| Description | Transcript of interview with the Very Rev. Professor Alan Main recorded on 2 September 2004. The interviewer is John Hargreaves.
JH Good afternoon Alan, are you ready to start the interview now?
AM Whenever you are ready John.
JH Alan perhaps we could start the interview by a very brief review of your long relationship with Aberdeen University. You were born in Aberdeen or nearby?
AM Yes, I was born in Torry. I was a Torry loon and grew up in Aberdeen. All my schooling was at Robert Gordon's and going on to the University in 1954.
JH Did you at that time already intend a career in the ministry?
AM It was about that time that I became more and more convinced that this was a calling that I could not ignore. So I got my wife through an Arts degree. I had originally intended doing languages and go on to the Foreign Office, but I realised I would have another degree to do to get into the ministry, so I did my Arts degree and went straight on into Divinity.
JH So you graduated MA and B.D. I remember you took a year at Union Seminary at New York.
AM We were on the same ship going across.
JH We were and you got a Masters qualification there, returned and took a Ph.D in 1963 and then you became a parish minister in the Chapel of Garioch.
AM I got to the point where I couldn't avoid working any longer! So off we went to the parish of the Chapel of Garioch and loved it. Really loved it.
JH Did you retain University contacts while you were working in the parish?
AM Yes, I did. I retained quite a number of contacts one way or another through Halls of Residence, Theological clubs and all this kind of thing.
JH And from 1970 to 1980 you were University Chaplain.
AM Yes, and that is an interesting story actually. I had no intention of coming back as University Chaplain. I had thought about an academic career by this point and I got a letter from the then Principal Edward Wright to say they were looking for a new Chaplain and my name had been given to them and would I come and talk to them. So without any commitment at all I went in to the Old Court Room thinking it would be a talk with him and here were 35 people round the table! I was grilled for about an hour and then they said "well would you mind leaving us for a few minutes we have some business to do" and I said "Yes, fine". So I went out into the quadrangle and about a minute later out he came and grabbed my hand and shook it and said "Congratulations, you have got this job!". I said "Wait a minute - I didn't apply for it!" So I had to go and say to Ann well they have offered me the job, what am I going do! So that is how I landed there.
JH That is very interesting. Do you mean literally 35 people or?
AM Yes.
JH Good gracious that is unusual.
AM Well maybe it wasn't quite 35, but pretty near it.
JH Goodness me! Well you had to find out what you had to do. What did you have to do? Could we talk about the job for a while?
AM Yes, I would be very happy to do that.
JH About what you were advised to do and what you may have actually have done.
AM Well I didn't get much advice as to what was involved and I think a Chaplaincy job is one that you can make yourself. You have to work out what the priorities are, those things that you must do. For instance there is the Chapel and everything around the Chapel I was involved with. And then the Chaplaincy Centre was just developing at a time when the University was growing, expanding at a great rate and there were all sorts of student groupings that met in the Chaplaincy and I had to be associated with the running of these. There was the pastoral care of people, hospitals and then you had all the happy events and the sad ones, you know, baptisms, marriages and deaths. An absolutely fascinating time to be around the University. You would know that yourself.
JH Well there were honorary chaplains, denominational chaplains as well.
AM Yes, there were already denominational chaplains and only one University appointed one but because of the work load and expanding size of the University there was to be a second appointment and by the time I had finished there were actually three of us. There were two and a short-contract person doing chaplaincy work with over-seas students and my long term colleague was an Episcopalian, Rev. Rex Chapman and we worked very well over a long number of years.
JH What did you learn from your time as Chaplain. It would be a very different experience from parish ministry.
AM You are absolutely right. You can't predict what is going to happen in a Chaplaincy. No two days are the same. It is easier in some respects than a parish, because you had no responsibility for raising money or up-keep of buildings as you would have had in a parish, but on the other hand the sort of pastoral demands on one were quite heavy, particularly if you had gifts that lent themselves that way. I have always enjoyed working with people and I spent a lot of time doing pastoral counselling which gave me an interest in that particular academic specialism which was to prove very useful to me in my later work. I learned a great deal about people and about the fact that you were working with a community that was predominately young and also transitory. It was there for 3 or 4 years so you might be able to influence them a little bit but then after that - who knows. But you hadn't also to forget there was a large number of people whose life's work was in the University, academic staff and all the ancillary people.
JH As far as the student body concerned how do you define the, calls, I suppose between the topics, which may be sex, money and work!
AM I think we will take them the other way round! Start with work. The big change that I noticed through the 1970s and onwards was that the student body was no longer as care-free as it had been when I was a student. It was a much more serious business that you were there to get a degree and there was no promise that there would be a job for you at the end of it, as there had been in my generation. So that was a difference in attitude for a start. Money, yes sure a lot of people saw getting a degree as a track to getting a well paid job and maybe it was. I think nowadays it would be better to be a joiner or a plumber and you would probably get more money. The sex thing well of course the so-called swinging sixties had just gone past and I think there was a huge moral sea-change between those of my generation which was just before that in the 1950s and those coming up in the 1970s and I think it put the youngsters under intolerable pressure. I mean they no longer knew, as we had, where the edges and boundaries of acceptable behaviour actually were. And if you add into that the rather difficult combination for a youngster growing up the whole business of the sort of soft drugs that were going round as well and that made a real mess of some people. So it wasn't an easy time for people to be growing up.
JH It was soft drugs rather than hard throughout your time as Chaplain?
AM Mostly so. Plus the ever present alcohol!.
JH Yes, absolutely.
AM Which was there before and still is there.
JH When I mentioned money I wasn't thinking of money as ambition, did people come to you because they were broke? Had you any means of dealing with them?
AM Yes, the University did give me a sort of fund that I could draw on for people in genuine difficulties. You would get those who would try and sponge off you, but you had to learn to differentiate between one and the other. Yes it is the old days of the grants again and parental contribution. As you will remember some parents simply didn't pay the parental contribution so some of the youngsters were existing on a very thin line for what they had.
JH Then in 1980 you became Professor of Practical Theology. I would like first to clarify from practical questions of status, this was a Chair in Christ's College, whose role is training ministers for the Church of Scotland?
AM Well it was historically. Can I give you the history, a potted history.
JH Yes, please.
AM After the disruption in 1843, the then new Free Church of Scotland, decided it didn't want its ministers trained in the old Faculties of Divinity, there were three of them in Scotland, they would create their own colleges. So very quickly after 1843 Edinburgh started a college, called New College, and Glasgow started one, Trinity College and then Aberdeen decided it was going to start one and despite vocal opposition at the General Assembly from Edinburgh and Glasgow the Aberdeen college got built, there it was by the 1850s sitting on its dominant position at Holburn Junction. So various attempts were made to unite the old Faculties of Divinity with the Free Church faculties, but they existed quite separately and independently for a long time and in fact the Free Kirk College, Christ's College, up at the junction there, produced some of the most distinguished scholars of these days in divinity, you know William Robertson Smith, D.S. Cairns and the like. Outstanding figures.
JH Now when you say it, the college produced, they were studying, the student at that time would also be doing studies in the Faculty and in Christ's College?
AM No, at that time, the early days, the students in the college would be quite separate and would be being trained for the ministry. Over the course of time, I mean various attempts were made to unite the two, but they didn't succeed until into the 20th Century, the first few decades of, and where a Chair lay vacant in one place it would just translate the synergy coming from the other place. And this went on, a process of integration if you like, until there was only one chair left that wasn't a University Chair, purely a Church Chair, and that was the Chair of Practical Theology at Christ's College. It was decided by a joint committee, a selection committee, of University men and churchmen. David Cairns, son of D.S., was my practical theology professor and he was in that Chair for 20 odd years. He was followed by another chap who had been Chaplain to the University, Ian Pitt-Watson and he did seven years, from 1972 to 1979 and then I got the Chair in 1980.
JH Yes, so this was a Chair in Christ College with a part-time duties?
AM Well it was linked to a lectureship, later a Senior Lectureship in the University.
JH Yes, and how, can you say anything about how your time, indeed your remuneration was divided between College and University.
AM Oh, I don't know the details to be honest. I think the church was required each year, through Christ's College, to pay into the University a certain amount of money and the University then paid my salary.
JH I see.
AM It was somehow linked also to the, what is called the minimum stipend and the payment for a parish minister, so it wasn't a king's ransom, but it was confortable enough to live on. Because of its odd status it took me quite a while to get Practical Theology established on the same departmental level as the other in-house disciplines in Divinity. That was a bit of a struggle.
JH There is just one question that occurs to me in passing, which some people may be interested in. You say the chairs were combined, was the University's freedom in appointing non-Church of Scotland, non-members of the Church of Scotland to the other Chairs constrained in any way?
AM No- non at all. Total academic freedom, which it has to be, if you wanted the best scholars.
JH Had you worked in Christ's College at all before 1980?
AM Yes, I had. Of course I had been a student in Divinity and all the Practical Theology and the Christian Ethics were taught up at the junction. Also the College lunches were there, the College Chapel was there, the Library was there, so we used these premises a lot. We worked between the two sites, at King's and Christ's. Gradually through the 1970s and 1980s our numbers grew and it was obvious that it was going to be quite difficult for students to be commuting back and fore between Holburn Junction and Old Aberdeen for classes that followed on from each other, it just wasn't possible, so eventually bit by bit, everything that we needed, the Library which was an excellent library at Christ's College, that was moved down to King's, to the Old Senate Room, where it still is. We sold off the building opposite the College, which became a church, and the College building which was now in the wrong place as all the students were living down in residences in Old Aberdeen, we moved all the teaching down to King's. But that was over a period of years. The late 1980s and early 1990s.
JH And looking forward, whilst we are still on the practical questions; in 1992 you became Master of Christ's College. How did that change your pattern of life?
AM I never thought I would ever become a Master of Christ's College. I had held my own boss Archie Hunter, Mr. A.M. Hunter, in great respect, never thinking that I would succeed him at some point. There is an interesting story about that why the sort of person was called Master instead of Principal. The Free Church College had a Senate and a Principal and the University had a Senate and a Principal and apparently, somewhere in the 1930s some high person in the University had actually said to the College people "there is only one Principal in Aberdeen, and that is me. And there is only one Senate and that is here, so you will have to change what you call your leading academic", so the College had to have a College Council and be led by a Master.
JH And what are the duties of the Master?
AM Well to run the College Council and its Financial Board for the welfare of candidates for the ministry, not just in the Church of Scotland as by now there was a much more ecumenical spirit abroad and there were students from various denominations. The provision of bursaries, paying the salary of the Librarian , Secretary. What else? A whole string of things.
JH Were you involved in selection for the ministry?
AM Yes, that too. We still have a College Council and we still have a Financial Board, although I am not involved with them now as I am retired. The College Office runs from the Chaplaincy Centre the University Chaplaincy Centre.
JH But there are no persons in the old building any longer?
AM No, no. It was with great regret that we saw it go, but clearly it had outlived its usefulness and it was now in the wrong place. A pity as it was a lovely building.
JH Well perhaps we could move on to the other aspects of Practical Theology. How do you define Practical Theology?
AM Well there is a sort of layman's definition, which would be the training and preparation of candidates for the ministry. All the facets of that, but the more academic one, by definition, would involve something to do with the work of theology of the practice of the Christian faith, in various contexts, whether that be in terms of pastoral care, counselling, crisis work or Homiletics or the liturgical side of things. There are different facets to it. As a title Practical Theology is a good umbrella one under which various things shelter, Christian education, religious education, sociology of religion, a whole string of things but a fascinating mélange in which obviously you can't be an expert in everything, so you just have to focus as best you can in those areas that you would deem to be priorities.
JH In "Whose Who" you describe your interests, you have three headings, I think, of pastoral care and counselling, medical ethics and military ethics.
AM Yes
JH And why these three? Pastoral care and counselling I suppose is obligatory as it were?
AM Absolutely. In Aberdeen unlike the other three old Divinity Faculties we had a very tightly prescribed Divinity course and each candidate coming in, or each student coming in, would have to do the first two years no choice at all, you would do all 5 in-house disciplines, New Testament Language & Literature, Old Testament Language & Literature, Church History, Systematic Theology and Practical Theology and some Religious Studies. You would have to do two years of all of those before you got to choose to specialise at all. But we felt it was building a good platform for students to grow on.
JH Well going back in line with the philosophy of the Faculty Arts for that matter. Military ethics, I think at some point you were Chaplain to the Training Corps weren't you?
AM Only Honorary. I did that because I was interested and it was another way of meeting students as a University Chaplain. They adopted me as the sort of the enemy, I would go off to camp with them, and I would be the fifth columnist or something, but I was Chaplain to the Highland Division Regiment for 20 years, part-time.
JH When did that begin?
AM 1972
JH It arose out of your work with the Training Corps?
AM I suppose it did. I had never thought of doing this and I had been, you will remember, that National Service you were deferred while you were a student, which I was, and by the time I had actually finished studying there was no more National Service!
JH I had thought that, that you would have missed National Service.
AM I was asked to go in and I thought I would try it and I enjoyed it. It was a great foil to the academic work, quite different and it taught me I think to be more careful in my use of language, to use language that ordinary non-academic people would understand.
JH Indeed.
AM So it was like foreign missions in a way but I enjoyed it.
JH By the 1970s the CND debate would have abated a bit, but were you much drawn into that area of discourse?
AM Oh yes. I mean there were people by and large around me knew that I was attached to an army regiment and therefore I wasn't a pacifist, and therefore I had to stand up and defend my own corner, in terms of debate with student groups and I thought it was good. It was good for me, it was making it clear in my own mind. The other area you mentioned that we should say something about is the medical ethics. I had always been interested in health and healing and I taught courses on it and I got drawn into working with Grampian Ethics Committee, of the Health Board and the University, looking at all the protocols of all the proposed developments in medical care that were submitted, because they were new, to be checked before they could be tried on any patients. This met at Foresterhill every two months and there was about 10 of us, who were responsible for putting through all the protocols submitted to us and for the last 4 or 5 years I was Chairman of it. It was absolutely fascinating. Very interesting.
JH What sort of questions came up? Was abortion prominent among these?
AM No, but there were issues around abortion, but there would be all the genetic sort of things, looking at the genetic ailments that people can have and what ethically you could do about it and what were the rights of a patient, what did the patient need to be told and where it says that the patient will give her or his permission for this procedure to be carried out. What does the patient know before he signs his name at the bottom of the sheet, a whole range of things, and a lot to do with the issues at the beginning and ending of life. Both ends.
JH Did you, was it part of your normal way of life to be discussing this with medical students?
AM Yes, only sporadically. I had various colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine who on occasion would get me to go up to Foresterhill and sit in with the classes and while they discussed the ethnics of medicine and allow me to sort of contribute to that and by the same token I would reverse it and I would invite some of them down to talk to my Divinity students to say "Alright when you go out into the big bad world this is what you are going into".
JH Yes, that must have been very fruitful. I was going to ask more widely about relationships between staff and students of other university departments, you dealt with this as far as the Medical Faculty is concerned, but what about Psychology or Philosophy for that matter, did you ?
AM I had lots of personal links because I had been around the University for quite a long time and the staff was for a long period very stable. There was not a lot of coming and going. I did have contact with the Psychology department and we did have interchange of students going both ways, a little with Philosophy, but I would think that Philosophy would have been more allied to Systematic Theology than to Practical Theology.
JH Yes, yes, but to the teaching in Pastoral Care and Counselling, I don't know quite how to put this, was this in any sense Applied Psychology or was it ……
AM No, but there would be an element of Applied Psychology but that assumes of course the student has at least soaked up some rudimentary psychology before he starts. It wasn't my job to teach psychology but really the pastoral application of it. Care and counselling everybody can do.
JH Yes it is a discipline based on experience and on human relationships rather than on scientific learning.
AM Yes, and also it becomes pastoral when you bring in the kind of motivation "Why are you doing this?" You are doing this because you are a Christian. Your faith drives you to do it. And to make all sort of assumptions of what you can and can't do. And I eventually developed a course that ran right through and part of the level 1 of Pastoral Theology giving the building bricks then the Pastoral Counselling was on top of that and then there was a Honours course in Crisis Intervention Work on top of that. So the whole thing was linked or it was intended to be.
JH You mentioned earlier relations with colleagues in Theology with particularly with the Chair of Systematic Theology and I suppose before you went into Christ's College there was the Chair of Christian Dogmatics and I never quite understood the relationship between those two I must confess! Did you have any demarcation problems or relationship problems there?
AM No not really, the fact that there was, what you are remembering is that there was a chair of Systamatic Theology and there was a chair of Christian Dogmatics, I think it is an historical fact.
JH It was historical in its origin, I think Christian Dogmatics was only founded in 1934.
AM You see, it may have come across from Christ's College.
JH Yes, I suppose so.
AM I really don't know.
JH No I wondered if it was just an attempt to stiffen the theological education.
AM No, I don't think so. There was a fair bit of duplication across the line. In the same way between Systematic Theology and Practical Theology. What we had in common was Christina Ethics. You can't teach Practical Theology without getting into the ethics, and Systamtic Theology had traditionally taught ethics, so we did tend to run across each other a bit.
JH But there was no course labelled Christian Ethics?
AM Yes.
JH They were and taught by theologians and not by philosophers?
AM Yes, taught by theologians, that's right. What was also interesting was that over the years that I was associated with Divinity it was … what the sort of the main lines in research were… well I was a student first and right through to my Ph.D times the big attraction was New Testament Studies and I think that was a course of Ian Hunter and there was a big, strong post-graduate research group doing New Testament work and then through the 1970s and into the 1980s Systamtic Theology came on very strong with the Torrance interest in Neo-Orthodox Barth, Karl Barth's theology, and that brought home a pile of Post-graduate interest in research. Then Practical Theology and we came late into this, from the late 80s and 90s, we began to become a big player in this whole area too, because it was quite fascinating how this changed over the decades.
JH And in 1980 when you became Professor of Practical Theology presumably then you became a member of the Faculty of Divinity, retaining your dual status as before. Perhaps we could now talk about changes in the Faculties since that time. Now one change of that period which must reflect on the Faculty was the development of Religious Studies under Andrew Walls from 1970 onwards. Was this seen as an intellectual stimulus or was it seen in any way as a challenge to the Faculty of Theology?
AM I think it was an intellectual stimulus, a broadening of things. As Religious Studies was a broadening of what had been Biblical Studies, that was what the department was originally called, and then it became Religious Studies with Andrew and Andrew opened it out in all directions, while still retaining pretty much a Christian base to it, but he, because it was in Arts and not in Divinity, Religious Studies rather jealously guarded its independence and I can understand this. But in the issue you mentioned a minute ago in the 80s we had fiddling about with the Faulty structure, re-jigging and finally getting rid of it, that led to the greater integration of Religious Studies with Divinity.
JH Yes, I am aware of that. I was wondering, in the 70s if there was any feeling, I may have sensed this, and certainly not from you, fearing that this is a dissipation of effort, that the teaching ought to concentrate on Christian Studies and it is a destraction to go in to new religions, Islam and Buddhism and so on. There had of course in the past been scholars in the Faculty of Divinity with an interest in comparative religion, I was not very conscious of that I must say before Andrew's time in Aberdeen.
AM No, Andrew, really he brought it all out and I think was the means of attracting all sorts of people to Aberdeen to study. It is very interesting that going round the world, as I have done as Moderator, and many other things. I kept on running into people who were former students of Andrew's who remembered with great affection their time in Aberdeen.
JH Well we have all done that I am sure.
AM But eventually all this integration meant that Religious Studies while still seen as a separate discipline had an equal standing within a new unified department called Divinity with Religious Studies.
JH When was that integration complete would you say?
AM I would be guessing, sometime in the 80s
JH Yes, some time in the 80s.
AM Yes with Jim Thrower.
JH Yes, it was after Andrew had gone, that was a terrible, terrible loss, but we had better not go into the question of responsibility for that.
AM What was nice for me was to be asked to do the Lauriation for him when he got his DD when he came back.
JH Yes, Yes. No that was a terrible mistake and I would have thought even in terms of University income it was a very dubious decision.
AM Yes, well he was a real loss to Aberdeen.
JH I suppose it was as a doctrine of small departments, poor departments.
AM Well you will be as aware as I was that all through this period change was happening and you wondered if some of it was just shifting the deck-chairs.
JH Yes, but in the 1980s it wasn't merely shuffling the deck-chairs it was getting rid of chairs. So I wonder what effects in the 80s what effects the economies that everybody had to undergo, had on the work of the Faculty of Divinity?
AM Well, one thing they did, it forced us to cut courses, because we didn't have the bodies or staff to teach them and we were all taking on huge loads because there were fewer of us. There were those components which had to go into a Divinity Degree anyway, in order to satisfy church requirements as well for ministers coming through and we were all stretched to the limit. So we had to dump quite a lot of courses.
JH What sort of courses did you dump?
AM Well I had put together two, a course on Christian Education and one on Religious Education, as in Schools, so I amalgamated these two. There was one on Sociology of Religion , which I had to give up and there was one Christian Communications, which was an Honours course and that had to go. My colleague at that point, 1986 I think, went off to become General Secretary of the Board of World Mission in Edinburgh, in the church, and because the cuts were on, no replacement. I struggled along by myself for a year and a bit, and then I was allowed what was called "A 1- year special appointment" which they kept thankfully renewing for a good number of years, and that took some pressure off me, but it really was hard, hard going. At every corner you were being assessed, you know the load you were carrying . I remember on one occasion being rapped over the knuckles in terms of a post-graduate completion rates, mine was 90% and they wanted 100% and the answer to that , the difference between the ninety-something and the hundred was one overseas student who had died, which I could do nothing about, but it counted against you still.
JH Yes, I remember this sort of thing. I was going to say that one effect of the cuts seems to me to have been to further the, what in my view, was the deplorable tendency to treat overseas students, including overseas postgraduates as a source of income rather than as intellectual stimulus!
AM Absolutely correct!
JH Was the Faculty increasing its overseas postgraduate students at this time?
AM Yes we were any way, because as I said to you a New Testament Systematics, and Applied Theology were all attractive to students, and this did help us immeasurable in money generation terms because Divinity was never on undergraduate level was never going to be a big player, it is a small pool, so there was a finite limit to the number of undergraduates we could take, but we could increase our postgraduates and certainly those from overseas, as we did.
JH Was this demand led or were you able to .. take any steps to encourage recruitment as a lot of people were doing at this time.
AM We did both. A lot of it was demand , it was coming anyway, but we did do some quite deliberate recruitment as well.
JH Then in the 1990s there seemed to have been a number of restructurings the latest of which is that Divinity went on the Faculty to a Department to part of a School, with a historian currently at its head. What effects did this have? Was it just negative or were there positive effects as well.
AM Well I think from the point of view of Divinity particularly, I argued very strongly for the retention of Faculty status because of the way in which we were perceived from abroad from America and what not. This was a well known Faculty of Divinity in Britain to which people are proud to come. But if you took away the title of Faculty what was it? Was it just a Department. People wouldn't really know what they were coming to. So we did argue for that and I remember at the time the Heads of the various little departments and Divinity were all interviewed by the then Principal George McNicol and one or two of the Senior Admin people and I argued very strongly firstly for us being allowed to retain the title Faculty for outside consumption, even if administratively it was changing, and that was conceded. I suppose that if there was an advantage at all, if there was a gain from that, it was that it did integrate us, all the former separate little disciplines, a bit more closely together and made sure that we would work more closely together. So that was I suppose a plus point.
JH Would it be true to say that in the course of the integration Religious Studies were, in the broader sense and beyond the traditional Divinity syllabus, became relatively more important?
AM Than it has been?
JH Yes.
AM Well I think so, I think it gained in stature and it became very much a full department in terms of offering combined Honours degrees and this type of thing.
JH And did this have any effect on relationships with the Church of Scotland and the Faculty training for the ministry?
AM No, I don't think so. The church had a committee on church chairs and on academic progress, but because candidates for ministry had to satisfy church requirements as well as academic ones, the church sat down and looked at the courses that were being offered at St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, to make sure that the bona fidas of each of these courses were up to academic standards that were acceptable to them. So that was being looked at both from the University end and from the church.
JH That was fine academically, not in Aberdeen, am I right in thinking there was a bit of a stand-off with the church and the university of Edinburgh when they appointed a Roman-Catholic theologian?
AM Yes. It wasn't a stand-off between the church so much, as between one or two of the then professors in Divinity in Edinburgh who didn't fancy having this Roman-Catholic theologian and they were only speaking for one wing of the church, but it is long forgotten.
JH And there was never any suggestion like that in Aberdeen? No.
AM No, none at all. We were an extraordinary happy community for a long time.
JH So looking over your time of your association with the Faculty, would think the University's contribution to theological education in a narrower sense has been enhanced or diminished, extended or diminished?
AM Oh I think it has been extended. Over the period certainly. It is very difficult to judge at any one particular time, as I was saying we were, even at a time of huge expansion of students numbers and all the rest of it, we were still a community, as were Halls of Residence and some of the other small departments, they stuck together well. It is much more amorphous than now and I am not quite sure what you do about that in order to maintain a community spirit. The University certainly did allow us to maintain that through the difficult years and one has to be grateful for that. We weren't scattered to the four winds around the University campus and that was good too. There was a relationship with the Chapel and the Chaplaincy which was an ongoing one too.
JH And would I be right to say an increasing extra-mural involvement as well?
AM Yes, certainly, we produced a certificate in Christian Studies, distant learning, and several of us got involved in that, and Christ's College helped with that too. We employed a scholar part-time to write- up some of the courses that we were wanting to teach and then we all took turns, a share, in teaching them. We had people from Stornoway and people from Lerwick.
JH These being courses specifically for clergy? No? I know Christian Studies wasn't?
AM No, they were mainly for lay people. To allow them to do and in fact we went on from having written special courses for a kind of certificate or diploma onto perhaps credit 1 level in the University so that eventually if someone had done various modules in that and then wanted to convert it into a Divinity Degree, it became possible and that was to do with another of the good changes in our time, which was this modular thing, which changed the style of what we were doing altogether, producing what could be bolt-on bits, you know not so cohesive.
JH Well we are perhaps getting now on to what I suggested might be the final comment, any observations you might like to make. Changes in the Aberdeen University Community over the last 50 years, because some of what you say about the Faculty of Divinity I think has resonance elsewhere.
AM I am sure it probably has. I think it is now far more difficult to maintain a cohesive community, given the size of the University and the range of things that it is now doing. When I was a student in the early 1950s I would guess that the whole student body would have numbered about 1500.
JH That was about it.
AM And now look at it now, it has changed out of all recognition so it is quite a task to try and maintain a sense of community identity. I think as I said to you when I look back to my Arts days or Arts and Divinity days, they were pretty carefree really and this is not so true now. It is a more serious business altogether.
JH More serious, has the education experience improved or declined?
AM Hard to generalise, in some ways I think it has improved. The offerings that are available are so much wider, I am not sure that the standard being necessarily reached are as good, or the demands as high as they were when we were going through. For instance in Divinity in my time you had to do and had to pass Hebrew and Greek or you didn't get the B.D. and I can think of various highly intelligent people who went out of the ministry with no B.D. because they couldn't pass the Hebrew. But they are optional now only if you want to take them fine if you don't want to take the, also fine. I think that the Universities, probably in Scotland, before the sort of oil crisis and cuts and all the rest of it came on, had been in calm water. It must have been hay days for those who were around then, so I guess there must have been fat in the Universities so that when the bad days came the fat was chopped off instantly, but I think they started hitting bone, and it was very unhealthy for us who had to go through it.
JH And some of the fat was perhaps nourishing!
AM Oh, indeed, it led to good people having to take premature retirement to take numbers down, these were all negative things and maybe in some ways some of them were unavoidable but it just seemed to come year on year and more and more.
JH Well thank you very much indeed Alan Main, unless you have anything else you would like to add?
AM It has been a great pleasure and I enjoyed talking to you.
JH Thank you very much.
End of Interview.
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