9. What Are Universities For?
© 2021 Philip Graham, CC BY-NC 4.0https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0278.09
While the Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology was sitting between 1982 and 1984, the members who had university posts were living anxiously through a government onslaught on the finances of their academic institutions. In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher and a radically reforming Conservative government had been elected to power. The Prime Minister saw the universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, as anti-business, anti-merit, even, with their cosmopolitan leanings, anti-patriotic.1 There were some academic subjects to which she was particularly antipathetic, sociology, which had mushroomed in the 1960s and 1970s being foremost among them. Mathematics and the sciences (she herself had studied Chemistry at Oxford) as well as vocational subjects such as law and medicine were more likely to be protected. As was nearly always the case over this period, the country was in an economic crisis. It did not take long for the axe to fall. In 1981, universities were told to expect an 18% cut to their finances over the next three years. They were given a month to decide how to implement the cuts.2
Mary’s husband, Geoffrey, had been elected Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor in 1981. Within a year of his appointment, he attended a meeting of Vice-Chancellors held in London which was addressed by the Prime Minister in uncompromising terms. She relentlessly attacked the universities for what she saw as their elitism and indifference to the economy (see Chapter One).3 He was astonished that the Prime Minister should assemble a room full of leading academics and university administrators and show no desire to listen to them; indeed they had not been allowed to say a word. He was in the forefront of those at Oxford who had to work out how to cope with a significant decline in funding. Before 1979, universities had been relatively favoured by the Treasury and had seen a gradual but significant expansion over the previous thirty years. Now they had to go into reverse. Because of the large endowments of some of the colleges, Oxford was relatively cushioned against the cuts, but even so, between 1981 and 1990 the university lost sixty-nine posts in the arts and social studies and fifty-eight posts in mathematics and the sciences. External funding from research councils and the National Health Service meant that many science posts were retained, but the arts and humanities subjects were badly hit over this period.4
The fundamental ideological differences between academics like the Warnocks and the Prime Minister concerned the value to be placed on the arts. Mary and Geoffrey saw them as precious cultural assets that should be supported by substantial public funding. Margaret Thatcher saw them as the preserve of a privileged elite; those who wanted them to survive should pay for them, not taxpayers, the vast majority of whom never went near an opera house. It was not that the Prime Minister dismissed intellectual ideas as unimportant; indeed, her government was ideologically driven to a greater extent than any previous Conservative administration. Unlike any of her predecessors, she was a reasonably regular attendee at a philosophy group, one of whose members was the Warnock’s friend, Anthony Quinton.5 But the neo-liberal, free market ideas discussed in the philosophy group which attracted her were very different from those which influenced the Warnocks and their friends.
While an ideological chasm was opening up between the government and the universities over the purposes of higher education and its funding, Mary herself had become a favoured public figure. The Report of the Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology had won widespread praise. In 1984 she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire, a high public honour. Lady Warnock was now in demand as a wise woman who could pronounce in the media on virtually every issue in which an element of moral judgement was required. Further, she was good value, speaking entertainingly and often drawing on her own personal experiences as a mother, wife, teacher and friend. She managed to be both profound and funny.
In 1983, there was an unexpected vacancy for the Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. Brenda Ryman, a distinguished medical biochemist who had been the Mistress for the previous seven years, had died after a relatively short illness. In the spring of 1984, Mary was approached to see if she were willing to be a candidate. She was just coming to the end of her chairmanship of the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Committee. The member of Girton’s search committee who went to Oxford to discuss the possibility with her was Gillian Beer, the Vice-Mistress, a distinguished English don and later herself President of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She found Mary to be a delightful, free-spirited woman, interested in a wide variety of topics. She reported back favourably, and, after an extended interview with all the official fellows, Mary was duly offered the post. Gillian Beer recalls that when she telephoned to tell Mary she was to be offered the post, her reaction to the news was to exclaim ‘Oh, my Lord’ giving the impression she was greatly surprised, having not really thought her candidacy would be taken seriously.6 In Mary’s own honest but rather graceless words: ‘I suppose I accepted Girton because I had not got anything particularly urgent on hand in either Oxford or London, and because it felt agreeable to be offered a new job at the age of sixty, when if I had still been a headmistress I would have had to retire.’7
Girton College had been founded by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon in 1869 to make university education available to women. It was the first women’s college in Cambridge and for over eighty years was only joined by Newnham. In 1976, Girton began to admit male undergraduates and by 1984, when Mary became Mistress, there were roughly equal numbers of men and women undergraduates.8 The fellows, however, were still predominantly female with very small numbers of male fellows, mainly in subjects such as Engineering in which female academics were in a small minority. During Mary’s tenure at Girton, there were no controversies regarding the mixed status of the college. When there were vacancies for fellows, men were given equal opportunity and began to be appointed in increasing numbers, no particular concessions being made for women; indeed, Sarah Kay recalls that when she arrived to be considered for a position as a fellow, she was made to leave her baby in the Lodge while she was being interviewed. There was no creche.9 On the other hand, in contrast to the men’s colleges where committee meetings were usually held at five p.m., in acknowledgement of the needs of committee members who were mothers of young children, at Girton they took place at two p.m.
Mary was undeniably a catch for Girton. She was a well-known public figure with a strong academic record who had already received a high public honour. The following February 1985, shortly after joining Girton, she was made a life peer. Indeed, had the life peerage arrived a few months earlier, it is quite possible Mary would not have gone to Girton, making a more full-time career in the House of Lords. As it was, she spent rather little time in the House of Lords while she was at Girton, limiting her attendance to debates about legislation arising from the report on human fertilisation and embryology and a few other topics such as education in which she had some specialist knowledge or opinions.10
Mary was already familiar with the complicated governance systems of Oxford; those of Cambridge, though not identical, were very similar. As Vice-Chancellor, with the Chancellor only a titular position, her husband Geoffrey was the administrative head of the University of Oxford. The relationship between the colleges and the university was highly complex, the colleges jealously retaining their independence and autonomy to the best of their ability. Writing in 1964 (and the situation had changed little by the early 1980s), about one aspect of the organisation of Oxbridge, Rose and Ziman claim: ‘The organisation of undergraduate education is intricate. Like so much else, it is not the product of straightforward “educational engineering”, or indeed planning of any kind. Rather it is a splendid historical growth, rich with complexities and anomalies, positively Burkean in its close intertwining of interests, ancient customs and peculiar practices.’11 And that was just undergraduate education. Equally complex issues were, for example, postgraduate education, the distribution of government finance between the university and the colleges and between the individual colleges, and the representation of the university to the outside world. While attempting to bring some sort of order into a chaotic situation, Geoffrey had discussed with Mary how to achieve a more logical structure. She was therefore well versed in the problems. Further, by the time Girton approached Mary, Geoffrey had achieved some success in the matter of representation to the outside world. On his retirement as Vice-Chancellor in 1985, he was able to claim: ‘We have found ways, while remaining an essentially federal and inevitably complex system, of speaking with one voice when necessary and of acting, when necessary, with respectable decisiveness and celerity; we have found ways of presenting ourselves to government and the University Grants Committee and particularly perhaps to schools as one university and not a disorderly crowd.’12
While Mary did not have to deal with politics at a university level, she had thought deeply in the past about the purposes of higher education. To understand her thinking on the aims appropriate for a university, one needs to go back a decade. Although Mary had resigned from her position as headmistress of Oxford High School in July 1972 largely in order to help her husband in his new role as Principal of Hertford College, she also wanted time to write another philosophical book. After appointment to Lady Margaret Hall’s Talbot Research Fellowship,13 over the next four years she dedicated the time available to her after supporting Geoffrey and those of her children still in their teens to writing Imagination. This was the first book Mary published putting forward her own original perspective on a philosophical topic. Its content is largely a description of the history of ideas relating to imagination, but the book also makes a passionate plea for the power of imaginative thinking to be valued throughout the education system.
In her Preface, Mary makes clear that she is attempting to follow a thread of ideas about the nature of imagination and imaginative thinking, beginning with Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. The sequence of ideas she is to describe links the way we perceive the world to our imaginations. We use mental images in our everyday perceptions but, more significantly, we have the power to use such images to interpret the world as different, sometimes radically different, from the way it is usually perceived. Such creative interpretation may be, in Mary’s words, ‘inventive, personal and revolutionary.’14 Our imagination underlies our capacity to think creatively in that it is ‘that which creates mental images [Mary’s italics].’15 She adds that she has come to believe that ‘it is the cultivation of the imagination which should be the [my italics] chief aim of education.’16 Ignoring this aim is, she believes, the main reason why current systems of education most conspicuously fail.
She traces the development of the idea of the imagination from the Enlightenment philosophers, Hume and Kant, through to the early nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Schelling. She pauses here to consider the way the Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge considered the power of the imagination in creativity and our awareness of the infinite. She then moves on to consider how twentieth-century philosophers, especially Wittgenstein, Sartre and her own Oxford colleague, Gilbert Ryle, have explained the function of the imagination. Finally, in her concluding remarks, Mary gives her own characterisation of imagination as follows: ‘there is a power in the human mind which is at work in our everyday perception of the world, and is also at work in our thoughts about what is absent; which enables us to see the world, whether present or absent as significant, and also to present this vision to others, for them to share or reject.’17 She goes on: ‘And this power, though it gives us ‘thought-imbued’ perception (it “keeps the thought alive in our perception”) is not only intellectual. Its impetus comes from the emotions as much as from the reason, from the heart as much as from the head.’18 She approves of Sartre’s view that our ‘ability to imagine is identical with the ability to detach ourselves from our actual situation and envisage situations which are non-actual.’19
‘One must,’ she wrote, ‘recognise the universality of the imaginative function, both in that it belongs to everyone and in that it is exercised by each over all his experience.’ It is necessarily connected to the emotions and therefore education should include education about the emotions. She believes that ‘there is more in our experience of the world than can possibly meet the unreflecting eye […] a feeling of infinity.’20 Without this feeling, she believes, life would be boring and, as we know from the horror she had of her own children being bored, this would be one of the worst fates one might have to endure.21 On the basis of her teaching experience, she claims that children cannot be taught to feel deeply but they can be taught to look and listen in a way that leads them to experience emotions differently.22 This does not lead her to think that children should necessarily be encouraged to be creative themselves, but more that in looking at art or in reading literary work, they will invent or imagine meanings that give them a sense of infinity.23 Meanings, she believes, spring up around us from the moment we become conscious and it is the imagination that ascribes these meanings.24 Thus, the power of the imagination is central to our understanding of the world around us.
The reviews of Imagination in the general press were highly positive. The anonymous reviewer in The Times Higher Education Supplement wrote
The task [Mrs. Warnock] sets herself—to trace and assess the rise of Imagination as a word of power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—is a formidable one, requiring both acuity of intelligence and a comprehensive literary culture […]. To read this book is to experience the special pleasure of being taught by a brilliant teacher. It is unlikely to be matched for many years.25
Michael Tanner in New Society wrote:
Anything that Mary Warnock writes is notable for lucidity and zest, and that is perhaps truer of this book than of anything she has previously written. It is certainly her most ambitious book to date, in that she argues for some views which, if they were taken seriously by educationalists and teachers, would lead to something of a revolution in education.26
Frank Kermode in the New Statesman wrote: ‘One of the charms of this very attractive book is that it disentangles and makes luminous [a] daunting complex of notions […] [she] has the pertinacious delicacy of Ariadne in the labyrinth.’27
The reception by contemporary philosophers was less enthusiastic. Although W. Charlton in the Philosophical Quarterly thought that Mary handled the topic with ‘a sensitivity and professional expertise which could hardly be bettered,’ he felt that she never satisfactorily came to grips with the idea that we [must] have an image-producing faculty if we reject idealism.’28 Andrew Harrison in Mind suggested that Mary’s major claim is that ‘we need to take something out of the Romantic picture of the imagination (as illustrated by Wordsworth and Coleridge), seriously, but when she comes to the point of saying what that picture is her statement of it becomes curiously insubstantial.’29 David Carrier in the Journal of Philosophy saw Mary as wishing to connect our imagination as an essential part of ordinary perception and imagination as an aesthetic experience. He does not think that she succeeds in linking the two satisfactorily. Further, he does not find her historical analysis of imagination of much philosophical interest.30
Imagination may, all the same, be regarded as providing the philosophical underpinning for Mary’s views on the purpose of education at all levels. In Schools of Thought, the book she had published in 1977, in which she developed her views on secondary education (see Chapter Six), she wrote about Imagination as one of the three components of what she called ‘the good life’ for which secondary school pupils should be prepared (the other two being Virtue and Work). She was no less insistent on the importance of the development of the imagination when she came to consider the purposes of higher education. In a lecture she gave in 1994, she claimed ‘I have argued that the imagination is crucial in the acceptance of shared and continuing values. It is not surprising therefore that I would also argue that the education of the imagination is by far the most important educational goal…’31
These then were her ideas of the aims of higher education formulated in the decade before she went to Girton. In addition, while waiting to take up her post, she developed more practical thoughts, mainly expressed in interviews with journalists. In one such interview she cited her interest in women’s education. This interest might have seemed misplaced in that Girton, by her time, admitted equal numbers of men and women as undergraduates, but for Mary, this had only led to a number of unanswered questions. ‘Mixed colleges at Oxford have not made the faintest difference,’ she declared,
What has been exploded is the myth that girls work harder and do better than boys. In fact, they do worse. Girls never get thirds, but they seldom get firsts. They are less ambitious, more cautious and the fear of seeming to be a clever girl runs very deep. The easiest way for a girl to survive at Oxford is not to compete very hard. If she does get a first or a scholarship, at least some of the men she knows may not be able to put up with it. They may say ‘How marvellous’ and turn away. They’ve got to be very careful.32
She was depressed and irritated by this. She noted: ‘At Girton the previous year, all the first class degrees had been awarded to men—she would like to find out why and how the girls are educated on the way up.’33 There were other ideas Mary took to Cambridge in the hope of changing minds there. She wanted to broaden the social composition of the undergraduate body, not by making it easier for disadvantaged students to gain entry (she was opposed to any sort of positive discrimination), but by engaging with matters such as the secondary school and especially the A level curriculum, making it broader and more accessible to the whole range of students. She felt the existing, highly focused examination system favoured the candidates from independent schools. She also liked the idea of there being a month-long introductory course before their first term started for students admitted on the basis of their school record, to enable them ‘to familiarise themselves with aspects of their subject they would not have covered at school and with the general method and outlook of the university.’34
Mary remained at Girton for nearly seven years from January 1985 to the summer of 1991. In many ways these were productive years but, according to her, they were not happy. Although most of the fellows who were on the staff at the time Mary was at Girton do not recall any significant tensions in their relationship with her and find it hard to understand why she should have been unhappy there, she herself wrote later ‘the only part of my life that I would not want to live again is my time as head of a college.’35 For Mary, this was a rather striking admission. Most of us have more than one part of our lives that we would rather not live again. The strong impression from Mary’s profuse recollections is that every phase of her life, from her ‘blissful’ childhood onwards, had been a source of apparently unmitigated delight. For Mary, it was not that the glass had ever been half full or half empty; her glass had always been brimming over. So, her time at Girton was in marked contrast.
The problems, such as they were, probably arose even before she began there. When she arrived, the handsome modern flat built for the Mistress of the College was being renovated, and the temporary accommodation found for her was outside the college, not far away but far enough to make it seem as if she was outside ‘the family home.’36 In addition, when she began at Girton, Geoffrey still had two university terms to run as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and it was expected that Mary would be beside him when he entertained important guests of which there were many. Further, soon after his retirement from Hertford, Geoffrey began to suffer the early symptoms of the lung disease which led to his death in 1995. Mary’s worry about his health and desire to spend as much time as she could with him weighed on her throughout the later years of her tenure at Girton. She got into the habit of driving from Cambridge to Oxford quite early on Friday afternoon. Because she wanted to attend Hertford College chapel services on Sunday evenings, she did not return to Cambridge until Monday, often on Monday afternoon if she had appointments in London on Monday mornings.37 These various factors meant she had a short Girton week. This might not have mattered. In fact, her predecessor as Mistress, Brenda Ryman, was a more part-time Mistress. She had lived in London where she had a busy medical school job during her seven-year tenure, holding down a four day a week job as Professor of Biochemistry at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, only spending from Thursday evenings, when she always attended Formal Hall, until Monday mornings at Girton. When Brenda Ryman was at Girton, however, she made considerable efforts to socialise and mix with the fellows.38 So, it might not have mattered that Mary was only in Cambridge for part of the week if she had made a serious attempt to mix with the fellows when she was there. In fact, she rarely had lunch in Hall and when she did, she usually arrived late, just in time for grapes and cheese and stayed only a short time.39 Further, on the grounds that she hated eating dinner as early as seven fifteen p.m. she was only a very irregular attendee at Hall dinners, even at Formal Hall on Thursdays when graduate students joined the fellows at High Table. In her memoir, Mary describes one Tuesday evening, when she did attend dinner in Hall and found it an embarrassing experience. After dinner she went to the Combination Room for a cup of coffee only to discover that this was the evening the scientists got together after dinner to discuss science teaching, so she felt unwelcome.40 She sometimes gave the impression she was somewhat suspicious of the fellows and Gillian Beer, the Vice-Mistress felt she occasionally had to act as liaison between them.41 In fact, there is really no evidence that the fellows felt or showed anything but goodwill towards her.42
The governance of Girton was mainly in the hands of the Council, consisting of twelve fellows elected by their peers. Decisions made by the Council were passed on to the Augmented Council, formed of all the fellows and lecturers. If there was a matter requiring greater authority it was passed to the College Governing Body for a final decision. The Mistress chaired both the Council which met fortnightly and the Augmented Council which met less often. She also chaired the Education Board, the Academic Policy Committee, the Investments Committee, the committees selecting for research fellowships (one for sciences, one for arts subjects) and appointment committees in general.43 She was, of course, very fully briefed before all these committees but it is clear she had a heavy administrative load to carry within the college. Further she had to represent the college at university committees. There was a widely held view among the fellows who recollected her time as Mistress that she represented the college most effectively on these university committees, speaking with great authority and experience.
Shortly after her arrival at Girton, Mary was reported to have said at a dinner party that she intended to ‘give Girton a taste of strong government.’44 This may only have been a rumour, but, if true, according to a don who spent her career lifetime at Girton it was certainly never going to work, especially with a fellowship which had found during Brenda Ryman’s tenure that it could manage pretty well with a very part-time Mistress. In fact, as far as most fellows were concerned, it had always been a free and easy institution run in a democratic manner. This turned out not to be Mary’s style. A couple of examples illustrate her somewhat autocratic manner. It had been a tradition for tea and shortbread biscuits to be provided for the fellows at around four p.m. Fellows in arts subjects tended to finish their supervisions at this time and the science dons who often spent the day in their laboratories in the city two miles away tended to give their supervisions in the late afternoon after tea. So, the tradition of afternoon tea allowed all the dons to get together. Perhaps as an indirect result of pressure for economy from above (from the university and, beyond the university, from the Treasury), in what was seen as a rather petty money-saving measure, Mary, apparently without realising the social importance of the event decreed that afternoon tea (or was it just the shortbread?) would no longer be provided.45 On another occasion, it was discovered that one side of an avenue of cherry trees was threatening the foundations of a college building. Clearly these trees would have to be removed, but from an apparent desire for symmetry, Mary took the unpopular decision that the trees on both sides of the avenue had to be chopped down.46
Gillian Beer, who had been so impressed with Mary’s openness and charm when she initially discussed with her the possibility of her standing for Mistress, felt she rarely saw this engaging behaviour in her among her peers once established in the college, though Mary was more attentive to the students. Surprisingly, she found that Mary showed very little interest in the academic work in which the dons were engaged. Nearly all the fellows were carrying out research using their imaginations to extend the frontiers of knowledge, activities which, as we have seen, Mary saw as the paramount consideration in academic activity. Yet she seems never to have asked them about their work.47 Clearly then, Mary was seen as a rather remote figure who was not around very much and when she did appear failed to make much friendly contact with the fellows. Various reasons for this have already been described. At the beginning of her tenure, her flat was outside the college and she was regularly away for quite a large part of the week. But there were other reasons. Mary had never been particularly sociable with her work colleagues. Her family was central to her existence and she and Geoffrey together lived a highly sociable life in Oxford. But neither at St. Hugh’s nor at the Oxford High School had she been at all socially friendly with her professional colleagues. This characteristic was particularly marked at Girton although she did regard one of the dons, Gillian Jondorf, as a good friend. Another reason might have been that, even at this relatively early age (she was in her early sixties) she was becoming progressively deaf. Gillian Jondorf, who had to brief her before the committees she chaired, noted that she often had to repeat items of business before Mary grasped them.48 Deafness, because it makes it difficult for people to know what is going on around them, is sometimes linked to suspiciousness, and this might have been the case with Mary. Further, her sight was also impaired, which meant she sometimes did not recognise fellows when she passed them. Some of them probably mistakenly thought she was ‘cutting’ them.
One of the dons present while Mary was Mistress, Anne Fernihough, thinks there was a class problem. She thought that Mary regarded all the dons as having the same sort of privileged upbringing she had had herself. At one point, it became clear Mary thought Anne must have had a nanny to help her mother bring her up, whereas in fact she, as well as probably a number of the other fellows, (including Anne herself who came from lower middle-class Manchester) had family backgrounds in whose childhoods nannies certainly did not figure. Anne saw Mary’s Oxford background, her smart clothes and her North Oxford voice as setting her apart from the more modest lifestyle of the Girton dons, many of whom prided themselves on their lack of social pretension. She thinks the dons, though not particularly liking these aspects of Mary, were somewhat in awe of her, as indeed, she seemed at times to be of them.49 Another English don, Juliet Dusinberre, notes that Mary brought a certain aura of Oxford sophistication with her, alien to the more high-minded Girton ethos. Further, Juliet notes, Mary was the first Mistress not to have been an undergraduate at Girton, so was at a disadvantage in being less in tune with the place. According to Juliet, Mary thought Girton was incredibly shabby and was always trying to smarten it up. This got people’s backs up, and ‘she didn’t really handle it quite right, as later Mistresses have managed this without any difficulty.’50 Juliet thinks Girton has always felt rather gratified by its shabby image, which seemed to guarantee first-rate scholarship. This was noticeable in the dons’ clothing.’51 Mary made some unfortunate comparisons between Oxford and ‘the high-minded ladies of Girton’ which nobody liked. She also showed lack of judgement in some of her fundraising activities, at one point proposing that Robert Maxwell, the billionaire notorious for financial dealings of doubtful propriety, be approached. This did not go down well.52 There were also some fellows, such as Frank Wilkinson, the left-wing economist, who were ideologically opposed to Mary’s centre-right politics.53
Mary may have expected to have more power to make changes than she did. When her husband had been appointed Principal of Hertford College in 1971, academic morale was low, and the buildings were in a poor state of repair. Geoffrey was able, by dint of strong leadership and a hierarchical power structure, to turn things round and Hertford had moved to near the top of the academic table. Cambridge colleges did not work like that, as Mary’s brother, Sir Duncan Wilson, had discovered in the early and mid-1970s when he had been Master of Corpus Christi College (see Chapter Five). There may also have been differences in style and academic aspiration between the Mistress and the dons. At least one of the fellows, the Director of Medical Studies, positively disliked the idea of pushing the students towards top grades in their examinations. John Marks wrote: ‘[…] the Girton attitude to medical studies was to encourage the students to work to a high second-class standard, rather than a starred first, and to enjoy the other opportunities through which Cambridge life nurtures a broad-based character.’54 This, as we have seen, was not how Mary thought aspirations should be set.
Not all of these problems were of Mary’s making, and it was by no means the case that Mary was universally disliked by the Girton dons. Many admired her, including some, such as Edith MacRobbie, a distinguished animal physiologist, who thought she was good for the college.55 Those who were critical of her also found much to praise. Anne Fernihough reports that she has ‘nothing other than fond memories of her during her time at Girton.’56 Juliet Dusinberre, reported that, despite her reservations, she herself always got on well with Mary. The English dons worked together very much as a team and Mary was highly approving and supportive of this approach.57 Further, her contacts in the wider world meant that she brought unusually interesting people to the college to give talks and occasionally to dispense advice.
If relationships between Mary and the Girton fellows were sometimes awkward, she was undoubtedly popular with the undergraduate body. She made a point of having face-to-face interviews with all students shortly after they started their first term and all students in their first, second and third years were invited up to the flat for a buffet lunch during the year.58 In addition, she tutored a small number of the Girton undergraduates who were studying philosophy. One of them wrote to her many years later after hearing her talk on Radio 4:
You are unlikely to remember my supervisions with you at Girton, but they are a memory I treasure. You once encouraged me to write an entire essay with my views on the topic in question, rather than simply summarizing the various more distinguished perspectives on it, answering my protestations that it would be the Mickey Mouse guide to the topic with the riposte that you had not read that guide, so to go ahead and write it. It was a very kind piece of encouragement.59
Probably Mary’s main achievement during her tenure was in fundraising. She was proactive in this respect. Sue Palmer, an ex-Girtonian with strong marketing and communications expertise, writes that, in the late 1980s, she was asked by Mary’s son, Felix, whom she knew through the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, to meet his mother. This led to the setting up of a group of business-minded ex-Girtonians who advised not just Mary but her two successors on fundraising.60 Mary understood that, following the government cuts, fundraising must become a serious and continuous activity. About twenty years earlier, while she was a member of the Oxfordshire Education Authority (see Chapter Four), she had worked with the Director of Music, Constance Pilkington, a member of the wealthy Pilkington family which had previously contributed to Girton. Mary wrote to the family trust, mentioning her previous contact with Constance. She was immediately contacted by a Liverpool solicitor who asked if he could come to see her. The solicitor asked what it would cost to endow a fellowship. Mary nervously named a large six-figure sum and the solicitor replied ‘All right. That is what Miss Pilkington would like to give, so long as it is not named after her but after her parents.’61 Thus, the Austin and Hope Pilkington Trust Music Fellowship was endowed. The first holder of that fellowship, Martin Ennis, a keyboard player, was recruited from Christ’s College where he was Director of Music. He was still in post thirty years later. Prior to his arrival, Girton undergraduates had put on musical events, but there had been no encouragement from the top. Martin ran the choir and took over the Music Society. After three years, he was appointed to the Music Faculty of the University of which he was Chair over a long period. Girton music was transformed during Martin Ennis’s tenure and this made a major positive difference to the College. During the short period from the time of his appointment to Mary’s leaving the college, he found her very supportive, though he thought her hearing impairment probably precluded more active involvement.62
Towards the end of her time as Mistress she instituted the Emily Davies Fora perhaps as a gesture towards the history of the college and one of its founders. These were annual meetings held in London for Girton students and alumnae which focused on the position of women in society. Mary’s successors continued to organise these meetings. According to Nancy Lane-Perham, these were ‘an enormous success. Not only Girton scientists but also graduates and practitioners of other subjects took immense delight in meeting at a central London venue to discuss different aspects of issues that impact on all women, such as the problems associated with ageing.’63
Mary was succeeded as Mistress of Girton by Juliet Campbell, a retired diplomat, who was somewhat in awe of Mary, having been supervised by her as an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Mary made a considerable effort to ensure Juliet had a smooth transition into her post. But when she took over, Girton did not seem in good shape to her successor, who came from a more civil service background. According to her, the budgeting system was inadequate, and the buildings were in poor repair.64 We have seen how Mary herself did not regard her time at Girton as a success, but it should be emphasised that many of the dons themselves took a less negative view. The endowment of the Music Fellowship and the kick-starting of fundraising were major achievements. After she left, Girton remained what Sue Palmer describes as a place where ‘the legacy of pioneering and the creation of opportunity blaze through.’65 Since Mary’s time, it has continued as a happy, relaxed college, maintaining high academic standards.
* * *
As we have seen, before Mary went to Girton, the Thatcher Government had already cut university funding. Then, after a year or two, it again began to formulate new policies towards the universities that were a distinct threat to the status quo. In 1981, Sir Keith Joseph, a brilliant but tortured Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, was appointed Secretary of State for Education. In 1985, a year after Mary arrived at Girton, he published a consultative green paper, Higher Education in the 1990s, that made some rather anodyne proposals for changes to university funding and organisation.66 The following year Kenneth Baker, a less cerebral but more decisive character with the same ideological commitment to reform of the universities, succeeded him as Secretary of State for Education. In 1987, Baker published a white paper, Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge, which proposed a far more radical agenda for universities over the next five years.67 The tone of the government’s policy was set out in the introduction. Prominence was given to the radical idea that an important role of universities should be to serve the economy more effectively and develop closer links with industry and commerce and promoting enterprise. Less contentious, indeed not contentious at all, was the other aim of pursuing basic scientific research and scholarship in the arts and humanities. In the immediate future, the government would plan for student numbers to increase. The needs of the economy would determine the right number and balance of graduates in the 1990s. The quality of academic work would be enhanced by more selectively funded research, targeted with attention to prospects for commercial exploitation. Efficiency would be increased by improvements in institutional organisation, changes in management and the development and use of performance indicators. The University Grants Committee, the body which had hitherto had the responsibility for the distribution of university finance, would be reconstituted (and, it was later proposed, should be retitled the ‘University Funding Council’) to include ‘a strong element of people from outside the academic world.’ The government would provide planning guidelines for the university system as a whole.68 The government also proposed instituting a system of student loans to help finance the cost of higher education. Overseas students had been paying for their university education from 1981, but the idea that home students should also pay was new at the time. The Conservative Party manifesto for the 1987 election was the first occasion for this idea to be mooted.
While at Girton, in addition to a philosophical book entitled Memory, discussed in Chapter Two and below, Mary wrote two books critically engaging with these new government policies. The first of these, A Common Policy for Education (see Chapter Six) is largely concerned with her views on secondary schools,69 but the book also contains a chapter on higher education. In this chapter, Mary discusses in some detail the likely harmful effects of changing the basis of student funding. Nearly one third of the UK population of relevant age was currently in higher education and the great majority of these were supported by Local Authority grants. Mary was shocked at the plans to convert grants into loans, with the inevitable consequence that students would leave university with substantial debts. This, in turn, would mean that they would not wish to enter low-paid employment, such as teaching.70 The fact that, in her view, there was no alternative to government funding of universities made it particularly important that such funding was seen to be justified.
Mary was particularly hostile towards the new government policies but universities themselves did not escape criticism. The expansion of the universities in the 1960s had been accompanied by the fear in academic circles that standards would drop. Universities had responded defensively by insisting that A level admission requirements must not change. She thought that universities should instead have looked at ways in which they themselves might adapt to meet the needs of students whose earlier school experience had left them less well prepared for higher education than it might have done. They should accept candidates with lower grades on condition they attend pre-entry courses to bring their basic skills up to scratch.71 Second, university courses for undergraduates should put far more emphasis on the method of acquiring and dealing with information rather than with the content of the information itself. Such transferable skills would be of immense benefit to the graduate when expected to enter new fields of knowledge.72 More attention should be paid to the needs of overseas students, rather than just their ability to pay high fees. The needs of older or more mature students, likely to enrol in ever larger numbers, should also be considered: they couldn’t just be slotted into undergraduate courses. In a concession to government policy, universities should also show flexibility in offering partnerships with employers in industry to meet the needs, for example, of employees who required re-training to fulfil new roles.73
In this connection, she discusses what she sees as the failure of polytechnics to devote themselves primarily to ‘produce an expert work-force for industry as it emerged into the era of new technology.’74 Instead, polytechnics had drifted towards providing degree courses of varying quality, blurring the distinction between themselves and universities by meeting the requirements of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA). She suggests that, instead, they should become free-standing institutions with the power to determine the nature of their own degree courses. At the time Mary was writing, apart from student fees paid by local authorities, universities were funded by grants administered by the supposedly independent University Grants Committee (UGC). This had become less and less independent and now, as has been noted, the government was proposing that it should be replaced by a University Funding Council (UFC) under much closer government control. Such a system might perhaps work for the applied sciences, Mary thought, but funding for humanities and the more abstract sciences such as mathematics or astronomy would be under constant threat.75
She then goes on to discuss academic freedom. This topic had come to the fore because the government was proposing to make funding support to the universities conditional on ending the existing lifelong tenure for university grades even as low as lecturer. This, in Mary’s view, would give the government powers to insist that academics whose views differed from theirs should have their contracts terminated. This was, in fact, not what was being proposed but one could see the dangers that government policies might present in the future in this direction. She points to the constraints put on universities in Nazi Germany as well as those exerted by the Soviet Union at the time she was writing.76 (She does not mention the fact that she had direct experience of the blinkered teaching at Soviet universities during her visit to Moscow in 1971 (see Chapter Five).) Nevertheless, she does not claim that universities must be free to teach whatever they want at whatever cost. Further, she thinks that the principle of tenure should not be applied when, for example, a university teacher is clearly incompetent or there are insufficient students to warrant continuation of a particular course. There will also be cases in which universities might justifiably be asked to merge some departments to ensure they are run more efficiently.77 Concerns about the level of expense of some university research might be met by setting up research centres of excellence independent of universities but, she notes, there are dangers in removing undergraduate contact with researchers at the cutting edge. She concludes her discussion of higher education with a firm statement of belief. ‘[…] to fulfil its function, higher education must be the source of questioning, critical and sceptical minds. Students will acquire these attributes only if their teachers are free to pursue knowledge and learning wherever they have the passion to do so.’78
During 1988, the year that A Common Policy of Education was published, the Conservative government passed its Education Reform Act which, in Mary’s view, seriously compromised the ability of universities to pursue their proper functions. Accordingly, she rapidly wrote a short polemic, Universities: Knowing Our Minds, as an attack on this legislation.79 She began by repeating her charge that universities were regarded with increasing indifference by successive governments. Not only is there indifference; the level of academic salaries indicates there is contempt for university teachers. Such contempt, she suggests, may arise from the jealousy of some politicians and ministers for what they perceive as the privileged life of the Oxbridge don.80
She then goes on to attack what she regards as the confused ideology underlying the 1988 Act. Universities were clearly seen by the government as commodities whose goods were to be bought and sold. She quoted Robert Jackson, the Minister of State for Higher Education, who declared: ‘Because a greater proportion of Universities’ income will depend on the attractiveness of what they are offering, they will have to fix on what is attractive and market it effectively.’81 The government, she alleged, was wrong to point to American universities as successfully applying a commercial model on the grounds they were privately funded. On the contrary, she pointed out, apart from a few liberal arts colleges, most institutions of higher education in the United States were funded either federally or, much more commonly, by the individual states.82
She went on to allege that the government clearly thought that the content of courses was less important than how they were paid for. In the past, the existence of the University Grants Commission had ensured that universities were seen as fulfilling needs. Now they no longer had an articulated function. Instead, it appeared that governments would only support universities if they were successful in obtaining funding from external sources. Such external funding would ensure that courses were relevant to the needs of society. This ignored the obvious requirement for universities to remain at the top of the academic pyramid. If, as Robert Jackson was suggesting, governments must stop being the providers of funding, and must be seen as customers, it was of relevance that it was widely accepted that customers do not always know best.83 On another tack, Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education, was proposing a division between universities carrying out research and those dedicated to teaching. In Mary’s view, research and teaching were inextricably linked. At university level, all teachers must be expected to look critically at received wisdom and are themselves best placed to do this if they are engaged in research themselves. This meant that students should realise that their teachers were as interested in research in their subjects as they were in them. ‘The test is,’ she wrote, ‘students should be conscious, through their teachers, of standing on the edge of a changing and developing world of learning.’84
The 1985 Jarratt Committee on the management of universities had outlined the fundamental aims of university education:
- instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour
- teaching to promote the general powers of the mind
- the advancement of learning
- the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship.85
Mary broadly endorsed these aims, but also proposed an additional function which she saw as paramount. Universities must attempt, she suggested, reverting to the idea she had expressed in Imagination, to lift people out of the limitations, both intellectual and imaginative, in which they had hitherto been bound.86 To do this universities themselves should place more emphasis on how knowledge is acquired rather than focusing so much on the body of existing knowledge. Information, she pointed out, can quickly go out of date, and it is the mental discipline needed to acquire it which matters. Universities should not just leave it to schools to develop curricula which might or might not be useful. She accepted that schools and universities must aim to teach useful knowledge, but, in reality, they have always done so. Latin was originally taught because it was the language of legal documents, and it continued to be taught because it was thought to hone useful transferable skills. But usefulness is, in any case, hard to define. Governments, in her view, frequently confuse the use of technological skills with the theoretical understanding of technology. Skills could not improve without theoretical advances, and industry could often not afford to fund theoretical research.87
However, Mary confidently asserted that all undergraduates should study the humanities as they are ‘language based and offer the chance of practice in clear expression and logical analysis.’88 Language provides the utilitarian justification for teaching the humanities as it is the basis for acquiring and communicating all knowledge. It enables students to learn that the imagination, insight and the ability to relate one subject to another are the most important attributes of a graduate.’89 Crucially, it allows ‘the possibility of envisaging a future different from either past or present that lies at the heart of the human imagination […] It must be the expansion of imagination that is the first demand on the universities.’90
If, as Mary believed, this was indeed the prime function of universities, then funding could not be left to industry that has profit as its main motive. Universities are a long-term investment in the not necessarily calculable future. The introduction of student loans would be folly, forcing students into debt they might never repay. In fact, student loans were only introduced over ten years later by a Labour administration and their introduction has led to many of the problems Mary envisaged. Although, as before, Mary accepts there can be no such idea as absolute academic freedom for universities, they should always retain control of the content matter of what is taught and the subject matter of research and its publication. These cannot be compromised. She writes: ‘A philosopher cannot be subject to the judgement of a committee, no single one of whom may have the faintest idea of what philosophy is.’91 Further, while a national curriculum for schools may be acceptable, there can be no such curriculum for universities. Instead, universities ‘must be seen as the source of new knowledge, the origin of that critical, undogmatic, imaginative examination of received wisdom without which a country cannot be expected to have its voice heard, and from which ultimately, all intellectual standards flow.’92 It is only from universities that such learning can come. She claims that when, in the 1930s, refugee scholars, including her most admired teacher, Eduard Fraenkel, came to Britain, this was well understood. She questioned whether this was the case now.93
Mary continued to talk and write about higher education after these books were published. In a lecture titled ‘Education with a Moral’ in 1991, at a symposium on higher education, she reflected on the importance to the undergraduate of the recognition of the principle laid down by Isaiah Berlin that ultimate values sometimes conflict with one another. At higher levels of education, it becomes more important for students to embrace the ‘virtue of non-dogmatism […] with an imaginative grasp of other possibilities.’ For such students, values intrinsic to education become central. By this she means ‘the imperative to accuracy, the need always to produce evidence for one’s statements, the need to argue, not merely assert and the readiness to listen to critical appraisal.’ She sees these values as akin to moral values, or at least part of ‘the culture of learning and research into which a student enters when he embarks on higher education.’94 This view continues to resonate in our own age of fake news and social media distortions of ‘truths’ unsupported by evidence.
Much of the content of Mary’s two books on education while she was Mistress of Girton makes admirable sense. However, her views and the views of the very large numbers of academics who agreed and continue to agree with her, have been consistently ignored over the thirty years since she wrote them. The result is that, despite the heroic efforts of the poorly paid academic staff in UK universities, many of the best academics are still tempted abroad, and students leave universities saddled with levels of debt they will struggle to repay for much of the rest of their lives. The history of British universities over the period from 1985 to at least the second decade of the twenty-first century, despite many notable achievements, has not been a happy one. Mary stood against the forces of largely mindless reform and was among the many who were defeated.
While she was at Girton, Mary also wrote the philosophical book, Memory (1987), from which I have quoted at the beginning of Chapter Two.95 She saw this as a sequel to Imagination, discussed earlier in this chapter. Memory is largely a history of philosophical ideas about recollection and recall from Locke and Hume to the mid-twentieth century. More significantly, in 1992 she delivered the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow and, in the same year, the Read-Tuckwell Lectures in the University of Bristol. These lectures which were brought together and published under the title Imagination and Time (1994),96 elaborated on the themes she had discussed in Memory and integrated them with her earlier work presented in her 1976 book Imagination.
Mary begins Imagination and Time with the proposal that the eighteenth century was a turning point in understanding the mind. The metaphor of the mind changed from it merely being regarded as a mirror reflecting the external world to that of a lamp, illuminating the world.97 Her aim in these lectures was to bring together literature and philosophy to consider the nature of the ‘I.’ She begins by claiming that the paramount requirements of both memory and the imagination are fundamentally the same. They depend on what has been in the past and what might be in the future. Because they have imagination, human beings are able to dissolve the otherwise insoluble problem of the relation between the inner and the outer. This provides them with the capability of grasping and understanding the world of which they form a part.
To support her argument, she cites the writings of philosophers such as Kant who explained how contemplating the wonders of nature could affect the sense of ourselves; scientists including the chemist, Humphrey Davy, who saw the imagination as essential to the discovery of truth; and the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge.98 She found helpful Coleridge’s proposition that because creative thoughts can be communicated to others the idea that such thoughts can discover timeless and universal truths is validated.
She then brought together the view of R. G. Collingwood, the historian of ideas, who described the function of the imagination in the understanding of art, with those of Sartre who believed that our imagination allows us to comprehend the significance or meaning of things. Our imaginations do this by acting as a bridge between what we perceive and what we understand about what we perceive. This is facilitated by symbolic thinking, with the shared meaning of symbols enabling us to communicate ideas more effectively.
This argument is followed by a discussion of values, the attributes by which we judge actions or beliefs to be good or bad, nice or nasty, pleasurable or painful, great or mean etc.99 The central means by which we communicate such values are stories. There are many ways of approaching the truth, including deductive argument and historical narrative. Mary attacks the post-modernist notion that truth can only be relative, pointing to Anthony Quinton’s refutation of the argument that truth must be relative because some ideas were once believed to be true and are now known not to be true. She quotes Sartre at length on ways we might know that a particular imaginative reconstruction of the past is ‘true,’ concluding that the more a historical explanation takes account of the known facts, the more likely it is to be accurate.
She then goes on to claim that it is in autobiography that the connections between our imaginations, our values and our awareness of time are most clearly seen.100 It is in recollection that the idea of a sharp distinction between mind and body is corrected. She quotes the neuroscientist, Gerald Edelman, in support of the idea that human consciousness evolved over time to enable people to develop individual identities based on their unique experiences. Human identity encompasses both mind and body. Further, the idea of a person who has a discernible identity is social; it involves the belief that there are others in the same boat as ourselves with similar discernible identities, some of which are shared, others not. People may wish to affirm their own immortality by writing an autobiography. They achieve a sense of continuity to their lives by telling their stories. The truth-telling element derives from the fact that what they write derives from personal experience.101
The Romantic poets believed that truths about oneself could illuminate general truths about everyone. Similarly, Proust claimed that, through writing a work of art, he could endow with wider significance his own memories of the past, especially if he concentrated on those memories which arose spontaneously.
The only meaningful way of seeing ourselves as immortal is to think of ourselves as somehow linked to the future. We can do this by considering our obligations to people not yet born. To do this, following the philosopher Derek Parfit, she suggests we must establish both continuity with and connectedness to the future.102 When we act, we should do so on the assumption that others will behave like us. Parfit wanted us to believe, and Mary concurs, that we are part of the future. Further, it is the imagination which ‘performs the trick of connecting the momentary and ephemeral with the permanent.’ Our sense of connectedness between the past and the future carries with it ‘an obscure feeling of eternity.’
Mary then considers, as she often has before, the importance of the imagination in both school and higher education. She re-affirms that ‘the education of the imagination is by far the most important educational goal and should be central to any curriculum decisions.’103 It follows, she claims, that the teaching of history is the most important part of education. It should be made clear that the historical narrative is never closed. Finally, she proposes that moral ideas must be thought of as having permanence. They do not need external validation, but they need to reflect values that are beyond the merely personal. Thus, they must reflect a point of view that can be shared with others. This will result in a consensus morality which should govern our laws. She realises this position is under attack by moral relativists but defends it vigorously. Hostility to the idea of a shared morality makes the task of teachers difficult but they must, according to Mary, not be frightened to use the word ‘wrong,’ especially when discussing stories. Perhaps children cannot be taught what is right and wrong, but they can have their imaginations stimulated to work their values out for themselves.104
Memory was not widely reviewed, but Annette Bauer in The Philosophical Review declared that Mary was ‘a very good guide on the tour of human self-exploration’ drawing on a ‘rich treasure-house of literature.’ She was ‘a less good guide to the purely philosophical debate on the nature, role and varieties of memory’ for which, Bauer probably accurately suggests, she had little patience. Bauer thinks the book will be a ‘fine start’ however for anyone wishing to know more about the fascination that biographies and autobiographies exert on their readers.105 Geoffrey Strickland in a long and discursive review in The Cambridge Quarterly notes Mary’s neglect of painful memories and her concentration on memory in its ‘most reassuring forms.’ He is impressed by her ability to write movingly ‘of the conviction by which we lead our lives; of the inability to believe we are any other, for example, than the person we were many years ago.’106
Imagination and Time was reviewed very sympathetically by Anthony Storr, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, in the RSA Journal. After summarising her arguments, he wrote ‘Mrs. Warnock is a gifted writer as well as a fount of ideas. Her use of language is both eloquent and elegant. This book is a pleasure to read.’107 David Jenkins, the then recently retired Bishop of Durham, writing in Theology, drew from Mary’s book the idea that, ‘although we can no longer claim “objectivity” in our thinking and the value we put on things, we are not therefore abandoned to total pluralism, relativism and “truths of many kinds”.’108
* * *
In writing about Mary’s time at Girton I have sought to balance her own account with the recollections of others. Naturally these accounts differ, not so much on the facts themselves, but certainly in their interpretation. What they have in common is their basis in memory, both fallible and personal. It is the task of the biographer to exercise their own imagination in creating a coherent account which, it may be hoped, conveys some truth and insight, based as Mary would have insisted, on evidence rather than opinion. Mary herself, in her various published and unpublished recollections, the fellows and Mary’s secretary were, in telling their stories to me using their imaginations as well as their memories. For, as Mary wrote in Memory, ‘memory and imagination […] are not wholly to be separated […] the creative construction of a story involves seeking out what is significant, what is to feature as part of the plot.’109 If I have been successful in writing a coherent, truthful account, then, again in Mary’s ambitious words, I may have achieved ‘understanding, a quite general insight into how things are, not only from my own standpoint, but absolutely universally.’110
1 Hugo Young, 1991, p. 412.
2 Ibid., p. 414.
3 Mary Warnock, 2000, p. 174.
4 Harrison, pp. 677–678.
5 Young, p. 406.
6 Gillian Beer, personal communication.
7 Warnock, 2000, p. 37.
8 Diana Barkley, 2005, pp. 17–18.
9 Sarah Kay, personal communication.
10 Warnock, 2003, p. 118.
11 Rose and Ziman, p. 136.
12 Halsey, p. 733.
13 Warnock, 1976, p. 11.
14 Ibid., p. 10.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 9.
17 Ibid., p. 196.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 197.
20 Ibid., p. 203.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 206.
23 Ibid., p. 207.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., back cover blurb.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Charlton, 1977, p. 377.
29 Harrison, 1978, p. 455.
30 Carrier, 1978, p. 41.
31 Mary Warnock, 1994, p. 173.
32 Suzanne Lowry, 1984.
33 Ibid.
34 Valerie Grove, 6 July, 1991.
35 Warnock, 2000, p. 126.
36 Kitty Warnock, personal communication.
37 Jean Smith, personal communication.
38 Gillian Jondorf, personal communication.
39 Anne Fernihough, personal communication.
40 Mary Warnock, 2000, p. 126.
41 Gillian Beer, personal communication.
42 Anne Fernihough, personal communication.
43 Gillian Jondorf, personal communication.
44 Ibid.
45 Gillian Beer, personal communication.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Gillian Jondorf, personal communication.
49 Anne Fernihough, personal communication.
50 Juliet Dusinberre, personal communication.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Sarah Kay, personal communication.
54 John Marks, p. 105.
55 Edith MacRobbie, personal communication.
56 Anne Fernihough, personal communication.
57 Juliet Dusinberre, personal communication.
58 Jean Smith, personal communication.
59 Sophia Robb, personal communication.
60 Sue Palmer, p. 176.
61 Martin Ennis, personal communication.
62 Ibid.
63 Nancy Lane-Perham, pp. 99–100.
64 Juliet Campbell, personal communication.
65 Sue Palmer, p. 176.
66 Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985.
67 Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1987.
68 Ibid.
69 Mary Warnock, 1989.
70 Ibid., p. 137.
71 Warnock, 1989, p. 143.
72 Ibid., pp. 143–144.
73 Ibid., p. 148.
74 Ibid., p. 151.
75 Ibid., pp. 158–159.
76 Ibid., p. 161.
77 Ibid., p. 163.
78 Ibid., p. 170.
79 Warnock, 1989.
80 Ibid., pp. 5–8.
81 Ibid., p. 10.
82 Ibid., p. 11.
83 Ibid., p. 18.
84 Ibid., p. 22.
85 Jarratt Report, 1985, para 2.6.
86 Warnock, 1989, p. 25.
87 Ibid., p. 33.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., p. 35.
90 Ibid., p. 37.
91 Ibid., p. 41.
92 Ibid., p. 42.
93 Ibid.
94 Warnock, 1991.
95 Warnock, 1987.
96 Warnock, 1994.
97 Ibid., p. 1.
98 Ibid., pp. 31–34.
99 Ibid., p. 87.
100 Ibid., p. 109.
101 Ibid., p. 129.
102 Ibid., p. 152.
103 Ibid., p. 173.
104 Ibid., pp. 182–186.
105 Bauer, 1990, p. 439.
106 Strickland, 1988, p. 392.
107 Storr, p. 83.
108 Jenkins, p. 140.
109 Warnock, 1987, p. 132.
110 Ibid., p. 133.