The Disintegrating Chair: Professors in Britain Today

Abstract

Outside the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the academic building-block in British universities has long been the Chair, occupied by the single professor of the subject or discipline. This was true, if with minor differences, both in the old Scottish universities (established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and in the English and Welsh nineteenth and twentieth century foundations. Without ever, perhaps, being such autonomous and pre-eminent deities as their counterparts in France and Germany, yet the British were at least recognisable to anyone with direct experience only of the professeur titulaire de chaire or the professor Ordinarius. Even where the Department, staffed by academics of lower rank, became the normal unit for teaching and (to a lesser extent in the non-scientific ones) research, the standard pattern was that the Professor, from his Chair, should be the Head of Department and thus responsible for its satisfactory working even if armed with lesser powers over his non-professorial colleagues than were his continental European counter-parts. Thus, as recently as 1961-62, 80% of were department heads, while 74% of the heads of department were professors (The Robbins Committee on Higher Education, 1963, as summarised by Halsey & Trow, 1971, p. 375); and those departments headed by non-professorial staff were almost invariably small and/or relatively new and thus not yet deemed worthy of a chair. What is more, such departments could not expect significantly to grow until they did acquire a professorial head, such was the predominance of the in the university's decision-making. How social pressures and (largely government inspired) structural reforms in mainland Europe did much to depose the continental enthroned professor in the later 1960s and early 1970s is well documented (as in Daalder & Shils, 1982; Van de Graaf, 1978), but there is less general appreciation of the consequences for the British professoriate of a series of sustained but less dramatic developments. During most of the first half of the twentieth century, a chair or professorship indicated a package of characteristics that were both distinctive and coherent (in the sense that they were in large measure mutually sustaining). This is to say that, to anyone familiar with the academic world, the title of professor signified the holder of the chair in a particular subject whose superior rank was accompanied by superior status, pay, authority, power and responsibility within his (usually) university as well as in the department of which he was the head and uniquely qualified representative. Put slightly differently, it could be said that the position implied several roles: (1) the professor was expected to be the (or an) intellectual leader in his subject, the person who would initiate and supervise research, give shape to the curriculum as a whole, select, train and encourage the more junior members of staff, and provide a model for students; (2) his was the responsibility also for the efficient working of the