| Description | Interview with Professor Raymond Illsley on 12 June 1985 by Elizabeth Olson
The Interview transcription is available in two parts : MS3620/25/1 and MS3620/25/2
Transcript of interview:
I Professor Illsley, what brought you to Aberdeen?
RI Well I suppose there was a bit of a push from where I was and a pull from here, I'd been working in […] New Town, calling myself a Social and Economics Research Officer. But for other reasons I got rather discontented with the degree of freedom that I got in that kind of new town co-operation, wanted a bit more excitement and I saw a job advertised and applied. I had no idea of vocation or anything of that kind. I was going for an interesting job…
I And that was?
RI That was in 1961 and it was a job of, I suppose, Research Officer they must have called it, with the Social Medicine Research Unit, a Medical Research Council unit stationed in London that was co-operating with Dugald Baird and his Department of Midwifery here in Aberdeen and between them ,and another person named Richard Titmuss, a fairly famous wartime figure, they had hatched-up a plan of research which involved people being appointed by the Social Medicine Research Unit in London and seconded up to work here with Sir Dugald. So I came up for that temporary three-year job in 1951.
I And you've been here since then?
RI Been here ever since, yes.
I What work was the Unit engaged in?
RI Its main interest was to have a look at the many social factors which might affect the course of pregnancy and the outcome of pregnancy. Anything from the complications of pregnancy through to the perinatal death and so on. When I say social, it was a very widely based and unusual programme for its day in the social, yes, sociological, it was economic, it was psychological, psychiatric and nutritional as well as obstetric, and unusual almost unheard of type of approach to that problem at that time and it was partly as a result of, well mainly as a result of, Sir Dugald's ideas and perspectives on that.
I And what was your contribution to be?
RI My contribution was as the sociologist and a plan had already been drawn up before I got here because they'd employed another sociologist before me, one with whom it hadn't worked out very well and so they were trying me out, again. They didn't really know what they wanted, I think, in terms of a sociologist and I didn't even know what sociology was.
I Really?
RI I'd trained as a historian and as an economist but I had very little idea about sociology; social science, yes.
I What's the difference?
RI Well, in that social science would include things like economics and psychology and politics, whereas in sociology we're very much concerned with the structure of personal social relationships rather than the internals of a person's mind or his economic motivation and so on. So they'd got a joint plan which involved the conduct of a social survey on pregnant women during six months of pregnancy and the period thereafter and I was to run that social survey.
I I see, and did this involve you in for example setting up the criteria of social groups or was that something that you could take form earlier work?
RI I think we, the plan was already fairly well formed in that the sections of the population that were going to be interviewed, that were going to be studied, this had already been determined and the interview as already started. Where I came in was in the nature of the information that I collected and the way in which that data would later be analysed rather than in the broad design at the time which was already there.
I I see, that was Sir Dugald's?
RI That was Sir Dugald's, and the other teams were operating alongside and since there were so many of us wanting to see these poor pregnant women in a relatively short period of time, it was quite a scheduled operation.
I When you say the other teams, you mean…?
RI A psychologist was looking at the same patients that I was looking at. They were having weighed dietary surveys conducted on them; they were of course having antenatal care and in a portion of them, an economist was doing a budgetary study of their income and the way in which they spent their income. So they had busy pregnancies. And that was again unusual in that what we had here was teams from different disciplines attempting to focus their particular skills on a problem and at the same time to interlink it with the others.
I And was that an amicable arrangement?
RI Em …
I More or less?
RI Yes, I think it was. After a period to time, and I think I notice this subsequently in many other fields, you become so deeply involved in your own work that you become just a little one-eyed about it and we got to the point where we'd got our main results out, and at that point, having got the main results out, whilst the team went on for quite a number of years thereafter, we each went off then on our own drives, so Dugald was only able to keep us together for one major study and then we thought we'd got findings which led me there, and somebody else there, and somebody else, and we never really quite came together again.
I Would that have been at the point that you went into the University, or was it before that [happened]?
RI No, that came much later. I stayed on with the, as a member of the, what was then called Social Medicine Research Unit, until it became changed, there was a change in its status, it became an independent research unit and became the Obstetric Medicine Research Unit. It was still the Medical Research Council, and I stayed with it at that point.
I And that was no longer linked with London, is that correct?
RI That was no longer linked with London, that had been found to be an unworkable relationship partly because of the distance, partly because of the differences of philosophy between the people that ran the London end and the people that were working at the Aberdeen end.
I Were they working on the same field or was the London…?
RI They were working on the same field but they were on different kinds of data, they were working on a purely statistical basis. We were actually involved in seeing, meeting women; they, part of them, were engaged in giving antenatal care and so on, so we had different, inevitably different perspectives. And then round about, I suppose 1955, 1956, I began to achieve my results that were interesting to me. I used them to do a PhD …
I Which was …?
RI Which was at the University here …
I Yes, and the topic for that was…
RI I think it was just called Social Background to First Pregnancy. There was no Sociology department and so I had to take it in the Economics Department and the economists knew nothing about Obstetrics or pregnancy, nor did they know very much about sociology. But it was a reasonably, happy, pleasant relationship and so I got my PhD in about 1956. And I think on the basis of those results, it was on those results that the Medical Research Council suggested to me that I should stay and indicated to me that there would be a long-term career within the Council if I were prepared to. So, although I'd only come for three years, and although I was only on a one-year renewable appointment until I was in my forties …Which is quite nerve-wracking.
I Yes, and things weren't being cut, were they?
RI No, no, and even if they were cut it was for a short time, they didn't affect you. So I decided to stay on and I stayed on there, in fact, until the end of Sir Dugald's time as Head of the Department of Obstetrics.
I Yes, that was 1964, 1965?
RI '64, I think, he left, might have been '65.
I And did you continue to work with him?
RI I continued to work with him. The topic changed from time to time. I got very interested in, not so much the process of pregnancy, as in the product of pregnancy, the children, and conceived the need to go off and have a look at some of the children that we had studied at an earlier point in time as they were growing up. I managed to get very generous funding from the Medical [American?] Foundation to do that and set up a joint study between an American Team and ourselves there which carried on for many years and indeed is still continuing. So what I was doing was studies of children at the age of between seven and eleven, looking at the way in which they had grown up, and looking if possible to see how far there was any impact on their subsequent lives of the events that had occurred during pregnancy and labour. And some of that work, as I say, still continues.
I This is an ignorant question but when did the Registrar General's classifications come in? Was that …?
RI 1913 was the occupational classification into five, well at that time into eight, social classes, and he applied it backwards to the 1911 …
(phone rings)
I Well, we'll finish the Social Register …
RI Yes, are you on it now?
I Yes.
RI Right, well, I began working with that classification and have continued working with it and as a matter of fact I am just finishing the paper, its on the computer now, which goes back to some of the findings that we got at about that time in relations to social classification. The issues are still live and I don't think that the thought in the field is any more advanced that it was then when we were working on it in the 1950s. But it was a lonely life for me, coming up at that time. I was supposed to be a sociologist, I didn't quite know what a sociologist was, and I was doing my best to conform to the image. There was no Sociology Department in the University. What Social Science Departments there were rather removed from Foresterhill and communication was very poor indeed. So that it was, I was very much an isolated person there. Within the Medical Faculty, it was very unusual for anybody at that time to have a social scientist around. And so I was a bit of an oddity and people didn't quite know how to take me; sometimes friendly, sometimes with a certain degree of amusement, sometimes with a degree of contempt. But it was very difficult indeed to establish any good working relationships, with anybody outside the particular research group that I was with. They, of course, were extremely stimulating. The next nearest sociologist was in Edinburgh and there were only one or two there. The Sociological Association had barely got itself started at that point and so much of the work that I did then, whilst it broadly conformed to sociological work, was very much dictated by my colleagues in the department until somewhere midway through the 50s and so on, I'd begun to make sufficient contact. But it was at that point that I almost left.
I Really, because you hadn't defined what was expected of you?
RI Yes, that was one thing. They didn't quite know what was expected of me and were honest about that. I didn't quite know what I could learn or could provide. I didn't know whether there was a future for me in the field and there certainly I had none of the excitement of disciplinary conversation that you might have had in an ordinary university department. Went down to King's where the Professor of Political Economy was extremely nice but would be the first to acknowledge he really didn't know much about what I was doing and so it was more a social relationship than an academic one. So those were quite hard days.
I Yes. What about the Psychology Department, did they have anything to offer you?
RI Not very much, because the Psychology Department in this university then, and for as long as I can remember it, has really been very little interest in social relationships and personal relationships, very much more concerned with laboratory work rather than with relationships between ? people living and working in a community. So there was very little possibility of any contact with them.
I What about Economic History?
RI Economic History, I think at the time was part of the Economics Department and so, yes, I was meeting them as part of the Economics Department. As I said, friendly, pleasant but with no interest whatsoever in the kind of thing that we were doing. It was at that time a fairly lonely life. And I suppose that it was partly because of that that at a fairly early stage I began something which I then continued for the rest of my academic life, moving fairly frequently and for long periods out of Aberdeen to get ideas, stimulation, company, whatever it was in other places, mainly in the States.
I Were there any Chairs of Sociology in Britain at that time?
RI I should think that at that early time there would have been only about six or seven departments of sociology and there would probably only have been about two or three Chairs in the subject. So, whilst Aberdeen was, hadn't got one, it was not all that unusual in not having one.
I Was there one in Scotland?
RI Only in Edinburgh, not sure that he was a professor, the head of the department. I think he was a reader but there was nothing in Glasgow and there was nothing in Dundee.
I And presumably not all that much student demand for instruction in the discipline?
RI None at all, no. Well, there being no departments you really couldn't gauge the demand for it. So, no, and that was true of Scotland as a whole, until of course the burgeoning, blossoming explosion of sociology that came in the late '50s and in the early '60s.
I What caused that?
RI I have never quite sure what caused it, but I think that what was happening was that the work was, had become, a more prosperous place and people were much more concerned, I think, than they had been about their personal place within that world and the way in which it could be arranged for the comfort, convenience and happiness of individuals. They hadn't got their nose down on the grindstone of having to earn a living as, all day, every day and be a treadmill and I think, just as you see many those kind of movements flowering in rich societies like the United States, like, shall we say California at the present time, it was part of that in seeking for new thoughts on the world.
I Yes.
RI It's the best, I think, I could say of how it happened at that time. It came late, of course, to Aberdeen. Aberdeen began to have its Chair; it started its Chair of Sociology in 1965. By that time, I had become very deeply involved in a subject that's now called Medical Sociology, and I don't think we called it that at the time I don't know what we called it. And so I had already become very specialised in a particular field when, general sociology came here in 1965.
I And when you got the Chair you were expecting to teach general sociology in the University?
RI Yes, yes and did. Yes, I got the Chair in '64; at the same time Sir Dugald retired, and the Medical Research Council made me the Director of its new research unit, the Medical Sociology Research Unit.
I In place of Sir Dugald who had been in charge of the Obstetric one?
RI Yes, really the old unit died and they started of another unit at the same site but not necessarily with the same themes and certainly not with the same sciences and disciplines within it.
I Yes. And you felt that you would also like to be Professor of Sociology?
RI I wanted to do both of them, yes. Rather ambitious, I think, to want to do them but did decide to go ahead on that basis for probably reasons which than again influenced the way in which I developed things in the Department. I'd always felt that we were in a very isolated position here, that we were at the very end of a long line of academic communication. That this University would always be in danger of being a marginal second or third rate university, unless it maintained its contacts with the rest of the world. And so I felt at that time that if we were not to become just a tiny little outfit, unconsidered by anybody, it was necessary to make a splash. And so I kept the Research Unit, I took on the teaching department and I built up the research, very large research group within the Department of Sociology. So that, I suppose, five years after the Department was founded, we must have been the second or third largest sociological outfit in the country, certainly in terns of staff. Probably in terms of students as well. And my hope was that by doing that we could develop distinctive lines of research and ideas and so on which would attract particularly staff but also students up to this part of the world. On the whole that was, I think, successful, relative successful, I think it is still extremely difficult to attract good people to Aberdeen.
I Was there a large pool of experienced sociologists to draw on for staff at that stage?
RI No, that was of course one of the problems, and one of the reasons why I wanted to build this up into a distinctive place, that the subject had really grown at a spectacular rate in the years from 1960 up to 1965, and nearly every university had now got a Department of Sociology, except for Dundee which still hasn't got one, and therefore all those departments had had to be staffed by the products of what were really only about six departments earlier. And so it was extremely difficult to get experienced people and you had therefore to have something attractive to offer to them.
I Yes, and what did you offer?
RI Well, I suppose what we were offering was basically a large group of colleagues with whom they could work, the opportunities for research on a scale which they would not have found possible in most places, funded to a degree of generosity which they would certainly not have got in most places.
I And that was thanks to …?
RI Well, it was a variety of things. I was fortunate in having the Medical Research Council as one of my backers. But as part of the general policy, I deliberately went out and I got to know everybody, the grant-giving foundations in Britain, and I got to know the staff and committees of them, I made my trips abroad and did the same there, so that we were in an extremely advantageous position for getting research money.
I What did you see as the desirable specific orientation of the Aberdeen department in the research line?
RI I didn't think that. At the beginning, my first aim was to ensure that we could teach the subject first of all and my first inclination was to ensure that the theoretical background and so on was there, that we had all that, that is a common part of all departments of sociology anywhere. After that, I began, I was clear that I needed to keep my Medical-Sociological health thing going because by that time it was acknowledged that this was the first and the most important and the foremost department concerned with Medical-Sociology in the world. That was clearly, had got to be kept going. After that, I began to be interested in the distinctive features of this area of the North of Scotland. The feeling, not just for research purposes but for teaching purposes, that it was important that the staff, but particularly students, should become cognisant of the society within which they lived. Also felt that it was easier to teach people sociology on the basis of the experiences of the areas in which they themselves lived. In order to do that, we had to know about it and we had to do research on it because almost every member of staff I got was English. Nobody had been trained in Scotland.
I True.
RI And so they all had bought in from outside. They all, therefore, had to learn something about Scotland and to bring them up on things to do with local culture.
I And dialect no doubt?
RI Yes, that obviously was important in class and in seminars and so on. So that was my second concern. My third concern was to begin to develop an applied arm, and I came under fairly heavy pressure from a number of social workers and organisations around the North and eventually decided to set up, it didn't take me very long, a year or two, to set up a course in the training of social workers.
I And that is the Department of .. [Social Work]?
RI Eventually I managed to get the money for, outside the University, for a Chair for that Department and staffing for it and it was set up as, eventually, as a separate Department of Social Work. That was not how I had envisaged it and, but by the time I had left ... We'll come on to that later. My original hope had been that we would have a Department of Sociology that would broaden by becoming a Department of Anthropology as well - and I had begun bringing anthropologists in - would also have Social Work within it, and that here we would have a large, again powerful, grouping, an attractive grouping which had got flexibility within it, so that if Sociology declined it might very well be that Social Work increased. If you'd got flexibility of staff movement and retraining and so within the same organisation. But the University didn't go for that solution, I think unwisely.
I Did the University welcome the establishment of a large Social Work Department? It was concurrent with the Robbins expansion wasn't it?
RI Yes, well they were, let me just go carefully over that, that's not … It did not welcome … first of all it did not welcome the large research element which I brought in. That was not regarded as, not really very respectable.
I Why?
RI Many of the people, it was a cosy, couthy university. It saw itself very largely as a university for the teaching of the students of the Northeast. It didn't really see itself as needing very much money to do that, so people like myself coming in and getting large research grants as in some sense is young nouveau riche opportunists not sharing in the culture of this ancient and traditional university. And much of what I did in that field, and I did without any encouragement, in fact with some degree of discouragement from the Faculty. When it came to a Department of Social Work, there were mixed feelings about it. Yes, it was a fine thing to have so long as it was a small course that was a subsidiary part of a Department of Sociology. When the point came of setting it up on a much more, much larger basis, then opposition showed itself.
I When you talk about much larger, what sort of figures are you talking about?
RI Well, when it came to making a professor and having something like, instead of having, I think three staff that I'd got then, wanting to have something like six staff, instead of having four or five students a year, wanting twenty students a year.
I Had there been staff teaching sociology before you came in as professor?
RI No, there'd been nobody teaching anything in that field.
I And the Unit hadn't taught anyone, hadn't taught in that field?
RI No, no, no. But in Social Work, there was an interesting dialogue took place and fortunately the then Principal, Sir Edward Wright, was very much in favour of Social Work and indeed of applied subjects so that in very hard fought battles that we had in the Senatus, Sir Edward did support me strongly on this. But many people felt that Social Work was not a respectable subject, it was not a discipline, it did not rank with the Classics and the things like this as a university subject. It seems ridiculous at this day and age to think that was in early 1970s and it was opposed on that basis.
I So they bought the idea of Sociology, as a descriptive field?
RI They bought the idea of Sociology because, yes, it had got a very old kind of history, was clearly a scientific, fundamentally scientific subject. This was application.
I But they would accept a fundamental scientific subject in the Arts Faculty?
RI There was a lot of discussion at that time as to what the Arts Faculty should be and the Arts Faculty was one that reluctantly came to accept the powerful Social Science element within it. The social scientist wanted to move out and have a Faculty of Social Science but at that point they'd become so powerful and so attractive to students that the Arts Faculty didn't want them to move out because they would have lost those students at the same time. There were all these kind of rivalries and competitions and so on that naturally go on within universities. I don't think any of them really thought very much of the idea of having Social Work. It was just too applied. And again, there was the further factor, which is quite an important factor, that we've already talked about in relation to Sociology; there were very few people at the time who were capable of teaching it and teaching it well, so they were worried about bringing in to the University people who didn't have the same kind of intellectual background as they themselves thought they had.
I Which presumably was a description of the staff you'd recruited for Sociology in the first place?
RI Well, I don't think they felt that at the beginning. No. The, some of the initial sociologists I brought in were very much accepted as high quality staff. The problems arose, I think, around the time that all the disturbances were going on in universities across the country, and indeed across the world. And they tended to affect Sociology far more than they affected other departments. Students were moving into Sociology at that time, looking for certain kinds of freedoms, thinking in those kind of terms and seeing the possibilities of fulfilment in Sociology departments. Many of the people that wanted to come in and do those kind of things wouldn't really have found fulfilment in any place at all, but this was the best place that they could think of coming in. And so Sociology Departments throughout, I think, the world at that time came to be rather difficult, unmanageable, unruly institutions and that was not so true of this one as it was of many others around the world. On the other hand, even a little disturbance in a place like Aberdeen is an earthquake, and so there were problems between my Department and other Departments at the time, not so much between the Department and other Departments as between the Department and individuals within the University who had a much more conservative point of view. Fortunately, again, the Principal of the time, Sir Edward Wright, was very adept at handling student relationships. I think he recognised the situation, he gave me my head, and when there were likely to be difficulties we'd talk about it and he'd say, "Will you handle it, or will I handle it?" So in fact nothing really happened here compared with places …
I Yes, in Bristol they raised the red flag on the student building which was amusing, wasn't it?
RI Yes, there were all kinds of things happening around the universities at that time and very little happened here. But by that time I had come to have an enormous staff and an enormous student body from almost nothing, form certainly nothing, just me. Within something like five years, we had grown to have a first year class of about four hundred and fifty students which was very large, and we were taking something like two hundred and fifty into the second year classes and taking fifty people a year into single honours. I'd brought a staff altogether down there of in the twenties, something like twenty-six or something staff.
I Much bigger than any other Department?
RI Yes, except Psychology …
I Psychology was its equal, what about English?
RI English wasn't as large as that, no. It had got a much larger, it had got a, sorry, a large first year class…
I Yes, they always did have.
RI But Psychology had got a still larger one, you see it was on the Science Faculty as well on the other, but we had by that time become a very large department, quick growth, and it was at that point that I personally began to feel the strain of this and felt that I had to make my choice as to whether I would stay with the University or whether I would concentrate on research.
I Yes, this would have been about 71?
RI Yes, that was it. There were a number of things happening at the time, not only had Social Work got established in the Department but very interesting new systems were being set up in Scotland, not only in Social Work but in the criminal field, in the criminal justice field. The children's panels were being set up and I was asked to train them and to set the system in operation throughout the whole of the North of Scotland. Rewarding, interesting, but a very big additional burden, and so a point came at which I decided that I was going to move out temporarily from Sociology and devote myself more to the Research Unit which was growing strongly at the time.
I So you gave up the 'Head of Departmentship'?
RI Well, what I did was I managed to persuade various people outside to provide some money for a second Chair and with that second Chair, appointed a second professor and eventually I stepped down and took year in the States to allow him to find his feet and thereafter I taught for a little, for a year or two, the odd course but then retreated completely up to Foresterhill and devoted myself to the Research Unit, which was itself getting very demanding at the time.
I And at that time took the title of professor of Medical-Sociology …?
RI Medical-Sociology, yes, and set up what we called the Institute of Medical-Sociology …
I Which meant you taught postgraduates, is that right?
RI Well, … it was a nice fiction, really.
I If you were an Institute?
RI It was a research unit, in which everything was really funded by the Medical Research Council. The only person that was funded by Aberdeen University was my secretary. And so I'd got there fifty people, I think, of whom only one was really funded by the University. So whilst we did teach a number of postgraduate students, probably we took on varying numbers of two or four, perhaps five was the largest we ever took on in a single year, this was very much a small part to the business …
I And what were they going to get?
RI They would have got a M.Litt. to begin with and later a PhD and then most of them did in fact get that but it was not, I found that even people who had been devoted teachers when they were down at Kings and then later transferred to the research world found it very difficult indeed to combine a full-time research job with teaching. The kind of demands of interviewing, of being in different places, of doing field work in distant places and so on didn't fit well with the need to be present on Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, whatever it was, to teach and they would get so wrapped up and so absorbed within the set of thoughts and ideas and actions that they had that the student became just a bit of a nuisance. And so, gradually, we got to the point where we didn't take any students at all. We continued however to do what we had done for many, many years, to teach Medical-Sociology to medical students…
I And that's a small part or a large part of their course?
RI It wasn't a great deal to do, not much time, we shared it with the Department of Community Medicine. I think they got something like thirty hours a year out of and I put about four or five members of our staff on to teaching it so that they didn't give lectures but did seminar work and tutorial work.
I And that would have been an innovation, wouldn't it?
RI Yes, yes it was. And again I think it was an early thing. There weren't many departments and many universities that were doing it when we started. On the other hand, by the time we finished, many universities had gone sweeping far beyond us in relation to this.
I Who was in charge of Community Medicine at that time?
RI Well …
I Professor Weir or Maurice Backett?
RI No, well when we first started, it would have been Professor Backett, Maurice Backett, and then later Roy Weir. But it was not a major part about it. I always felt that the University were getting that kind of teaching on the cheap in that none of the staff were paid by the University and that's one of the reasons why I think that the other universities swept by us after a number of years because they decided to put their resources into it in a way in which this Medical Faculty wouldn't do…
I And should have you think?
RI I think so, yes. It's been an extremely conservative Medical Faculty. I see it from many different points of view, mainly through sitting on grant-giving bodies to which applications are made and on the whole I'd say, in terms of ideas, it's probably the most conservative of the four Scottish medical schools so that naturally they weren't too keen on the idea of too much Social Science in the Medical Curriculum.
I Even yet?
RI I think that's still the case, even yet, yes. Is likely to be I think for some time. Differs from Faculty to Faculty. It differs from time to time, from Department to Department. Departments grow up and are good and strong and interesting and innovative as Obstetrics was in the early days, as Mental Health became for a period when in the early days of Professor Miller, as Community Medicine is now with professor Weir. But then, you know, somebody goes or changes take place the cycle moves and changes and …
I Yes, it Sociology still as popular in the Arts Faculty …?
RI No, no…
I As at that time? What size of first year class do they have just to give a standard [comparison]?
RI I think it was a thing that flowered in the minds of students in the 60s and it's not just that the subject has faded as a subject in this University. That is true throughout, I think, most of Britain, at any rate. I wouldn't like to speak of wider than that. It was partly, however, an individual factor in that ,I think, I had different attitudes towards the subject from those of my successors who would have regarded themselves as much more professional sociologists than I regarded myself, who were very keen on teaching the great theoretical writers of the past and that kind of thing, whereas coming from a background that I did, I was much more interested in their understanding the contemporary society in which they lived and of their getting their feet wet in doing a bit of field work or whatever it might be.
I You must have considerable problems in dealing with four hundred first year students all sitting summer exams, for example?
RI Very difficult indeed. It would have been easier, I think, as every year went on because you learned more, you developed more customs, you developed more rules, you became less innovative, you changed less. We did major changes, several times in the curriculum and in the examination system. Yes, it was difficult and it was one of, I think, my feelings of sadness that I personally had was that I felt that here were all these students, who were my students, in the sense that I was the head of the department, many of them I could pass in the street and I wouldn't know. That was almost, that almost hurt me. In view of the fact that I recognised that in my own university education I had had very close and intimate, stimulating relationship with the staff. So what we tried to do was to divide up the staff in such a way that, whilst none of us knew everybody, it was always the case that each student had one or two staff whom they knew very well.
I I see, yes.
RI And so we developed a tutorial basis that I think was a successful one. But yet you couldn't say that you knew your department. You knew those parts of it that were yours.
I This, I think, was one of the fears of the people who were rather against the Robbins expansion?
RI Well, I think, yes. It was an argument that went on strongly within this University. At various times we were being asked if we wanted to expand or, and there were those voices but on the whole the majority in the Faculty of Arts, though perhaps not in some of the other Faculties, who said well really what the world wants is of no importance. What's important is what The Aberdeen University wants.
I What the University has to offer, yes?
RI Of Aberdeen wants, and how it wants to see itself now it wants to run itself.
Interviewed continued on MS 3620/1/25/2 |