing to do with the merger when it occurred, but when the Centre for Educational Research closed down, or when it was about to close down, I moved across into the Northern College, who were very happy to have me there and they took me on as an Honorary member of staff and I am still working there as an Honorary member of staff. Most of the research that I have done in the last ten years has been individual work on historical research or reviews of research and policy, which has been a main field. I am still able to keep my end up which I am quite pleased to do, even though I am now past the age of 80!
JH Well, thank you for that. Now finally might we come back a little bit to the beginning and wonder if you would like to reflect a bit on the changing culture of Aberdeen University as a whole. As I recall in the 1950's you and I were both among those who were anxious to influence the culture of the University and in particular to transcend departmental boundaries. I seemed to remember that you as convenor of a body called the Inter Faculty Group.
JN Oh I wasn't Convenor of it! Or at least I wasn't the ….
JH Oh I though you were for a time?
JN I may have been later on, that's right! I think I was.
JH Because I remember that at one point you were Convenor and I was Secretary.
JN That's right. I didn't start it. No I see. It is difficult to talk about the change of culture, because the biggest change that has taken place has been the increase in size. When you and I joined the University there were 2,000 students. There are now 10,000 or 12,000, something like that. We all used to have lunch together in one of the side rooms in the Elphinstone Hall, sitting at long benches, and so the staff and students mixed much more than they do now. Also I remember that one of the most enjoyable things of the early days was the fact that I was able to mix with, to exchange ideas with other members of other departments. There were about 10 of us who were young poorly paid assistants in the Arts Faculty and we used to meet for coffee at quarter-past ten in the Common Room and we had long intellectual discussions that sometimes lasted until half-past eleven! Such things probably are not possible now in today's competitive world, but for me it was the essence of what university should be. There was a group of people who were prepared to tackle virtually any problem, any ideas, without prejudice and openly. I very much enjoyed that atmosphere. As the University grew, and I would say that this was true even by the 1970's, that the departmental boundaries had become much more rigid and it was very, very difficult to cross them. Each department was big enough to be a unit in itself. I think that's the biggest change, apart from the introduction of a whole lot of new subjects, particularly in the Social Sciences, but I think to some extent the University today is a bit more like a factory that produces degrees, students with degrees, whereas that was certainly not the case I would say in the 1950's when we first joined it.
JH Well I very much agree with you but we mustn't let this interview become an exercise in competitive nostalgia!
JN Certainly we don't want to sound like a couple of old men!
JH No, I don't think so!
JN If you are moving towards a close, I would like to mention one thing.
JH Yes please.
JN I can't quite remember how it originated, but I think it was the Inter Faculty Group that started the provision for students who didn't have the appropriate qualifications to come in. The scheme, you know the name for it …?
JH The mature student acess?
JN Yes.
JH The use of a waiver….
JN Let me explain what I am trying to say. You will recognise at once if I can get the word, which escapes me. When I look back on various things that I was involved with I think that one of the most successful events, of all my time with the Aberdeen University, was the introduction of this system by which people who had left school by the age of 12 or 14 were able to attend university courses for a year on a probationary basis.
JH It was called the Access course.
JN The Access Course! That is the word I am struggling for. The introduction of these Access courses. I was closely involved with it, I won't claim credit for introducing it. It was done by a group of people who had this belief that the results that you got at the age of 17 or 18 at school were not a sufficient indicator of your quality, of your intellect, for the rest of your life and there was a tremendous loss of talent. Well that Access scheme was introduced somewhere about the 1970's, late '70's and there was quite a battle to get it accepted because the notion that you had to have 3 Highers or 4 Highers , or 5 Highers…
JH Well before that time as Dean, I think you managed to…..
JN Is this when you were Dean?
JH Yes, when I was Dean, we were still working on the waiver system and it was often very difficult to get a waiver, except for a young student, but difficult for the mature student who hadn't got the prescribed things. Now it took a long time to implement but I think it was very much in accordance with the ethos of that group in the 1950's.
JN I think so and looking back at the results from it I think that was one of the most important achievements. Many of these Access students, who came in as mature students and left, very often women, who had left school at 14 or 15 and came back, they did marvellously and often outshone the people who came straight from school.
JH I entirely agree. And it was true of mature students, even before the Access scheme who had to work up and get some sort of qualifications.
JN That's, as it were, one of the big differences that I notice, one of the big changes that there is provision, this greater openness, to allow people to have a chance, given a chance, and not to be too insistent on the entrance requirements. Unfortunately with the competition, as with so many things, the competition has made it harder and harder to get this kind of relaxed open attitude to the admission of students to the way the University works and I think in a way I was very lucky to be appointed to the Chair in the 1960's when there were so many opportunities. Everything was in expansion "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive"!
JH I think we have been lucky, lucky in our age if you like, in many ways. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.
End of Interview |