| Description | Interview with Professor Emeritus William Witte, recorded on 23 January 1985 by Jennifer Carter.
Transcript of Interview :
C Professor Witte you came to Aberdeen in 1937 and I wonder could we start by asking...
W Not '37.
C Well there's an error straight away. When was it?
W '31.
C And what were your first impressions of the city and of the university?
W Well I was a young man of 24 when I first came to Aberdeen, and I came as an assistant, what was then called an assistant, in the German department. I should perhaps explain that an assistant was a very lowly species of university teacher and a grade now extinct. The distinctive feature of these posts was strictly limited tenure. They were not, as assistant lecturers' are now, probationary posts, they were strictly limited to three years which could be in exceptional cases extended to five as it was in mine, but not beyond. You were asking about my first impressions. When I arrived I was, of course, as you will gather, not very much older than the senior students whom I had to teach. Nevertheless, one of my first impressions was that the students here struck me as being very young. In Germany, where I had had my early education, the normal school leaver's age was 18 or 19. Thereafter those who went to the university took things at a fairly leisurely pace, or at least they were free to do so. There was no fixed time limit. You went on studying until you felt ready to present yourself for a degree examination, which meant that quite a few students remained at the university for a very long time, especially of course those whose parents were sufficiently affluent to maintain them more or less indefinitely. It was nothing unusual for students to be in their middle twenties or even in their late twenties. Compared with that situation, compared with their opposite numbers at German universities, our students here appeared young and often a bit immature. May I add in this context that I am not concerned, of course, to praise the German system as I knew it in my day; that would be pointless because, in any case, it's now a thing of the past. It had evident drawbacks. Some students led a lazy and undisciplined life. On the other hand, those who wanted to, and who could afford to take their time, could under that system acquire a broadly-based and many-sided education studying a variety of subjects without the pressure of examination deadlines.
C Whereas our people, I imagine, came up at age what, late 16 early 17, with a fairly narrow schooling behind them?
W 17, yes. Well that was one thing and another thing which links up with what I have just said was the nature of the courses here, and the way they were organised. There was much more supervision here. Students of course were free to choose their own subjects, I mean those who wanted to read for honours chose their honours subjects naturally, and even those who went in for an ordinary degree had a limited freedom of choice, - perhaps I could say something about that a little later - but once that choice had been made they followed courses which were mapped out for them in considerable detail, with prescribed texts and textbooks, with regular written exercises, with class examinations at the end of winter and spring terms, and a degree examination at the end of the session. It seemed to me more like a continuation of school. This system of course had its advantages. It kept these young people, or most of them, on a straight and narrow path, but it was a narrow path, they were not encouraged to be intellectually venturesome.
C Did this apply to the honours system as well, or was there indeed a degree in honours in German then? I'm not sure.
W There was not a degree in pure German, or an honours degree in pure German. There was when I first came here, and for quite a number of years after that, a joint honours degree, and the usual combination for practical purposes, because many of our students became teachers you see, was French-German.
C And did the students, before proceeding to honours, have to spend a year abroad as they do now? Or was that a later innovation?
W No that was a later innovation. They did of course go abroad. They usually did this during a long summer vacation.
C And your feeling about the immaturity of the students: did that change over the course, in other words did you see them as it were rapidly growing up, or did they remain immature even when they graduated?
W Oh yes, they matured, and especially honours students. I think I ought to make that clear. The academic standards at honours level were perfectly respectable. At first-year level on the other hand they were fairly low. I'm of course speaking of my own subject, I can't speak for anything else, and I think it has to be remembered that the academic study of a foreign language and its literature presents a rather special problem. It has to include, at any rate initially, a considerable amount of fairly elementary language teaching, and this imposes obvious limitations on the study of literature. Reading in a foreign language is often a slow and laborious process at that stage, and the study of literary texts has to put the emphasis on comprehension rather than interpretation, which indicates a level of study you see.
C Yes indeed, and I can see that in the four years it would not necessarily be very easy to get people up to a standard that, from your European background, would have seemed an appropriate one? What was the teaching programme like from the assistant's point of view? You said that an assistant was, as it were, a low form of academic life. Did that mean he was an academic drudge? Did you have a tremendous amount of routine language teaching to do? W Well, yes, one had to do quite a lot of fairly elementary language teaching. The teaching situation was rather different from what it became later on. You see the university I came to in 1931 was very much smaller than the universities I knew in Germany, which were the universities of Breslau (which of course is now in Poland) and Munich and Berlin. Well, Breslau was a sizeable provincial capital, Munich and Berlin were capital cities. They all had large universities, not quite as large as they are now. I think that Munich, for instance, which remains very popular now, has something like 25,000 students, possibly more. Well it wasn't as big as that, of course, but they were big universities, where the individual students would very easily be lost in a crowd. Now Aberdeen was quite different: it had much more of a sense of community, of togetherness, both in the university as a whole and in departments, and that brings me to the question you asked. The department I joined was small, there were about 40 students in the first year, about 30 in the second, about a dozen in each of the junior and senior honours classes - say roughly just short of 100 - and these were taught by three members of staff: the head of the department, who was at that time a lecturer, and two assistants. Now this meant a heavy teaching load. I think now - perhaps I looked at it with a more jaundiced eye then, when I was in the thick of it - but I certainly felt later that it was a good thing, a good training for young teachers, because it compelled one to turn one's hand to anything at very short notice. You taught what was allocated to you by the head of your department, and if you didn't know much about the subject, well, then you just had to find out, and in a hurry. That may not always have made for very competent teaching, but it did make for flexibility of mind.
C Avery good grounding, as you say, for a young teacher. So the work of the department was carried by one lecturer and two assistants?
W Now you were asking me, before we started, how I was appointed, and perhaps this would be the moment to tell you about that. Assistants were, as I've said, a post of strictly limited tenure, and that meant that there wasn't the sort of degree of formality that came into use later on. An assistant was simply appointed on the say-so of the head of his department.
C How did you happen to end up in Aberdeen? Was there a Breslau connection?
W Yes there was. I was taught English, I studied English among other things, and I was taught by a man who was at that time on the staff of the university of Breslau. I don't know whether I can define his status very exactly because there is nothing to correspond to it. He was much higher up than a sort of conversational assistant, such as we have here. He was more like a sort of fully-qualified lecturer in English, but he did also do some language teaching. Well I became friendly with him, I suppose he thought well of me, anyhow I became friendly with him, and when he was appointed the head of the German department here, after having been here for a year or so, he wrote to me and offered me this appointment. I was not very happy in Germany at the time for various reasons, partly political. You know it was the time of the rise of the Nazi Party and also I didn't really feel that I quite fitted into the work I was doing. I was working on a Berlin newspaper at that time.
C Oh. I didn't know you had a journalistic background.
W And I didn't really feel that I was quite cut out for this. I mean I did my best.
C So your Aberdeen contact was Bruford was it, or Yates?
W Yates, yes. I became friendly with Bruford too, but that was much later. And so he brought me here, and there were no further formalities. I simply came. I had a letter, and I was told I was appointed, and that was it, and I just came. There was no further interview by committee, or anything like that, and I don't think that mattered from the point of view of the university. I mean as one would look at it as a sort of Emeritus Professor or a senior member with experience of university administration, it might look rather chancy, but there was the safeguard that the posts were strictly limited in time you see. I mean if someone made a mistake well, one could get rid of them.
C I'd obviously started on the wrong foot about your career. You went, I now think, from here to Edinburgh. Is that right?
W I taught here for five years as an assistant, and then, in the meantime, I had met Bruford, who worked here as an external examiner, and when my time here came to an end he took me on.
C Invited you to go to Edinburgh, yes? Then you came back here? W In the meantime Yates managed to persuade the Court to give him another lectureship, a full lectureship in the department, and I was appointed to that.
C That was the one you came to in '37?
W Yes that's right, but then, of course, I went through all the hoops you know.
C And that was a proper university appointment with advertisements, and committees and the lot?
W Yes.
C So your time in Edinburgh was a fairly brief one? A year?
W A year, just a year.
C Was there a tremendous contrast between the two universities incidentally? Edinburgh, I suppose, even at that date, was quite a lot bigger than Aberdeen, was it?
W Yes, it was bigger, but it was a friendly department. From my own point of view it was my first experience of living in a hall of residence, which must have coloured my whole view of halls of residence, because I liked it very much, I was very happy there. It was a hall which was purely for men, not a mixed hall like our halls here.
C What a marvellous place for a stranger to start off in, because you presumably had instant companionship from fellow academics and so on?
W Not only companionship, but actually formed some real friendships you know.
C Which is something in one's life.
W And, of course, one got to know the students in quite a different way, because they were students of all kinds, medical students and science students and so on, and one got some insight at least into their lives and their preoccupations.
C So when you came back to Aberdeen you had more student-contact experience behind you?
W Yes. Well in Aberdeen we had at that time a very flourishing German club, which met once a week, and I had a lot to do with that, because Douglas Yates, who had been running a similar English club in Breslau, he expected me to do this you see, and the department being small and more like a family you see, sort of brought one into quite close contact with students.
C One thing that has struck me in reading the memoirs of that time is what a lot of entertaining in their own homes members of the university staff seemed to have done. This was obviously very much a feature of life then was it? Both fellow members of staff and students were entertained?
W Yes, and you see some very senior members of staff, I mean senior Professors, when I first came here they quite naturally took very little notice of young newcomers, but if you had a chance of meeting them socially, if you were lucky enough to be invited to their homes, they were very nice and not at all stand-offish.
C Where did you live yourself in your early days? Were you in digs?
W In digs, yes.
C In the city, or in Old Aberdeen?
W In King Street, just round the corner from the university.
C So it really wasn't until people got into a more senior position that they were able to do this entertaining thing. Presumably it was mainly the old-established Professors with their big houses in Hamilton Place?
W Yes.
C Or Beechgrove Terrace yes?
W Certainly later on - we were never in one of these very large posh houses - but we lived in university houses in Old Aberdeen, and certainly we did as much entertaining as my wife could manage.
C Yes I'm sure you did. How well off were university assistants and lecturers then. I mean was it - as compared with let us say school teaching at the time - was it a relatively well or relatively badly paid job?
W Well to name a figure, which I'm quite willing to do, I came here at a salary of £250 a year.
C And it's difficult, isn't it, with inflation to know what that meant?
W I was fortunate in the sense that at the time my parents were reasonably affluent, not as affluent as they had once been before the first World War, but still moderately well off. That meant that I could, as I wanted to in any case, I could go and stay with them during the vacations, you see, especially the long vacation. At first I also used to go to see them at Christmas time. I was an only son and they were sentimental about Christmas. It was a somewhat difficult situation, in the sense that my father was rather inclined to sympathise with at least some aspects of the Nazi movement, and I did not, and that made a kind of - not a breach - but a rift certainly. Well, when I went to stay with them, my father would buy me a couple of suits, or that sort of thing, you see. I wasn't entirely dependent on the salary I earned, with the result that I felt quite well off.
C Quite comfortable. Your speaking of your father's politics reminds me to ask another thing - how politically-conscious were the Aberdeen students in those days? I mean in the thirties, when you first came here, did you find them politically very naive, or were they indeed politically-conscious and interested in world affairs and what was happening in Germany and so forth?
W That is a difficult question to answer.
C It's the period when in the older English universities there was a great deal of fashionable interest, was there not, in communism and so forth, and I wondered if the Aberdeen students in those days had a rather political character, which certainly seemed to be the case later on?
W On the whole I would say no. There were exceptions.
C Politics was not a thing which stirred the students very much in the thirties?
W Not at that time, not in the earlier thirties. I don't think that they quite realised what was happening. It was difficult to realise this if you hadn't actually lived through it you see. I mean I felt it more and more as the Nazi movement progressed and finally came to power, when of course - I mean they came to power legitimately in a sense by popular vote, but once they had seized power they changed everything and of course there was no going back on it any more. I mean there was no hope of getting them out again. People who hadn't particularly sympathised felt trapped, and under an increasingly cruel and despotic regime. Going back to Germany while one could, before the war, I became more and more conscious of this, you see. I think that anyone who went as a tourist, or even someone who went for six months to live with a family as a student, wouldn't have been totally unaware of this, but they wouldn't have felt it quite in the same way, you see, as people who lived under it permanently.
C And students who were not language students, and who were therefore not going abroad, would have probably been pretty unconscious?
W That's right yes.
C Were they equally unconscious of the domestic problems of the time? Problems of poverty and unemployment and so forth which you know the books are full of? Were the students very socially-conscious, very keen to put the world right, or were they alternatively rather accepting? It's difficult to generalise perhaps?
W Yes. Some of the students I knew had a great enthusiasm for the League of Nations, but of course by the time I came here, when in Germany at any rate things were moving away from that sort of concept, I suppose that kind of feeling simply petered out. As the League of Nations itself did.
C Yes indeed. Were the students themselves on the whole fairly poorly off in those days?
W Oh yes.
C Day to day living was quite a struggle for a number of them did you feel?
W Yes indeed. Rather than talk in generalities, may I be personal and just talk about my wife's family. I mean my wife was a student here when I first came here. Well her father had been headmaster at Turriff, headmaster of a secondary school. There were five children, two boys and three girls, and when he died prematurely his widow had a very difficult time. I mean she had five children to bring up, and she managed to get them all through a university degree, but it was a very hard struggle and they really were very sort of tight for money.
C Were they able to get [vacation] jobs, or was that simply not done in those days, or not possible?
W Well the eldest boy became an engineer and he, as part of his training, did an apprenticeship with various factories and workshops and so on. I suppose he earned a little money in that way. But the others the second son and the three girls - they all went in for languages. They were all rather good at it, clever people, clever family, and there was very little money to be made.
C Yes I'm sure, I mean it was not the done thing presumably, to go and be a waitress or what have you, probably such jobs weren't available anyway?
W No that wasn't so common in those days.
C So really they had to struggle through on what their mother could give them?
W Yes.
C With bursaries and things presumably to supplement them?
W Well bursaries, of course, meant much more in those days because of the changed value of money. They don't mean so much now, but in those days to get a top bursary was not only a prestigious thing to do, but very necessary.
C Coming back to those days in the German department. What do you think were the biggest changes departmentally in your time? After all you've told us how you began as an assistant, and a lecturer, but of course we know that your career went forward to the headship of the department, to a readership, to indeed holding our first chair in German. So it spans a long time. What do you think are the biggest changes in the actual departmental sense? I could think of lots of possibles, but I just don't know which one would be the right one.
W Well in the first place I suppose growth, and all that that implies. You see I was going to say something about the expansion, but that of course came much later on. You asked me about changes but of course in my time - you see I served this university for 45 years.
C That's a tremendous record yes.
W Even in the life of an ancient institution that's a long time and of course there was the war, and there was then the return of the students who had served in the forces, the readjustments of the post-war years, and then a little later the great expansion. This affected the university as a whole, but it also to some extent affected individual departments.
C What about the position of the German department during the war?
W Well this was very interesting to my mind. I was told, though I didn't of course experience this myself, but I was told that during the first World War there was a great deal of anti-German feeling which often went to extremes rather. I mean there was one Professor, I think he was a Professor in your subject, Terry wasn't it?
C Yes, Sandford Terry.
W Well, apart from being a historian, he was a great authority on Bach. Well he simply gave this up, because Bach had been a German! Now this is just an illustration of what I was told, and certainly people with German connections or of German origin had a fairly sticky time during the first World War. Even those who had become British citizens, either through naturalisation like myself, or who had married (women who had married British people) it wasn't very pleasant for them. Well the second war, which I experienced myself, was quite different in that respect.
C Did numbers wishing to take German fall off, or did they remain buoyant?
W No, no, German as an academic subject remained popular.
C That's interesting isn't it?
W Oh yes. In spite of all the tensions of the war, and a certain dislike, certainly, of the Nazi Party and all that stood for. It's odd, nevertheless, because Germany under the Nazis, I mean the whole Nazi movement, was so much more offensive than the Kaiser's Germany, and yet, somehow - I have often thought about this; inconclusively I'm afraid - somehow one had a feeling that many people in this country made a distinction between the party that had come to power, and the German people at large. They didn't, perhaps, analyse this, why should they? But I think they sensed that many German people found themselves in this situation that I mentioned before, trapped you know, under a regime that they didn't really sympathise with, and people were prepared to make allowances for this. Certainly, numerous refugees came to this country, and they were well treated on the whole. From our point of view the subject as a subject of academic study didn't suffer at all. There were problems of course, I think I mentioned this to you once before, there were problems for instance about getting texts you see. We had always been in the habit of using texts, or at least many texts, printed in Germany, because they were cheap you know, and this source of supply was cut off when the war came, and I remember one thing in particular which might be sufficiently interesting or at least amusing to put on record. Our syllabus always included the study of some early New High German texts - that means late fifteenth and early sixteenth century texts - and these were just not to be had anymore, and we didn't think it right to exclude this from our syllabus, it had always formed part of it and it forms a sort of link in a chain. So I suggested that we might use Luther's translation of the bible, which was originally made in that period, as a text because one could always get hold of German bibles, and that's what we did.
C Splendid. And then immediately after the war did ex-servicemen come in considerable numbers to the subject?
W Yes, oh yes. This, as a matter of fact, is one of my most vivid and also one of my happiest memories, because when the war ended one wondered how the men who had served in the forces, often in positions of considerable authority you know, how they would fit in, when they came back to complete their studies, sitting with school boys who hadn't been through this experience you see, and what their attitude towards the staff would be. We really needn't have worried because as it turned out, they brought not only maturity, but they brought a sort of new eagerness to their studies. Some of them, not all of them, but some of them of course had in the later stages of the war been in Germany in the forces and did all sorts of important jobs. [They] helped to reorganise the local administration, to reorganise newspapers, for the Control Commission and that sort of thing. The ex-servicemen were wonderful people to work with. We had had some brilliant students before, and we have had some since, but as a group these people were quite outstanding, and most rewarding people to work with.
C What was the proportion of ex-servicemen as against school leavers? Was it roughly half and half in proportion?
W Not quite that, no, but enough to provide a sort of leavening which really transformed a whole class.
W Well the only point I really wanted to add was that some of these new buildings that we mentioned before show the impact of technical innovation of teaching methods and methods of study. I'm thinking here of the language laboratory, of course, of the television centre, of the new large lecture theatre with its equipment for showing films, and of the new facilities for computing. Now in a subject like mine which deals with language and literature the application of a computer is I think marginal. It can be used, and it has been used, for research purposes, frequency counts for instance. I seem to remember, although this is outside my professional field, that someone used a computer quite successfully to establish the authenticity, or inauthenticity, I forget which it was, of one of the Pauline Epistles, by means of counting the frequency of words and the frequency of certain constructions. Well it can be used for that sort of thing, but not for general teaching. But we did use the other new equipment. We showed German films fairly regularly in the new lecture theatre. We built up a large collection of tapes, in fact one of my colleagues Dr Thomaneck took a special interest in this, and I think he built up one of the largest collections in the country of tapes for use in the language laboratory. They could either be used in groups, or for private study. The question that must arise in one's mind is whether the use of these technical devices raised standards, and I am sorry to conclude on such an inconclusive note, but it's difficult to determine. Perhaps they helped to familiarise especially first year and second year students with the spoken language, and gave them a wider vocabulary, and if, for instance, you are studying a German play as a prescribed text it's a good thing for a student to be able to take out the tape and just listen, to hear it performed.
C On the other hand, to some extent these devices are a substitute for reading, and the old idea that you read for a degree in the literal sense, that the input into your degree, what you got from it yourself, the study and so forth all depended on how much you could read and the width of your reading - presumably these modern devices to some extent undermine that old tradition don't they?
W You mean they dilute studies rather than add to them.
C Yes that's what I was wondering. But let's stop there and switch off.
C Fine, so we were on the ex-servicemen, and then I suppose the next big change is the great expansion from the early sixties onwards is it? Or have we missed anything in between?
W Yes, well after the end of the war it took a few years for things to settle back into a sort of peace-time pattern. One tends to forget that now, but changes and new developments took place very gradually to start with. Some new departments were established, for instance Italian and Swedish in the field of language and literature. Some new posts were created, including new chairs. One of these was the chair in my own department, to which I was appointed in 1951, and another was the chair of Geography. But what had at first been rather a slow trickle became a flood in the Robbins era, when departments began to expand rapidly. If I may take the example I know best, my own department of German, as I have told you it had always been a small to medium-size department with a first-year intake of something like 40 students, it varied a bit from year to year of course. Well at one point in the sixties, when the expansion was at its height, our intake had grown to 140; that is to say it had more than trebled. And this was not an unusual rate of growth. Of course the extreme example, as you very well know, was the new department of Sociology.
C It went up like a rocket and came down like a rocket.
W Well, within a few years of being established, it had a first year intake of about 600. Of course to accommodate such a vastly increased student body much new building had to be undertaken. One could see the university physically growing and changing all round. Just think - a new Arts building was added, a new Chemistry building, a new Physics building, a new Social Science building, a new large lecture theatre, a new office building, a new refectory and common room, a new library, and last but not least several new halls of residence. Now these were an entirely new development for Aberdeen. Unlike St. Andrews, for instance, and Edinburgh, Aberdeen had not had halls before. In fact it was rather, I think, traditionally anti-hall. Students lived in digs with landladies and so on.
C Reading Douglas Simpson's Fusion it's obvious that in 1960 the new development of a Crombie residence was being regarded with very mixed feelings.
W Oh yes, and you see, unlike other halls elsewhere - the one that I lived in Edinburgh, Cowan House, for instance, was purely for men -but Crombie Hall was a mixed hall housing both men and women. That set the pattern for the halls that followed: Johnston, Dunbar and finally the large complex at Hillhead. I saw something of all the new halls as an occasional guest, but as you know, I formed a specially close tie with Johnston. I was a member of the Johnston senior common room from its inception I think, and for years I chaired the common room committee as president. I attended its functions and met a number of resident students over the years at our staff/student suppers. I wanted to mention this particularly because my membership of Johnston came to mean a great deal to me personally. The closer my attachment to it grew - it started when my wife was still alive and she was a member of the senior common room too, and later when she became ill and finally died - Johnston came to mean more and more to me and the more it came to mean to me personally the more clearly I saw the important role of the halls in the life of the university at large. You see the university had grown so much bigger, and I think, rightly or wrongly, that the halls helped to create a sense of belonging, some sort of corporate sense of identity, of coherence. Things which are all too easily lost when the university grows beyond a certain size.
C Especially for students in their early years who have necessarily a much lighter attachment to any particular department. Yes I think that is true too.
W Well of course what happened in Aberdeen was happening throughout the country. Not only did existing universities grow but [new ones appeared]. Think of Scotland. Scotland had had for many years four fairly ancient universities, and now that number was suddenly doubled, with the foundation of Stirling; Strathclyde, the second university in Glasgow; Heriot-Watt, a second university in Edinburgh; and Dundee hiving off from St. Andrews. It was really a flood tide, and very difficult to resist. Indeed it was difficult not to be carried away by the tide. The Robbins Report showed a vision of a bright future, when higher education would be made available to all, irrespective of social class or income, all who were qualified to benefit from it, and anxious to do so. That was a fine and noble idea, and to have reservations about it seemed both illiberal and positively unpatriotic, and those who voiced such reservations inevitably came in for a good deal of criticism. I was one.
C I remember how bravely you fought against the latter stages of expansion at Senatus and Court level.
W Well it's good of you to say so. I mean I for my part simply wasn't happy about the sudden mushroom growth of our university, and indeed universities in general, but I was at that time one of a very small minority, and one of course could understand how one's colleagues felt. I mean grants from public funds via the U.G.C. were largely geared to student numbers and one's colleagues wanted Aberdeen to get its fair share of the cake you see.
C Looking back on it all now it is all in a sense past history. I mean did you feel in your latter years at the university that your fears about expansion had been justified? That, for example, the quality of the students that we were taking in was undesirably low? I mean was that your final feeling about it?
W I'm afraid so, yes. You see the trouble, as I saw it then and as I see it now - the trouble was that the assumptions on which the Robbins scheme was based turned out sometimes, not always of course, but they did turn out sometimes to be false. You see to benefit under the Robbins scheme prospective students were assumed - well two things were assumed - they were assumed firstly to be suitably qualified. Well that requirement was verifiable. Those who were handling admissions, admissions officers, could obviously find out whether an applicant had an acceptable group of passes at an acceptable level. But there was the second requirement that they were anxious to have higher education, and that assumption was not verifiable, and a good many of the young people who came into the university in such large numbers were really not motivated by any eager desire for higher learning, they came because grants were available and because they couldn't think of anything else to do. Now that sounds harsh, I know, but I hasten to add that I don't blame these young people. It's not their fault. Adolescence is usually a time of experiment and uncertainty you know, a time when ideas and feelings are fluid and apt to change. Many school leavers have no very clear notion of what they want to be or what they want to do with their lives you know, and they may see a degree course simply as a sort of respite which would give them time to clarify their own minds before opting for a definite vocational choice. I am talking specifically about an Arts degree because obviously degrees that are from the start geared to a particular profession like medicine...
C Law, Veterinary Science and so on.
W They are different. Well there is no harm in looking at a degree course in this way, provided that those who drift into it simply as a sort of posting stage make the most of the opportunities that it has to offer, but that condition I think was not always met. I mean you can take a horse to the water but you can't make it drink, and in consequence, as the expansion progressed, a growing proportion of students simply dropped out, they failed to meet even the minimum requirements in their examinations. The failure rate became a talking point. I mean that term, as far as I remember, hadn't been in very wide use until this time, but now it became a matter of public concern, not only in the university but among the general public too. I remember letters to our local paper complaining about the harshness and the inhumanity of university examiners, and the argument of the writers of these letters was quite simple. The university, they argued, had taken these students in and had admitted them, and having admitted them the university was under a moral obligation to make something of them, to send them forth with a degree that would help them to get a job. And, of course, academics were very conscious of this public reaction but what were they to say, what were they to do? Were they to say simply well you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? That would have sounded offensive and somehow unfair because the university had first taken these people in. Yet you know academics were in a genuine dilemma at that time because most of them thought, and wanted to think of the universities as centres of excellence, not degree factories. That was their problem. Reducing the failure rate meant lowering standards.
C And that did happen in your view?
W Well I remember resigning an external examinership, perhaps as you are recording this I had better not say where, but it was a very respectable university, simply because I could not see eye to eye with my internal colleague who was aghast when he saw what kind of proportion of failures I was suggesting you see.
C And within Aberdeen did you see signs of that slippage of standards, or were we able to hold things against it?
W Oh I think so yes. There was a bit of it.
C In German?
W Oh yes.
C Even in German.
W I don't mean a disastrous slide but as you say a slippage.
C So I well understand why looking back on it you think that the expansion was a mistake.
W Well it was simply too rapid and too large.
C And brought in people who were not committed to university education as you understood it, and we understood it, in the old days. Are there any other aspects of the changing university, apart from the growth in size, that have struck you particularly?
W Well of course the period of affluence was also a period of student unrest.
C Was that particularly worrying to you personally, did you feel that the students were getting too much of their own way - the revolting ones I mean? Aberdeen was let off fairly lightly on the whole in the sixties wasn't it?
W We had far less of it than many other places yes, we were fortunate in that respect. Again to come down to particulars in my own subject. By that time we had a degree in pure German, a single subject degree which was a five year course which included a year's study abroad. So most of our students had spent some considerable time abroad and some of them had been affected by the virus which was so much more virulent in certain German quarters and they came back and if that's not too crass a term they brought back the infection, so we did have sow of this. I remember staff/student meetings where the students were very critical of our way of doing things, and indeed wanted to see quite considerable changes in the curriculum. I mean not only the way we were teaching things, but also the things we were teaching.
C They had to be "relevant", if I remember rightly, in those days.
W Well we had a certain amount of that.
C Which reminds me to ask, by the way, has the balance of the teaching of German, within your experience of Aberdeen, has it shifted - whether in response to those sorts of pressures, or other pressures, from literature to the use of the language? Is that something that has happened to German? My impression is with some languages this shift has taken place, I'm not sure if it's true of German or not.
W Yes there has been a change. Looking back over my long period of service I do quite definitely discern a shift of emphasis. It's a shift away, for one thing, away from the older forms of the language and the other periods of literature, to the contemporary, and in the field of literature specifically a shift of interest from the aesthetic approach, to political and sociological aspects. Aberdeen is not alone in this, it's the same elsewhere as I have seen. I have served a lot as external examiner in a variety of places in Scotland and in England. Again to be specific if I may give an example. The great period of modern German literature is the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, that was traditionally regarded as the great flowering of modern German literature. It was indeed called the classical age; I mean there are books under that title you see.
C Schiller and Goethe and all that.
W And this period was always accorded pride of place in the syllabus of German departments; well that is no longer so. The interests of students have changed. Of course there are individual works like Goethe's Faust shall we say, which can never lose their interest and can never pall. I mean anyone who can't make the first part of Faust at any rate interesting to a class of students had better not teach German. But the period as a whole has lost much of its appeal.
C And people now want modern literature and to study institutions and so forth?
W Well you see we, my colleagues and I, actually acknowledged this fact by introducing a new course of third-year German for students who were sufficiently interested in the subject to want to pursue it a bit further, but who did not want to submit to the rigours of a traditional full length honours course with the various things that that implied. The new course which we introduced was deliberately geared to modern German studies, that is to say contemporary literature dealing with contemporary themes, the language of the present day as it is used in colloquial speech and found in newspapers for instance. Recent German history, by recent I mean post-war Germany history, and institutions both in the German Democratic Republic and in West Germany. That's how this course was made up, and the response showed that this kind of course really met a demand and that was gratifying. However I must add that I for my part should be sorry to see university departments of modern languages go too far in this direction, in accommodating their work to purely practical interests. You see those interests are catered for elsewhere, they are catered for in colleges of commerce, business schools, Berlitz schools, institutes for the training of interpreters, and some of these are very high powered. I'm not denigrating them in any way, they are very high-powered institutions, but they are really doing something rather different. You see it's only natural that universities, more than ever after all in need of money, and on the lookout for research grants and that sort of subvention, it's only natural that they should seek to serve the needs of modern industry and commerce, but they should not be dominated by these needs. The Arts Faculties in particular, to my mind, should continue to provide a home for the humanities.
C Preserve the great tradition. In the case of German, what would you characterise as the principal emphasis or contribution of your own department to scholarship, if one were looking back on it and saying what was our particular thing? What do you think was the main strength of your department of German? [There was] your own interest in the eighteenth century, obviously, and Dr Barber's interest in the earlier periods of German literature and language. W Barber's contribution, which was by no means negligible, is I think that simply through the force of a somewhat eccentric but a very genuine personality he managed to maintain at least some interest in medieval philology, which is not a subject which attracts the majority of students you know. But those whom he managed to attract, they gained a great deal from it, and I can think of one at least who went from strength to strength and is now a Professor of Sanskrit at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He did produce that sort of person. Well I myself, my own publications were mainly in the field of eighteenth century studies, as you say, but I am also a great admirer and always have been a keen reader of Thomas Mann, and have published a certain amount on that. My predecessor, Douglas Yates, he was a specialist in Grillparzer, the Austrian dramatist, and he did make quite a considerable contribution, but the book he was planning he wasn't able to finish, only the first volume.
C He died early I gather?
W Yes he did.
C One general question in this area I have been wanting to ask. We have spoken quite a lot about how the students changed. It must also be true, I suppose, that the staff must have changed vastly in the time you were at Aberdeen, with different sorts of people coming in? Would that be true, or did the staff stay in your mind much the same - though of course getting older. Were you conscious of a change in the type of people joining the university?
W Well one was certainly conscious of that. I would say "one", but perhaps I ought to be frank and say "I" was conscious of that, in the case of the new department of Sociology. I mean some of the people who were recruited there - you see there was this massive expansion that we were talking about earlier on and these people had to be taught - and I suppose the head of the department couldn't be too choosy, simply because considerable demands had to be met. Since we are recording this I don't want to say too much, but I mean some of the people who came in then into that department in particular struck me as being really very unsuitable for that job. Otherwise, I personally, I was Dean of the Faculty of Arts for 3 years from 1960, and of course subsequently I served on the University Court for 8 years, so I had some experience of university administration and policy making. I remember when I succeeded to the deanship I was wondering, I hadn't done this kind of job before and looked forward to it with some trepidation, but I must say that my colleagues were really very nice. I did my best. I mean I resolved from the start to prepare carefully for each faculty and committee meeting, and I made certain other resolutions. I was determined to give everyone a fair chance of expressing his or her views, and to listen to them, not just let them talk, but listen to them. And then I decided that I must learn to bring things to a conclusion when I thought that enough had been said and nothing could be added by further discussion. I think on the whole this approach, simple as these principles may sound, was appreciated by my colleagues, and on the whole the business of the faculty really proceeded in a very civilised way during my deanship.
C I think you said that you revised the M. A, regulations when you were dean?
W Yes I'm glad you mentioned this because that stands out in my memory as one of the chief - not achievements, because it didn't last long - but one of the chief experiences of my deanship. I found this very interesting because it raised the question of the nature and the purpose of a general arts degree. I mean what is meant by a liberal education you see. When I first came, when I had nothing to do with this sort of thing, I was then too junior, but at that time the regulations for the ordinary arts degree prescribed what used to be called a hard core of compulsory subjects. Everyone had to offer first of all a classical language, Latin or Greek; secondly a Philosophy, Logic or Moral Philosophy; and thirdly either Mathematics or one of the Science subjects. The subjects which formed this hard core obviously were in a special central position, and this was particularly marked in the case of Latin, for a very simple reason. You see the teaching of Greek at school level had declined so much that very few students who came up were able to offer Greek, so Latin was virtually a compulsory subject for anyone who wanted to take an ordinary arts degree, and that meant that the first year Latin class was always one of the biggest. This privileged status of Latin was viewed by some other departments with disapproval, and it was ultimately eroded. What happened in successive years, and decades - because it was a long process - was a gradual softening of this hard core until finally the hard core disappeared altogether, dissolved, and it was replaced by what was sometimes referred to, a trifle maliciously I fear, as a cafeteria system. Compulsion in the choice of subjects was not completely eliminated, but it was much reduced, and students were given a much greater freedom to choose whatever subjects they fancied, a freedom which they did not always use wisely. The revised regulations which were introduced during my deanship, were of course the result of joint deliberations in committees and in the faculty, and they had been submitted to the Senatus and the General Council. However they had one distinctive feature which I think I may claim to have introduced myself, and that was that they put the study of English, the study of the native language and its literature, in a special category, in such a way that while English language and literature was not exactly made compulsory, the regulations made it very difficult to opt out of it. I may add that although at the time these regulations gained the assent and more than assent, the approval of the majority of my colleagues they didn't last long. They didn't remain in force for very long because they were changed under my successor. But I thought, and I still think, that they made sense, in that there was at least a kind of guiding idea.
C So the hard core had gone but we hadn't yet got a complete cafeteria system: there was a greater degree of compulsion under your regulations than obtained subsequently?
W It meant that the great majority at any rate of students taking an ordinary arts degree took English language and literature.
C Language as well as literature?
W Yes. To me this is so central, I mean the study of the native literature, especially if it's one of the greatest literatures the world has ever seen.
C So that was one of your central issues as dean, coping with that change in the regulations?
W Yes. And when my deanship was finished in 1963 my colleagues did me the honour of electing me as one of their representatives on the Court. Again I was appreciative of the honour, though I was dubious about the wisdom of this because I am not by nature an organiser. It was interesting work, and what remains in my memory is the change of perspective. As the head of a teaching department one had to speak up and sometimes fight for one's own department. As dean, of course, one had to set aside such departmental interests and act as spokesman for the faculty as a whole, even when faculty decisions did not represent one's own departmental point of view. Now, as a member of the governing body, the Court, one had to ignore all factional interests, and view things in the perspective of the university as a whole, and that for a member of a teaching department involved in the actual give and take was not easy. A thing that I remember, and remember gratefully, was how the Court's deliberations benefited from the presence of members who were not academics, who had been co-opted or appointed by the General Council. I am thinking of people like Sir William Scott Brown, John Milne, Maurice Cramb, men of great experience in business matters, and experience of the world in general, who gave so generously of their time and energy and really devoted themselves to the affairs of the university in a most disinterested way.
C It's a tremendous tradition.
W You were asking earlier on about Principals. Well I served under five, I served under Sir George Adam Smith, Sir William Hamilton Fife, Sir Thomas Taylor, Sir Edward Wright, and Sir Fraser Noble. They were widely different personalities and I don't think that they can usefully be compared. You see Sir George Adam Smith was a pretty old man by the time I came to Aberdeen. He had been a distinguished biblical scholar and a very prominent churchman in his day, but his day was really long past. He was a very dignified figurehead.
C A remote figurehead.
W Yes. Nowadays of course he would have been well past retiring age, but in those days there was no age limit of that kind. Well then his successor's period of office, of course, included the war and the years immediately after the war, which again puts Hamilton Fife in a rather separate category because things weren't what they had been before and what they would never be again. Tom Taylor's Principalship lasted until the beginning of the expansion, but he did not live to see the peak of that expansion.
C Was he pro or against expansion in his last few years, because he died in '62, so it must have been as it were just beginning before he died?
W That's right.
C Was he a resister or was he in favour of it?
W Well.
C Or was he such a good lawyer that it was hard to tell?
W He didn't give much away, and he was not an easy man to get to know. I got to know him a little at least. I think he had his reservations about the expansion, and this may partly have been due to his not feeling too well towards the end of his principalship. One thing that I remember, one of these little things that are perhaps of no consequence but stay in one's mind. You know we had these quinqennial periods when we all had to prepare for the decisions of the U.G.C. and this was a very long drawn out process, I mean an enormous quantity of papers were produced by departments and by the administration and so on, and one had to plough through this. It was quite a job. I remember when we came to the beginning of his last quinqennial period and we assembled in the Senatus, and he looked at all this paper that was lying on the table and he said "Most unwilling am I to set my foot again upon the first rung of this ladder". And that told its tale. If he had lived to the peak of the expansion, which he just avoided, and therefore the student troubles that followed, he would have been very unhappy. Because although, as we said earlier on, there was less of the student unrest and militancy in Aberdeen than in other places, Taylor who was a moralist and a very staunch Presbyterian, would have found the whole climate of the time most distasteful. Well the task of piloting the university through that devolved upon Edward Wright, and I think that on the whole he really performed that task remarkably well. He could be difficult, he could be assertive and even abrasive at meetings, even with senior colleagues, but he had an elusive kind of charm, and he usually knew his own mind, which is another way of saying of course that once he had come to a decision he was not easily persuaded to change it. He was good with students at a time when this mattered much, at a time when it was fashionable for students to rebel against authority. He was prepared to listen to them, he was prepared to reason with them, and at the same time he knew when to stand firm and not to give in to their sometimes unreasonable demands. Well the last Principal I served under, Fraser Noble, he came when the spacious days of the expansion and of the large grants were over, when retrenchment was becoming the order of the day, and this was sad in a way because he was a graduate of Aberdeen, he had served here as a lecturer, he was coming back to his own university after a distinguished career elsewhere, and it was sad that this return should coincide with the time of depression.
C You must have known both those two, that is to say Wright and Noble pretty well as colleagues, before they became Principals. Noble when he was here as a young lecturer in Economics?
W Yes. I didn't know him very well but I certainly knew him.
C Wright you must have lived alongside virtually all your professional life.
W Yes. I don't really know quite how much I ought to say about this since we are on record, but it is an interesting thing you see because of the human relationship. We were quite friendly long before he became Principal. He came here as a very young, I think the youngest Professor of Mathematics ever appointed, and we used to play tennis together. We sometimes went and had a beer together, and that sort of thing. I felt that I knew him quite well. When he became Principal, naturally he moved into a somewhat different sphere. Naturally one didn't want to presume on friendship that existed before that, but it was not always easy to know just exactly how far one should set this aside, you know the old relationship, after all we had known each other for so many -years, and this could sometimes create a certain awkwardness.
C Of course the other unusual thing to an outsider I suppose about Wright was that he did seem to be very much a man of this university. As you say he came here as a very young man and spent his whole career here. I don't know if one was correct in sensing latterly a certain reluctance to make those contacts outside the university which perhaps a Principal should cultivate in these hard times. In other words one felt that he was in a sense very much an Aberdeen man and not terribly willing, for example, to travel to London.
W Oh he did a lot of travelling. He always travelled by air you know, he was keen on flying. I mean he had to go to London a lot as Principal to see the U.G.C.
C You think that was an unfair criticism of him?
W Well I don't want to accuse you of being unfair, I mean you had rather more to do with him as a member of the Court and Warden of Johnston Hall, you had lots of dealings with him. I simply didn't know him as well latterly as I had known him when we were younger, but he certainly took the duties of the Principalship very seriously.
C I share your admiration for him. I think he was a very good Principal, but the only shade of criticism that I had wondered about was this business of becoming perhaps a little bit Aberdeen bound, or bounded. Which it's easy to do in Aberdeen isn't it?
W Yes.
C Because it is such a place to itself.
W Well it's also a very attractive place in many ways.
C Have we covered the ground or is there anything that you would have liked to say that we haven't touched on?
END OF INTERVIEW
|