Abstract
Reputations, especially of an institution over a long period, are a minefield for dispute; even a correlation between reputation and influence may often be disputable. Certainly, LSE Sociology has long had a certain reputation in British sociology, but one derived heavily from of its being the first full higher-education teacher of the subject in the UK. When, before the 1950s, the University of London was the only UK institution offering a degree in sociology, and LSE was the most prominent among the University of London colleges and external institutions also teaching the subject, it was not difficult for it to be pre-eminent. That raises a number of questions: was its reputation justified when it was effectively the only institution teaching sociology, before others were available for any evaluative comparisons? If its reputation could be justified as in any sense positive, how far has this remained so? If there has been a decline, was this a sudden caesura or have there been undulating variations between periods of higher and then lower reputation?
‘Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit; and lost without deserving.’
William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 253–255
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- 1.
By 1950 there were, however, examples of Sociology departments or of the teaching of sociology by individual staff labelled as being in sociology in several Commonwealth or Empire countries. There were examples in Canada, such as at McGill University in Montreal (the first in Canada, established in 1922), while other examples were listed jointly with Economics and/or Political Science. There were also examples in South Africa, usually as Sociology and Social Work, in India and in Sri Lanka (Ceylon). However, no examples have been identified in 1950 in Australia or in New Zealand.
- 2.
However, Liverpool’s School of Social Science and Training for Social Work was formally incorporated into the University only in 1917. Its first degree in social science, as opposed to Diplomas and Certificates, was awarded as late as 1928.
- 3.
Memorandum sent by McKenzie to Adams, 29 October 1968 (LSE Archives, ADAMS W/8/21).
- 4.
LSE Archives, ORAL HISTORY, Professor A. H. Halsey interviewed by Dr. Colin Crouch, 23 September 1988, 1/6.
- 5.
David Caradog Jones had an MA from Cambridge.
- 6.
John Rowland Hall, BCom (Liverpool, 1943) is to be distinguished from John Hall, BCom (LSE, 1942), who moved after LSE to Bradford Technical College (later Bradford University) to teach economics.
- 7.
He later became Director of the Research and Intelligence Unit of the Greater London Council, before moving to an academic post at Edinburgh and then in 1972 becoming Professor of Social Administration in the University of Glasgow.
- 8.
As already noted, LSE was for a long time half-hearted in what it formally described as a ‘Department’, though the word was certainly widely used from its early history. Various groups were officially called ‘Departments’ (e.g., Social Science, Railway Studies, and Social Biology) or they arrogated idiosyncratic departmental titles to themselves, this apparently being one such. Although its formal status is unclear (no such departmental name appears in LSE’s Calendars of the period, for example), this ‘department’ had its own stationery with that name and it initially operated as such from the newly acquired Skepper House in John Adams Street.
- 9.
The Institute of Community Studies was founded in 1954. Shils claimed to have helped Michael Young in its foundation (Shils 2006, p. 87); however, it is unclear how much he actually helped and what form that help took.
- 10.
Elizabeth Bott Spillius (1924–2016) was born in Canada and had already attended the University of Toronto and the University of Chicago before moving to LSE. She later became a psychoanalyst.
- 11.
Details of research undertaken by PEP are among materials in LSE Archives, PEP/A/19/5.
- 12.
Letter from John Pinder of PEP to J. N. McAnuff of the Nuffield Foundation, 18 January 1965 (LSE Archives, PEP/A/19/5).
- 13.
This is analogous to the absence in the 1930s of any involvement of Sociology in the School’s major piece of interwar social research, the New Survey of London Life and Labour, which was organized and conducted by Bowley and Hubert Llewellyn Smith and supported financially by the Rockefeller Foundation; its results were published between 1930 and 1935 in nine volumes (Ahmad 1987, pp. 205–7).
- 14.
For example, John Westergaard, when External Examiner for the BSc (Sociology) degree in 2001, commented on the minimal or zero coverage of some of these subject areas (Report of the [LSE] Teaching Quality Assurance Committee on Educational Provision in the Department of Sociology, 2001, para. 2.4).
- 15.
Calculated from http://results.ref.ac.uk/Results/ByUoA/23.
- 16.
I cite and calculate such scores with a certain personal agnosticism as to what they actually mean. They are certainly ‘facts’ in the sense that many regard them as such, even if in some cases inclined to cynicism or scepticism, and comments and decisions are certainly made on their basis, but it may be disputable whether these scores are facts representing any conventional truth. Did the Department apparently improve significantly in quality of output between 2008 and 2014, or perhaps did others become relatively worse? Unless my own retirement between these years dramatically increased the quality average, the first alternative does not seem especially plausible, and nor does the second, especially as based on the reduction of much qualitative assessment work to a crude numbers regime. For a critical discussion of these issues, including the observation that RAE and REF scores are not very highly correlated and are perhaps measuring different phenomena, see Gingras (2016, pp. 34–59, esp. pp. 51–3).
- 17.
In support of the Department’s case, I recall being asked by the then-Convener to calculate the actuarial probability of at least one member then on the Sociology staff dying in post before retirement. This may have been a novel, if slightly macabre, approach to making the Department’s case, though a calculation with a similar result could doubtless have been made for most departments. With the probabilities of survival events being treated as independent, the calculation is merely a product of the respective probabilities of survival, with that result then subtracted from one; intriguing calculation possibilities emerge if the survival events are not seen as independent.
- 18.
LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/111/35, UGC Review of Sociology.
- 19.
The handwritten notes, which contain no names, were kindly released to me by Barbie Panvel of the Quality Assurance Agency.
- 20.
The 1960s, it should be remembered from previous chapters, were the decade in which the Department was horribly divided between two factions, when it was later badly destabilized by the fallout from the Blackburn affair, and when one group of its senior professors was fighting with another of their membership like rats in a sack.
- 21.
Perhaps indicative of this orientation is a first-year tutee, hard-working and ultimately a successful graduate, who rather miserably asked me, ‘Please tell me, am I supposed to be enjoying this?’ I suspect that such a question might have been asked by others.
- 22.
One minor and partial exception to this is a project on the nature of work that produced various articles and eventually the book Market, class, and employment (McGovern et al. 2007), although – by the time when it was published – McGovern was the only co-author still in the Department, Hill and Mills had left long since, and White was not in the Department.
- 23.
Report of Sociology Department Away Day, Friday 12 March 1999, p. 1.
- 24.
Even the necessary hyphen was omitted.
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Table W9.1
Level of LSE connection of first holders of Chairs of Sociology in UK universities, with surnames of holders and their institution(s), 1950 to 1974 (DOCX 14 kb)
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Husbands, C.T. (2019). Institutional Reputations and Influences. In: Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1904–2015. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89450-8_9
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