An ominous vacancy at the top of British academia

Press, 1 June 1988, Page 20

An ominous vacancy at the top of British academia

Ed Viilliamy, of the “Guardian,” reports on why Oxford will not fill its top history post

THE REGIUS professorship of modem history at Oxford — the highest chair in the historian’s profession and its ambassadorship on the world academic stage — is soon to become vacant until further notice, for the first time since the reign of George I. The present regius professor, Sir Michael Howard, announced at the beginning of this term that he will retire to work in America a year earlier than planned — in 1989, instead of 1990. In normal times, the quiet murmuring about an appropriate successor would by now be starting to echo around the quadrangle staircases of Oxford.

But not so: the Faculty Board is to recommend to the university that the regius chair be left vacant at least until 1990, when it will, as Sir Michael says, “look again at the situation.” It is conceivable that the seat at the apex of British history will remain empty well into the 19905. If the fact of these circumstances seems ominously significant, then the reason for them is more so. At Oxford, the chair of economic history is currently vacant. So is the chair of Commonwealth history. The regius professorship of ecclesiastical history is empty. The chair in history of science has just been filled, but the chair in American history is about to fall vacant. The important readership in diplomatic history is free and a considerable number of tutorial college fellowships are unfilled. The cause in every instance is a shortage of public money. "Every time the faculty looks at that queue,” says Sir Michael, “there is always a competition between the need to fill teaching posts in the colleges and the need to fill the universityappointed chairs. Now, we have to decide where in that order we put the regius chair, when there are all these immediate needs and specific jobs to do.” The chair is, in theory, a gift to the university from the monarch — and in practice an appointment by the Prime Minister. The , university, however, foots the bill.

The regius chairs in Oxford and Cambridge were created by George I as part of a- Whig plan to reform universities — the modern history chair in particular was a response to a flurry of Jacobite sympathies among academics at Oxford and Cambridge during the 17205. The machinery of appointment is a mysterious process akin to

that which used to apply to the selection of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Indeed, the regius chair has been a political matter in a similar way to Church appointments in as much as Prime Ministers (especially Mrs Thatcher) would be unlikely to select someone who held views which were politically repugnant to them. Sir Michael is a military historian who is read and admired by Mrs Thatcher, and has turned out to be a popular and industrious holder of the chair. He may have been Mrs Thatcher’s political preference over the dons’ clear favourite in 1980 — Professor Keith Thomas — but he has become something of a bete noir of late, writing an official history of World War II which the Government is trying to prevent from being published. If he is a Conservative, he is a liberal one;

if he is a supporter of N.A.T.0., that has not deterred him from criticising President Reagan. “It was an appointment I found rather embarrassing, because I was out of the historical mainstream, involved in diplomatic and international relations — sailing at a tangent from the fleet to which I was called to be the flagship,” recalls Sir Michael. “Flagship” is what the regius chair has become, to almost all historians at Oxford, and even to most outside. “I don’t think the regius professor can lay down the law about what history should be,” says Dr Paul Slack, who will succeed Sir Michael as chairman of the faculty on his retirement. “But he is there to set an example for history — to show by that example what the practice of the craft really is, and to guard the subject in a general sense against those who

may say it is not important, or that It is part of some wider thing called ‘humanities’ or whatever.” Earl (Conrad) Russell, who is Astor Professor of British History at London, and who would be a front-runner for the regius chair, regards the post as having a contemporary responsibility to protect history from the very circumstances which cause the 4 chair’s current predicament: financial difficulties and the idea that academe can be “managed” like a business by doing things like reducing Ph.D completion times. Yet Russell praises Oxford’s refusal to assume that the chair must be filled while teaching posts and professorships are vacant — “The top priority is to have people to teach our graduates and under-graduates. The greatest need of all is to have people who can carry on the profession into the next century.” It is rather poignant that two other probable front-runners — J. H. Elliot and John Kenyon — would first have to be wooed back from the United States'. Professor Keith Robbins, of Glas-

gow, the president of the Historical Association, regards the post as needing to be seen “in the context of a crisis in history as a whole, in terms of what history is, and also with regard to where the next generation of historians is going to come from, and what kind of history will they teach." Indeed, the past three decades have been tumultuous in terms of the definition, of history: the supremacy of the Marxist school during the 19605, the advent of the thematic “new history,” and

now the signs of a return to more

narrative or orthodox scholarship — and this has given Sir Michael’s term of office additional responsibilities, almost of arbitration. “I am neither of these things; I have to sort of hold the reins, to regard the right kind qf history as being that which absorbs innovations and digests them. No historian can write the kind of history that was written before the Marxists, and yet I see people like Geoffrey Elton as restoring the necessary muscle and fabric to the subject — without them history would be a jellyfish.” Another role that Sir Michael

has brought to the chair is administrative — he has been a more active faculty man than any of his predecessors (even if its members sometimes rather jokingly address hime as “Re- ' gius”). History at Oxford has had to make a decision that no practising historian believes that a great international university should be forced to make: between the intellectual and symbolic importance of the regius chair, the Importance of the specialist chairs to post-graduate study and the future of the profession, and the under-gradu-ate teaching responsibilities of the college tutorial fellowships. Sir Michael expects no guaranteed priority for his vacated chair: "The job specification of the regius chair has never been drawn up. Every incumbent has his own way, and so the faculty doesn’t know who or what it will get. Ultimately it is a gamble, and there may be a feeling of ‘if we are going to fill a vacancy then for heavens’ sake then let’s fill it with someone for whom there is an immediate need’. “There is economic history,. Commonwealth history ... how can you say the regius chair should have priority when you don’t even know who you are going to get?” Most historians in Oxford would be decidedly unhappy if there was still no regius professor by 1992. Nevertheless, there is an additional undercurrent to the thinking of a number of influential dons which, makes them reluctant to allow Mrs Thatcher the prestige of making her own appointment to a flagship post, when she is perceived to be to blame for the malaise which forces them to hold the post vacant In 1985, Oxford refused Mrs Thatcher the customary honorary doctorate awarded to Prime Ministers. Last year, Roy Jenkins was elected to the university’s chancellorship by an overwhelming majority, and only last week launched the latest of his many attacks on Government education policy from his Oxford seat, with what seeim to have been the hearty approval of most fellows. “There is no love lost between this faculty — indeed, this university — and Mrs Thatcher,'* observed one senior history don, “and that might well be' an Important consideration when the discussion comes around as to what chairs or posts this faculty should ask the university to fill.”