| Description | Interview with Professor Raymond Illsley recorded on 12 June 1985 by Elizabeth Olson
Transcript of interview:
RI There was a live and continuous debate in the University about whether we should or whether we shouldn't expand, or whether it was good for the University or good for the country. My personal view was that expansion should go on and my view at the moment is still the same: that this country can't afford for it not to go on. But if a small island is going to maintain fifty-five million people, it's got to have something in terms of the skills, expertise and so on of its population to make up for the vast acreage in the United States or other countries that have got other resources and so I would like to see that happen. How to handle it, you know, it's an organisational matter; about whether it's good for a University depends how you then go about handling that. But I've been in universities of ten times the size of this and felt them to be corporate bodies with a sense of unity and purpose.
I What about the quality of student that you can draw in a place, at least in a country with population like Britain?
RI Well, this again you see was another factor in the argument in that many of the people in the Arts Faculty whom I would have said at that time were extremely conservative, traditional people felt that this was a university for the North of Scotland. It wasn't a British university, It as a, it served its area and that therefore there was a limited number of people on whom it could draw because it was not a very well populated area. My own feeling is, that a university in this day and age takes that view of itself is bound to go to the bottom of the heap and that it has to begin to draw in all kinds of ways on other parts of the country and of the world and to participate.
I What about the percentage of people with sufficient intellectual ability to profit from a university style education in Britain say?
RI Well, it's a matter of degree. If you take successful economies of other kinds, like shall we say, the United States, they can afford to put something up to fifty per cent through.
I But their institutions are not at the … well, they have different things to offer?
RI They have a wider range of institutions. They have institutions that are; they have more institutions of high quality than we have. We know we've got Oxford, Cambridge and London as it were…
I And Aberdeen (!)… go on …
RI Way down the heap.
I You think so?
RI Yes, yes. Though I can't give a propaganda lecture.
I I'm not asking you to, I'm just teasing you.
RI Yes. But then they have other universities and other institutions that can take people at higher education, who can make a great deal out of that second echelon or the third echelon of people of ability in the country because we need such people as well.
I Yes indeed.
RI So, I at that time, was, and still am, in favour of expansion but I do agree that unless you are extremely careful you can destroy many of the qualities for which universities have in the past existed. So it would have to be a very careful kind of way of going about it.
I You see, when people compare the British universities with the American ones I think, well, the American one resembles a mixture of our university and our colleges of further education and that the, it's the second degree in America that seems to be equivalent to our first honours degree. Is that a fair comment?
RI I think that's the prejudice of the British population.
I Well, I'm interested in that too.
RI You know, I've taught there and it depends where you teach.
I And perhaps the subjects that you're teaching?
RI Goodness knows how many kinds of university-type institutions they have. It'll be something like nine hundred. If you were to take, what in Britain is, oh I don't know, forty-six, fifty universities, if you were to take their top fifty. My goodness, you'd be dealing with a very high quality population both in term of their abilities and their staff and so on.
I No, it was really the level of …?
RI How far down ...
I How far up the subject they go. You know, it seems to be the thing to take a college degree?
RI I don't think, if you take this university here. In order not to be invidious, I don't just mean this one, I mean Dundee would be the same, or Glasgow. The quality to which the vast majority of students go is very low. I mean an ordinary degree is by no means higher than that of most American undergraduate degrees, Indeed I would have thought no quite as good.
I I wouldn't be so broad perhaps?
RI No, well, the ordinary degree is again something that, it's got a lot of things, you know, to be said in favour of it and it's been argued a lot that it's not something that you can point to and say this is high education, it's a very, very low level of teaching. It's only when you get to the honours degree…
I Yes, I suppose that's what I was judging from.
RI That you being to get […] and then, well, you know, the majority of students here don't take an honours degree.
I True, as well, yes.
RI So. But there were many of those kinds of things that led me to feel that I wanted to move out of the University.
I Did you find that the, having a community of sociologists was as helpful and supportive as you'd expected it to be?
RI Yes, yes, I think I did. Yes. I found it extremely educational for me. I found everyone that you brought in and, for that matter, every postgraduate student that you took on, I found everyone of them brought something, brought a set of ideas, brought the stimulation, brought the challenge, brought an opposition, brought something and that to some extent you didn't need to got out so much to look for stimulation as you had done in the past. Yes I think it did do that and I was satisfied about the aspect of it.
I Yes, and would have most of your early staff moved on or is there a nucleus of them still there?
RI Quite a few of them are still here, yes; some have moved on, there are a couple with, who are heads of departments in the States, there's at least three heads of departments around in England, there's a vice-chancellor in Melbourne, you know they're all over the place. Yes, they have moved on but there are some still here who were here in 1966, '67 and have stayed.
I And do you feel that the Department still has to struggle for recognition or was struggling as much when you left as it had been in the beginning?
RI No, I don't think it does.
I I meant acceptance, not recognition.
RI Yes, no, no, I don't think it does. I thing that over time that has changed, not just in this University but across the world. I think particularly as sociologists themselves became more respectable shall we say.
I How do you mean respectable?
RI Well, they were people who were constantly challenging the conventions of any society.
I Any personalities in Aberdeen, you'd care to add to the record?
RI What of my own staff? Well, there were some at that time who certainly created a stir. There was a young man named Jimmy Kincaid, who has now gone down to, I think, Bradford. And Jimmy set himself up at that time as one of the students' champions and one was always conscious that something was afoot, something being plotted. When students held any king of protest meeting you'd find Jimmy actually up on the platform with the students and I remember being asked in Senatus if I would disown some of his remarks and refusing to do so because I hadn't made them myself anyway. But there were a number of people at that time of that kind and they were difficult people, the young people at that time were quite difficult to handle, they were rewarding, extremely rewarding but very difficult and I think some of the staff were of a similar kind of character. So there was a period, I would have said around 1970, when life was extremely tense when for somebody like me as Head of Department, I mean having relationships with the Senatus, with the Principal and the Faculty on the one hand, needing to keep my touch with the students on the other, needing to keep in touch with my own staff; life was at that time trying, difficult, very hard. I look back on it, of course, with a degree of excitement but at that time certainly I felt about the only time was on my own and a single person when I was in the bathroom, actually locked inside.
I Yes, oh dear. And did anything constructive dome from that? Or do you think it just went away?
RI I don't think the universities were ever the same again afterwards.
I Was that a good thing?
RI I think that it shook up teaching methods. It wasn't intended for that purpose, but in fact it did do that. People began questioning themselves a the time. "m I meeting the needs of these kinds of students who are coming up with fresh kinds of demands?" Examination systems changed. They would never be the same again.
I In what way?
RI Well, I think that, much more then than earlier, people were being marked, not on the basis of exams taken within a three hour period, but on the basis of written work and of achievements of various kinds during the course.
I Continuous assessment, as they label it?
RI Yes, I brought that in somewhere in the late 60s and I would think that something like fifty percent of the mark depended upon that. You could almost go into the examinations knowing that you had passed.
I And has that been adopted in other departments?
RI It was adopted in other departments at the time. I suspect the tide has receded again and that's no longer as fully fledged a system as it was, but I think that parts of it have remained and some of the spirit of it has remained. I think that the relationship between staff and students has never gone back to the degree of formality that was present at an earlier point in time. So although it was quite a traumatic period in all kinds of ways, I think that it left a good impact on the universities, made them more flexible. More student conscious. Lecturers were less likely to repeat he same set of lectures year after year.
I They took more interest in what the students were expecting?
RI That's right, that's right.
I And the students were just more demanding?
RI There were demanding, sometimes demanding in not a very good way, challenging for the sake of challenging, and at other times very enquiring young people and so it was quite a challenge settling the reasonable enquiries and handling the difficult ones. I don't think life's like that now with the students. I think they have changed back to more
I I think the pressure to pass your examinations is stronger than it was at that stage …
RI That's right.
I Because of the pressure to get something to do when you come out at the end?
RI Whereas they would have got something to come out at the end anyway from the other system. Yes. But sociology is now, everywhere I think, a more respectable subject. I'd not had some of the problems what some of the other sociologists had had partly because I had kept my very strong links with Medicine and had begun to develop my links with other major bodies outside, particularly the World Health Organisation and the Scottish Home and Health Department, so that even at that time we were getting commissions for research from the Scottish Department or from WHO …
I What sort of thing?
RI Well, from the Scottish Office we were getting commissions for problems relating to child development, services for handicapped people, questions about the role of social work and the management of social work department, a lot of work in relation to criminal justice and panels, and delinquency and all that kind of thing. With the World Health Organisation, much more a major advisory kind of role in relation to research being done in Eastern countries and so I was able to send staff out to places like Nepal and to Bangkok, to Seoul, to a whole series of places of that kind and that I think put our department, the Sociology Department, on a slightly different footing in relationship to university's compared with some of the other departments that wouldn't have been involved in the ordinary prosecution of everyday business in a society. That was something that I very much valued, because I had begun to feel somewhere during the 60s, at the same time that I was setting up the Social Work Department, that eventually Sociology had got to learn to apply itself. It had got to be concerned with policy and policy development and its application and so on and these were the occasions when we got involved in that way and that went on, still has gone on. Eventually, I came in fact to chair the government departments that decide upon research being done at the Scottish Office and on the funds and the distribution of funds for that. Similarly, with the Social Science Research Council in London I came to be chairman of the bodies that funded Sociology, Social Administration, Social Work and later a wider variety of subjects. And so I managed constantly to keep the Research Unit in touch with that kind of world, feeling that it was very important that we should. So we changed a little over the years from being more a fundamental, theoretical kind of body to being one that was much more concerned with application.
I Leaving the theory to the University Arts Department?
RI Yes, I think so, yes. They didn't need, you don't need resources for that. You don't need continuous time for that, you can kind of take it up in the vacation and you can put it down in the term and you can take it up again later. If you are, just to take an obvious example, deeply interested in the response of a women to pregnancy you can't afford not be there this week or next week, or another week. It only lasts about nine months and you're only conscious of it for about five. These kinds of thing demand your constant attention so I think there is a division of labour that is possible there. I still think that the University departments should do more of this other kind of work ...
I And presumably the Department of Social work in the University is constrained to do research in a practical field?
RI Yes, that's right. But I think Sociology should too, and I think all the others should, they could, it's just a matter of getting research funds in order to build up a research staff alongside the teaching staff.
I Have the staff who were conservative and not very keen on Sociology in its inception changed their minds, or retired, or both?
RI Of course, the people change, and the people that were most antagonistic to it are no longer present. A new set of younger people have come in for whom Sociology was part of the normal scene anyway.
I Yes, so that that passes.
RI And so, it'll be some other subject, I couldn't think what it is, but it'll be some other subject that is now taking the place from Sociology as 'Johnny come lately' that's highly successful and so on and is taking their students away from them. And Sociology is part, just ordinary part of the scene.
I Could you have made a better job politically of integrating the Sociology Department in the beginning; would you have wished to?
RI That's an interesting question but a difficult one to answer. Yes, I think I could have done. I think that if I had it would have been at a cost. You see, then I first went there the Faculty said to me, "Well you won't want an honours degree, there won't be many students wanting to come and take Sociology." And I disagreed with them and I had to push it through and they were astonished when on the first day of term, the first year in which Sociology was taught, a hundred people, students turned up to take first year Sociology. If I had been prepared to accept their assumptions about what the subject was, and should be, then OK I could have integrated, in fact I probably went to the opposite end in that I did want, as I mentioned earlier, to ensure that if I did take it on here I would make it a successful outfit. I went to the other end of building it up into a large department which made it look odd compared with some of the others that had been there before and felt …
I And perhaps like Humanity, had declined considerably over the twenty year period or so, that you were looking back on?
RI Yes, that's right. So there then might have been middle way. It wasn't my way. And I think I would have not been happy had I been making compromises of that kind. I'd always felt too, that, for me at any rate, I felt that it was necessary to have a series of options open and a series of activities in which you were involved and there was a sense in which the University, at the time, felt that you were disloyal if you spent too much of your time shall we say at a government, government offices, or at a Research Council or something of that kind. You were not a true University man. I couldn't accept that.
I Yes, I notice you were neither Dean, nor on the Court, which is one of the things that other people sometimes were?
RI I would never have accepted it even it had been pushed upon me. I would have rather resigned.
I Why?
RI I think they're very dull jobs. I think they have to be done by people, they are best done by people who spend, and wish to spend, most of their time within the academic circle of the Faculty of Arts within this University, or any university wherever it is. And for three years you do that; there were plenty of people who wanted to do that.
I Yes, indeed.
RI It was not my life and I wouldn't have done it. But no, I didn't take those kind of positions. Perhaps, partly, I didn't stay long enough for one thing, in that I took up the Chair in 65, I think it was, and …
I And left in 7-?
RI Left in 71, 72, left the teaching department, 72 I think it would be, to go up to the Institute, which I always found very much more exciting life than I've felt the teaching side of it was. I'd got good colleagues up at the, up at Foresterhill within the University Departments.
I Still in Obstetrics?
RI In Obstetrics, in Paediatrics and in Social Medicine, or Community Medicine.
I And perhaps Mental Health?
RI In Mental Health, a little in General Practice. Those kinds of ones which is concerned with populations, not much concerned with operations and laboratories and techniques of that kind.
I Would it be fair to say that you gravitated to people working with people rather than people working with ideas?
RI Yes, very much so, yes. No, I don't think I'd say that, it was a different distinction I was thinking of. It's people working with, socially with groups, as opposed to people working upon groups who are passive, I mean the surgeon is something very different from a psychiatrist. The same would be true to a large extent of Obstetrics as it was done because it is very much, very concerned with human development. So yes, I would have said that. On the ideas side, no I don't think I would agree on that.
I No, I think I was making, it's too narrow a point in fact because it's, I see what you mean by that.
RI But that was the world that I certainly found to be a very exciting world to be in and it's one that I continued until the present time.
I What do you feel about the Unit moving to Glasgow?
RI I was in favour of it,
I Of moving?
RI Yes
I Why?
RI Well, it was an accident that it grew here. The, it grew out of Sir Dugald to being with, and then out of me. I think it was a very good womb in that sense, in the same way that Anthropologists went off to, as it were, smaller societies to perfect their techniques and get their understandings. I think that we were able to that here. I feel that a time comes for a research groups of that kind which is supposed to be way ahead, I mean the MRC fields, each of the research units have got to be five to ten years ahead of the field. I feel that after a time there comes a point at which they have got to face greater challenges than they faced here and where somewhere like Glasgow with the manifold social and health problems in Glasgow is something that they've got to get their teeth on. Aberdeen, to its credit, is a very well ordered place. Its health service is very good indeed. It hasn't got the poverty and the problems and complexities of Glasgow.
I To the same extent.
RI Yes, I think they need that other challenge. And take, secondly, that a research group of that kind needs occasionally to be very shaken up and I'd moulded it for twenty-odd years. It needed to get away I think. Start under new management in a new place with a new set of stimuli and so on, and it got that. I thought thirdly, this is a more controversial point I think, that if it had gone to Edinburgh in particular, but if it also went to Glasgow, it would stand a slightly better chance of attracting first class people.
I Why?
RI Well, I don't know. Well, I do know I suppose. It's a long way from the major centres of population…
I Yes, in time, beside anything else?
RI In time, yes. It isn't just here for example; the King's Fund in London has just recently advertised a research unit in health policy, research into health policy. It's a job for only eight years, quite a good salary. Stirling has just got almost the same kind of thing but the person who's appointed will be made a professor and will have the position for life. It will be more generously funded. There were six applicants for the Stirling post, there were two hundred and fifty for the London one. It's that kind of a problem. There were many times when I was here, knowing that this was, I'm not being immodest, this was far the best outfit in Medical Sociology I the world, I'd advertise posts and get two or three applicants. Colleagues of mine in London who knew perfectly well it was just a minor little kind of thing would get twenty. It is more difficult and so I thought that that was a third and a marginal factor, but it was a factor.
I Would you have like to work in London then?
RI No. No. I don't think so. No. I think that would have been too unmanageable. You can just about take on Glasgow and then begin to make some sense of your work there in relation to a whole city. You can't do that on London. You could do it here. Faced very similar problems that Dugald Baird faced. I don't know if he talked to you about this, but he and his wife together here really made a magnificent job of the health scene and also, particularly of course of the Obstetrics scene and they felt it was the kind of place that they could organise and they could control. I remember Dugald being invited to go down and take the Chair of Obstetrics in Glasgow and it was quite a prestigious thing and he'd come from Glasgow. He'd come from Rottenrow. And he turned it down. And he turned it down because he felt he had not got enough time and enough resources and power to be able to really change it. Well I think perhaps that times have changed and I think that that group going down there could make a big impact. I don't think it needed to make one here. As I say, it's a well ordered, a well-run, well-administered system. So in general I was in favour of their going, even though when I contemplated the possibility that I might have to stay here myself, I was sending away all my friends. There was one extra point - I will mention this because I think it's an important point. I wrote to the University some three years before the Medical Research Council were due to come up to review the Unit and to make a decision. I wrote to them, told them that this was going to happen, told them that this was going to happen, told them there was a likelihood that there would be, at least, suggestion that it should move and I suggested to the Principal that it might be as well if we talked about it some time. I received a postcard of acknowledgement and nothing more. Now that I felt really was very naughty.
I Yes, the Principal would have been …?
RI And I do repeat it. The first Principal would have taken a very different view, Sir Edward Wright, and I think the present one would have done.
I Yes, that would have been Fraser Noble in between?
RI The one between, he was a bit …
I He wasn't there very long …
RI He wasn't there very long but he happened to be there then.
I Yes indeed, were you, you didn't serve, you did work under him in your time at the University?
RI Yes, but I'd already left King's by then and was up at Foresterhill. But there was just that feeling about the place that, they weren't going to bestir themselves too much at that time.
I Really?
RI Yes. I think when, what's his name, the new Principal came …
I McNichol
RI That all changed, I mean, he went through the place like a whirlwind.
I Well, he's had that forced upon him as well by the cuts that have been put in by the Government.
RI I do think, I do think that the question there in there about this, I do think it would have been good for this University had they had a more vigorous person like him at an earlier point in time. We may I think have lost out now in various ways. He's done quite a lot, I think, to enable this University to work alongside the Rowett Research Institute, a very big prestigious Institute with which relationships had been almost non-existent for a very long time. I'm sure he would have done the same with my research outfit but there was the sense, well if they like Aberdeen they come, if they don't like it well that's just too bad. And so I do think a more vigorous attitude would have been better. Now Universities are going to be judged by the UGC on, very largely, on the research budgets, and it will come hard upon the University that it has not developed enough at an earlier period. So I think there was a mistake there.
I Yes, Professor Wright throughout his time would have been more vigorous?
RI Yes, much more vigorous.
I Yes, and then it would have been in Fraser Noble's time that you felt that things were quieter?
RI But whether the result would have been any different I don't know. I think that the arguments were good arguments ...
I Yes.
RI But it would have done the University you know good to have had it here, to have kept it here. I myself have gone off now; I'm leaving for Bath. Had he stayed, I would have stayed.
I Yes, indeed.
RI Well, anything else that you think you'd like me to go over?
I Did you have … [recording stops briefly]
RI As much to do with the student as with staff at the medical school in that I was working constantly with them on research topics.
I So they were learning your approach through that?
RI Yes, that's right.
I So you were teaching medical students in the late '50s, that was then that began?
RI In the late '50s. I can't remember quite how it began, it was not because of any initiative that I took but I was asked to come along and teach. I think I was asked by the man who is at present the vice-chancellor of Durham University, Alan Halliday, who was in the Biology Department at the time.
I Really?
RI Yes. And then from there on it eventually expanded.
I Yes, and continuously expanded?
RI Yes, it continuously expanded until, instead of my standing up and talking to about a hundred students two or three times a year, we were working much more individually with small groups of students or even with individual students getting them to go out and do a piece of work, do a piece of research and come back and discuss it with us and so on. That was a quite different form of teaching, more enjoyable form of teaching, of course.
I Yes, thank you. This is a recap but how did your previous experience fit in with what you were going to do in Aberdeen in the '50s?
RI I don't think it really fitted in very much at all in any specific sense. Nor do I think it would have been possible at that time to have got anybody anywhere to do that. Because what Dugald Baird was doing, was something just totally unique. I shouldn't think there had ever in history before been a sociologist in a department of Obstetrics and there wouldn't at that time have been more than one or two in any medical school in Britain. So they were in the same position then that I was later in Sociology, that if they were going to develop this field, they had to crate their own people. And …
I That was where it began?
RI That's what they did, so they interviewed people in a terrifyingly competent way and then, having chosen them, they were subjected to, not education, but to a constant process of discussion, discussion and committee and meeting and so on that was itself very highly stimulating. I can't think that, at that in something like 1956 I think it would be, I was here and I had got two colleagues; one colleague, who was professionally qualified in Anthropology, and I brought him on to help me in that medical field and the Medical Research Council called a meeting to see how far this subject called Medical Sociology could be developed in the country and as a result of that we set up a meeting of all the medical sociologists in the county once every three months to discuss various things. The Medical Research Council paid for it. And we took, for our purpose, the whole of a small hotel which had got six rooms
I Really, so that was …?
RI So we could have the residents' lounge. That was the total body in this country. And so they couldn't have got people in to fit in with what, they wanted they had to create it.
I So that you came with experience of town planning?
RI I came with a very, what I came with was a very broad experience that I started as a historian, I'd then gone on, I'd been a prisoner of war and I'd learned various things there as part of being there …
I Like?
RI Statistics. But then I'd gone on to Oxford and politics, philosophy, and economics, I'd gone into town planning. I'd come out with a very, very broad knowledge of the social sciences.
I And rather older than some students who'd just graduated?
RI Yes, that's right, that's right.
I So more experienced?
RI Yes. So what I came with was this broad historical social background of knowledge and I came with a political motivation which I think was characteristic of sociologists in the early 50s. There were very few that would not have been either currently members of a left-wing group or in the past members of this.
I Really?
RI Yes. And to some extent what they were in that subject for was for a reform, a change of society. It was the nearest thing they could find in work-life to fulfil the kind of social, political ambitions that they had and I went over the list of all sociologists I knew, somewhere round about, there were only about a hundred in the country, and I reckoned that at that time more than half had previously been members of the Communist Party, including myself, which was how I knew they'd been in it. So I came with a motivation which fitted very well the subject matter in that what we were concerned about was the degree to which the lives of people including their jobs and their wealth and their income and their habits and their housing and so on, have an impact upon their pregnancy, and their labour and the outcome. So I think that the desire to help to change was also there. The subject changed subsequently and became very much more a professional subject that you learn, and you teach in the same way that you would learn a foreign language and you become a professional at it. They were amateurs at an earlier period.
I Yes, that's interesting.
RI They were still amateurs in the 60s, but I think it was only in the 70s that they began to feel a PhD became more important and the ability to display your ideas and your theories, and your methodologies and so on.
I Rather than to try to change society?
RI Yes, yes.
I And do you feel that you've change society, through your time anyway?
RI I think I have in certain ways, yes, I mean it's not given to any of us I think in the mass society that we live in to do more than change the shape of a blade of grass and that's what I would think that I had one. I think I have founded a profession and founded it fairly strongly in this country, where it is probably bigger than anywhere else in Europe, and also helped to fund it in Europe, so, and it's a profession that I think has got something to give to health and welfare. So, yes, I feel that in the formation of that profession I have. I think in one or two other things, individual pieces of research, yes. I think in the field of reproduction I have. I think the field relating to contraception, to abortion, to perinatal death, birthweight, yes. I think probably I then went through a period in which I was not really contributing except in the development of a profession and in the distribution of research funds to other people around the world. I'm now back to working individually and doing my own research in a way that I've not done for a very long time on the field of the elderly in Europe, and again I think I can begin to see things happening. So there are very few of us who feel that we are able to do things like that and I feel enormously privileged that I've been able to do it, to do it from here, Aberdeen, from a University base, from a medical school. Yes I think that's been an enjoyable experience, a very rewarding one. So yes, I look back on my work here, and indeed my life here, with a great deal of pleasure. I would have stayed but I feel the time has come for me to start something new, to be in a new place, just as it's good for my research unit to get shaken up from time to time. I'm quite happy about having myself shaken up, so I'm happy to go and work in Bath where there's somebody that I very much respect as the Head of Department and to use it as a base which will be more convenient than Aberdeen for the work I've got to do in Europe.
I What was it like in the University in 1951?
RI Well, when I, I was up at Foresterhill but had got the attachment to the Department of Economics in Political Economy in King's. When I wanted to get in touch with them there I had to ring down to the janitor's lodge outside. He had to send his assistant across the quad and up the stairs to bring down the Professor of Political Economy or one of his staff in order to talk to me on the phone. That was the kind of nature of the communications at the time and it wasn't until somewhere in the mid-50s that one phone was put in that department.
I Just one?
RI That was the professor's phone and if he wasn't there then you could manage to get somebody else but that was a very severe disadvantage if you were away up at Foresterhill. I was a young man; I hadn't got a car, quite difficult. On the other hand, when you did get down there, it didn't take you very long to know everybody and we used to go out, I don't know whether they do it now, but every year a Departmental picnic was arranged.
I How nice!
RI Fraser Noble, who later became Principal, was a member of the Political Economy Department at the time, he used to go with us, and Henry Hamilton and his wife used to organise this and off we went, taking our wives or so on with us and we'd stop off at the Raemoir Hotel and have coffee on the lawn and then we would go and have lunch at the Bridge of Potarch and climb up a little hill behind and so on, rather a sweet ceremony, but it was felt that you were a member of a small family and should be, even though I was up at Foresterhill and was not really ...
I Part of it, you were invited …?
RI And I always went.
I Yes.
I Professor Illsley, you were telling me how you dealt with the vast number of students in first year, how you gave them their first tuition?
RI Yes, well, it was a very difficult task, but what we attempted to do was to give two lectures a week, and to give two seminars a week, or two tutorials a week, to each student, preferably if we could managed it and we usually could in groups of seven or eight.
I That was a very small number?
RI It was a very small number and the only reason we could do it was that I was able at that time to draft the whole of my research staff to come down, from Foresterhill to teach; they quite liked doing it because many of them saw themselves as later going on to take a University teaching job and it was practice for that, and there was something, I think, very exciting about teaching at the time; a new course, new subject, new students, lots of enthusiasm, lots of naiveté and all that kind of thing, but there it was. So they came down and taught and some of them would teach as much as six hours a week, so we were able to teach what would otherwise have been an unbearably large class. Our teaching ratio was twenty-eight students to one staff.
I Which is heavy for a school, for less a university?
RI That's right, it was very heavy indeed. Obviously, that was at the highest point, I've remembered the highest point that it reached, but we were usually way up in the seventeen, eighteen, twenty, sort of mark, and I couldn't have done it without that and indeed at that time we were bringing down postgraduate students.
I As well?
RI In order to do it. In that way, I think, students who would otherwise have been lost and discontented in a very large group, had got somebody to whom they could relate on a fairly easy basis. So when I think back on my class, I think mainly of those tutorial students and I suppose I would remember most of them because over a year, meeting them twice a week in small groups ...
I You'd get to know them well?
RI You would get to know them. And I did do the usual thing that was characteristic of, I think a very good characteristic of Scottish universities of that time, was that I did concentrate very heavily in the first year class personally as the Head of Department. And I thought it was an excellent tradition. It was, from some points of view, I'm not sure that it's always true that the Head of Department because he's the dead of department is the best teacher in the department and he could sometimes, I think, be a penalty for students because some young staff are obviously better informed than the Head of Department. I think that was true in my case. There was another good thing about bringing down the research staff; they did bring in, and I encouraged them to do it, bring in their own findings, bring in their own sense of interest in what they were doing and that I think usually rubbed off onto the students.
I So there wasn't a feeling of competition between the MRC staff and the University staff?
RI There came one later, yes. At the beginning it was a very, very enthusiastic joint enterprise. The competition came, I think, at a later point. The dynamics of running a research unit and running a University department are very different and during those difficult periods of the 1960s, some of the young Turks of the teaching department felt that many of the decisions that they were wanting to take were being overruled by people they regarded as not really being proper teaching staff, who were more conservative they felt that they were, and so on. And there came a point at which they called for a vote on whether members of the research staff should attend staff meetings. It began to develop around that time, as I think it probably did in other places.
I About 1970?
RI Yes, about 1970.
I Yes, and did they carry that or was it ...?
RI No, they didn't carry that but it was obviously a deterrent thing for staff coming down from Foresterhill who weren't being paid for the job, it was purely voluntary, and I think gradually their interest began, their enthusiasm began to decline, Then I went away for a year to Boston University, and when I came back, a new Head of Department, I found that none of my research staff were teaching in the University department because what had happened had been that the number of students had gone down heavily and they did begin then to see competition and they decided that they hadn't got enough students to teach themselves and therefore they didn't need to bring in ...
I Extra staff?
RI Extra staff. So at the point, a division began to occur that became quite sharp ultimately between the Department and the Institute such that probably there was very, very little contact between them in the later years. Just individual contacts. Occasionally some of our people would go down to seminars there, occasionally they would come up to ours. We probably had more contact with Social Work than we did with Sociology.
I I see. Would the numbers of Sociology students have been declining nationally at that sage, or was this an Aberdeen phenomenon?
RI I think it was an Aberdeen phenomenon, yes.
I Associated with you moving out of the department, perhaps?
RI Yes, well I wouldn't put it quite that way. I would say associated with a change in the nature of the curriculum.
I Yes, you said that they were going for a more academic line?
RI Whereas I was saying, let me take the life that they have led, the schools they've been to, the way in which a school is organised, the life in a school, the life in a family, the life in a rural area, and let's look at it and talk about it and then begin to say: can we evolve some sociological principles out of this? And go back then to some of the texts and so on about it. The new Head of Department, turned it round and they began by teaching what the great sociologists had said and one and so on, and I think in a four year course you can afford to do that, in a one year course you can't.
I It's difficult yes.
RI Because you never really get down to these other kind of exciting things and so I think it lost its, I think it lost its most great appeal.
I Is the Department of Social Work a part of the …?
End of Interview
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