Conflict in the Academy

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001
 Conflict in the
Academy: A Study
in the Sociology of
Intellectuals
Marcus Morgan
University of Cambridge, UK

and

Patrick Baert
University of Cambridge, UK

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001
© Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-52128-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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ISBN: 978-1-137-52130-9 PDF

ISBN: 978-1-349-50660-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309
 Contents
Acknowledgements vi
About the Authors vii

1 Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? 1

Part I The ‘MacCabe Affair’ in Context 10

2 Chronology of Events 11
3 Contextualising the Dispute 23

Part II Symbolic Struggles and

Performative Positioning 41
4 Examples of Symbolic Strategies
Employed by the Pros 44
5 Examples of Symbolic Strategies
Employed by the Antis 60
6 Conclusion 74

Bibliography 82
Index 93

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0001 v
 Acknowledgements
We would like to express appreciation to our interviewees
for sharing their recollections and reflections, Vicky Aldred
and the Cambridge English Faculty Board for granting us
access to their archives, Jacqueline Cox and Frank Bowles
at the Cambridge University Archives for helping us
consult them, Jonathan Drummond at the Times Literary
Supplement for permission to reprint an advertisement
from their pages, Harriet Barker and Palgrave Macmillan’s
anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Jonas Tinius who
generously read and provided valuable comments on a
draft. The research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Union Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under Grant Agreement no.
319974 (INTERCO-SSH) and was aided by the stimulat-
ing intellectual atmosphere provided by the members of
this collaborative group: Christian Fleck, Johan Heilbron,
Victor Karady, Marco Santoro, Gisèle Sapiro and Gustavo
Sora. Finally, thanks to Lorena Cervera and Emma Murray,
for all manner of things.

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0002
 About the Authors
Marcus Morgan is a fellow and college lecturer at Murray
Edwards College, Cambridge, and a research associate in
the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge,
UK.
Patrick Baert is Professor of Social Theory in the Faculty
of Human, Social, and Political Science at the University
of Cambridge, and a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge,
UK.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0003 vii

 1
Introduction: A Storm
in a Teacup?
Abstract: This introductory chapter poses the question
of how a dispute that erupted in the early 1980s over
whether a young Assistant Lecturer in the Cambridge
English Faculty was to be made permanent became such a
widespread controversy. We explain the significance of our
book in the context of existing literature, and detail our
methodological approach and the empirical resources we
will draw upon, including interviews, archival research and
content analysis of various forms of published material. We
also elaborate our pragmatic approach to theory, and the
critical synthesis we forge between positioning theory and
cultural sociology. Finally, we briefly summarise the case,
and lay out the broad structure of the book.

Keywords: cultural sociology; MacCabe Affair;

positioning theory; pragmatism

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004 
 Conflict in the Academy

The research for this book is based upon the reconstruction of a histori-
cal case in which neither of the authors was directly involved. This case
involved a dispute over whether a young University Assistant Lecturer
in the English Faculty at Cambridge University would be upgraded
to a permanent position. What might conceivably have been quickly
forgotten as merely a trivial and routine difference of opinion within the
workplace very quickly turned into a cause célèbre, seen as illustrative
of fundamental shifts taking place within both the university system in
England and within the particular discipline of English Studies at the
time. The event rapidly swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media
attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic
consequence. One of the first questions directing our research is how
and why this took place.
It is not our concern in this work to evaluate the common assump-
tion that academics tend to overestimate the significance of their own
internal squabbles.1 However, we would like to suggest that tired clichés
of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even more self-complementary
myths of universities as platonic institutions directed towards disinter-
ested enlightenment lead to an unhelpful black-boxing of these zones
of social life from attentive sociological enquiry, usually on the odd
assumption that the ‘real world’ is somehow always going on elsewhere.
This book intends to contribute toward a growing literature that refuses
to content itself with such popular accounts of academia as a withdrawn
and therefore somehow asocial zone, and which instead takes the reflex-
ive academic analysis of the social processes of academic life seriously
(e.g. Bourdieu, 1988; Camic, Gross, Lamont, 2011; Collins, 1998).
Of course it is true that much of any debate, including this one, can be
explained – or we would rather, explained away – by recourse to the indi-
vidual ‘personalities’ of those involved, and since academia may have a
tendency to attract and inflate already overblown egos and then set them
competitively against one another like few other sectors of work, it would
seem likely that such personalities would play an even larger role within
academic disputes than within controversies elsewhere. To add to this,
it has been suggested, somewhat unfairly perhaps, that ‘self-obsession,
never rare in academe, is especially common in English Departments’
(Bayley, 1981: 135) and so it may be tempting to disregard what came to
be known as the ‘MacCabe Affair’ as a simple case of egotistical pettiness
getting the better of collegiate civility. But such egos are neither born, nor
shaped, nor expressed outside of social space, and this book attempts to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? 

show the distance that can be travelled in understanding such disputes

without resorting to psychologising their participants. In other words, it
attempts to mark out elements of the specifically social and performative
dimensions of such affairs and suggest that a case-analysis of this partic-
ular dispute might reveal insights into academic controversies more
generally, and in so doing reject Simpson’s doubt that ‘the conclusions
one might draw from these events can be extended beyond particular
individuals in particular institutions at a specific time’ (1990: 268).
A couple of caveats are however necessary. Firstly, whilst it is our belief
that the social sciences neither can nor should entirely avoid normativ-
ity (Baert, 2005; Morgan, 2014), our interest in this dispute is primarily
analytical. Many of the participants involved will no doubt take issue with
some of what has been written. Where erroneous information has been
included or accurate information excluded, we appeal to the reader to
trust our good faith in seeing this as a product of the difficulties involved
in reconstructing even a relatively recent past event from disparate arte-
facts, rather than our own attempt to take a stake in the affair. Secondly,
and this applies particularly to the following chapter, in any episode
that brings to the surface enmity in the way that the MacCabe Affair
did, differing accounts of what constitutes the ‘facts’ inevitably abound,
and no doubt our own description cannot entirely avoid this process
of presenting a located perspective on reality, as reality itself. Even the
uncontested ‘facts’ of the narrative we offer are themselves, of course,
never free from mediation. Later in this book we attempt to show how
the performative fixing of these ‘facts’, as facts – what Goffman (1959)
called ‘defining a situation’ – for the interested audiences, as well as for
posterity, was a key element in the strategic unfolding of the dispute
itself.
We feel that the historical case study is a valuable tool for sociological
analysis in that it allows theory to be developed organically from within
a natural setting. Even though, since the event has passed, we do not have
direct access to this natural setting, we feel that we are able to reconstruct
elements of the event in a manner that retains many of the strengths
of the extended case method as it was developed by the Manchester
School of Anthropology. The case study approach is particularly useful
to our aims in that it provides the possibility of identifying actors’ own
projected ‘definitions of the situation’, and offers the ability to analyse
the various sedimented layers of social meaning that go into creating
complex relational social interactions. Whilst in comparison to more

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Conflict in the Academy

extensive approaches to social research, intensive case analyses no doubt

lose out in terms of generalisability, they nevertheless gain in their capac-
ity to revive holistic accounts of social behaviour that are key to theory
construction and modification (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We reconstruct
this particular case from a variety of empirical sources – interviews with
direct participants and onlookers, contemporaneous media reports,
more scholarly accounts of the case that were written both at the time
and retrospectively, a published transcript of a debate that took place in
the University’s historic Senate House and became the most visible and
staged public performance of the affair (in what follows SHD citations
refer to this document), archived correspondence of the English Faculty,
and archived minutes from English Faculty Board meetings. We use these
empirical resources in two main ways. Firstly, in the more conventional
manner of the historian – in order to gather direct and contextual infor-
mation about the episode. In this manner, the empirical resources serve
as springs of information from which we are able to resurrect a version
of the past (as seen from the present). In this mode, we pick and choose
from the range of resources as and when they prove useful. Secondly,
however, we also analyse many of these empirical materials as instances
of the dispute itself. We treat them, in other words, as examples of the
performative enactment of the affair. In this second manner, we try to
show how the different empirical resources each occupies a different
level of public address so that for example, in the case of letters written to
national newspapers or comments made on the television, the audience
is clearly maximally undefined, whereas comments made inside closed
Faculty Board meetings were instead performed to a very limited and
clearly circumscribed set of known individuals. We argue not only that
these different zones of public address affected the resultant perform-
ances themselves, but also that the level of public address itself became
a site of contestation in the affair, with one camp attempting to open it
up as widely as possible (e.g. by requesting exemption from confidential-
ity rules governing Faculty Board meetings), and the other attempting
to close it down as narrowly as they were able (e.g. by claiming that it
was only locally comprehensible, and denying any validity at all to the
frenzied media accounts that circulated it).
Since the episode unfolded three and a half decades ago, methodo-
logical problems arise in that some participants are no longer with us,
and the memories of others have faded (‘mercifully’, in the words of one
interviewee). However, since the Owl of Minerva only spreads its wings

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? 

at dusk, retrospective distance from the event also provides the advan-
tage of seeing the event in the context of its broader historical landscape.
Therefore, in comparison to many of the reports that were excitedly
penned in the immediate wake of the events, our study is afforded the
possibility of more adequately judging the controversy’s status as expres-
sive of definite shifts in the history of English Studies, higher education
in England, and England as located within an evolving international
scene more broadly. Similarly, whilst our own disciplinary location
outside of English Studies provides challenges in terms of discussing a
field with which we are substantively unfamiliar (we do not assume to
offer much in the way of insight into the literary-critical content of the
debate), it also allows us the possibility of approaching practitioners of
the discipline as a somewhat exotic species of intellectual labourers, and
diminishes any emotional temptation to take sides in assessing the affair.
What can be said of chronological and emotional distance, however,
cannot be said for institutional distance, and some familiarity with the
workings of the University, we feel, has been useful to our project.
Theoretically, the book endeavours to demonstrate the virtues of
adopting a pragmatic approach to theory selection and development,
which sees theory not as separable from the particular empirical situ-
ations it is called upon to understand, but rather marshalled on the
basis of its expedience in helping elucidate such specific settings (e.g.
Baert, 2005; Mills, 1959; Morgan, 2014). Moreover, building on insights
that challenge the philosophical marginality of metaphor to the human
perception and comprehension reality (e.g. Blumberg, 2010) we regard
the use of concepts and metaphors as not so much ways of uncovering
hidden truths than as ways of re-describing and reformulating social
phenomena. Sympathetic to Richard Rorty’s (1980) philosophical stance,
we see an important value of sociological research in its capacity to put
a new spin on old ways of seeing the world (Baert, 2005), and therefore
argue for something of a bricolage approach that selects and combines
different theoretical frames on the basis of their ability to cast the
research object in a new or interesting light.
In particular, the book shows how positioning theory is able to augment
a cultural sociological perspective in analysing intellectual disputes and
controversies. We find the new school of American cultural sociology,
which itself takes critical inspiration from a variety of disparate sources
(including the late Durkheim, Parsonian functionalism, phenomenologi-
cal sociology, symbolic anthropology, Turner’s (1957) pioneering account

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Conflict in the Academy

of ‘social drama’, and structuralist semiotics) to be analytically productive

in its refusal to understand disputes and controversies as natural effects
of the occurrences out of which they are built, demonstrating instead
the importance of drama, performance, ritual, symbolism and notions of
the sacred to understanding how ‘events’ become culturally constructed
as such (e.g. Alexander, 2003). Nevertheless, as we elaborate later in the
book, we find it necessary to disregard cultural sociology’s methodologi-
cal guidelines of ‘bracketing out’ non-symbolic factors (e.g. Alexander
& Smith, 2003) by instead first analysing the various material pressures
that helped facilitate and shape the affair (Part I of the book).
On the other hand, we find positioning theory – which has already
been used in order to analyse both intellectual interventions (Baert,
2011) and the possibility of resolving disputes (Harré & Slocum, 2003)
– helpful in its emphasis upon the relational strategies that lie behind
struggles over meaning-making, showing how social actors compete,
both in isolation as well as in ‘teams’, to position themselves, others and
ideas in meaningful relation to one another. ‘Positioning’ here, refers to
the way in which any intellectual intervention, as interpreted by its audi-
ence, attributes characteristics to the author and to others (Baert, 2012).
It also offers a more dynamic alternative to the relatively static notion of
‘role’ as frequently employed in dramaturgical analysis (Davis & Harré,
2007), and helps emphasise the manner in which locating oneself and
others in social space is always a relational affair; occurring against or
alongside some other. For instance, we describe how one camp in the
struggle attempted to position the other as retrogressive, and in doing
so, implicitly cast itself in the structurally progressive role. We also show
how it is not just actors, but also ideas themselves, that become objects
of positioning moves, and describe the way in which labels, such as the
term ‘structuralism’, were pushed and pulled in opposing directions,
one side working towards elaborating positive connotations, the other
invested in positioning such labels, and those to whom they are ascribed,
as toxic. We treat intellectual interventions (such as speeches, lectures,
books or media articles) as both performances, that is, as social relation-
ships between actors and audiences, as well as performative, meaning that
we see them as doing something – bringing something about – and feel
that the notion of ‘positioning’ captures both these dynamics particularly
well.
Such positioning occurs continuously in social life, but becomes
particularly visible in cases of dispute as such cases are characterised by

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? 

the breaking down of the collective norms governing cultural classifica-

tions and the reassembling of social reality from the liminal wreckage of
shared symbolic life. As there appears to have been a general awareness
prior to the staging of the aforementioned centrepiece of the affair – the
Senate House debate – that departure from the University of the Assistant
Lecturer in question was more or less a fait accompli (e.g. Kermode, 1997:
267; MacCabe, 2014), we suggest that rather than an actual debate that
might have feasibly led to a reversal of decision on the matter of his being
appointed, the affair, and in particular the Senate House discussion as its
emblematic scene, is better understood as having opened up opportuni-
ties for those involved to dramatically position themselves, their oppo-
nents and their ideas, in front of a captive audience. The metaphor of the
stage underscores this performative perspective, which explains why we
will pay special attention to the setting and other dramaturgical props
and devices that accompany and influence positioning. We shall learn
how positioning and counter-positioning always takes place against a
background of values, some of which are shared even amongst the fierc-
est of rivals, showing, for example, how opposing camps in this case both
made a huge effort to position themselves and their allies in line with the
core principles of their shared academic profession. At the same time,
however, we acknowledge the problems involved in importing what was
originally a social psychological theory into sociological analysis proper
and we overcome these issues by emphasising the different levels of social
context that acted to structure and inflect the positioning moves that
were made, and through stressing that positioning is often the product
of teamwork, and especially so in this particular case.
We see this research as filling a gap within the existing literature in
the sociology of intellectuals, which has typically centred its attention
on the intellectual trajectory of writers – their social background (e.g.
Bourdieu, 1991), their formative years (e.g. Gross, 2002; 2008), their
intellectual development (e.g. Camic, 1987; 1992) or their influence (e.g.
Lamont, 1987; Baert 2011). Rather than conflict, this literature has tended
to focus on the cohesive or collaborative aspects of intellectual life – how
writers or thinkers come together and develop networks, or how intellec-
tual schools are formed and maintained (Collins, 1998; Farrell, 2001). In
distinction, since the 1970s, and inspired in part by Thomas Kuhn’s work,
a great deal of literature has emerged paying attention to the empirical
study of controversies within the natural sciences. Such studies have
been interested in the moments at which ‘normal science’ has been put

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Conflict in the Academy

into question through the accumulation of anomalies within a govern-

ing paradigm, and a controversy has resulted. This research agenda
has typically focussed upon empirical observations of knowledge-in-
the-making and shown the deeply social mechanisms through which
scientists struggle to assert authority over particular fields (e.g. Barnes,
1977; Martin, 1991; 2014; Latour, 1988; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). However,
nowhere near as much empirical research has been conducted during
this period into controversies as they have unfolded within the humani-
ties, in part, no doubt, because the notion of paradigm shifts holds far
less traction in these more multi-paradigmatic, porous and pluralistic
disciplines. There are notable exceptions, such as Sapiro’s (1999) study of
the conflicts between French writers during the Second World War, but
they tend to operate outside the university structure and are usually set
in politically charged contexts. Whilst certainly illuminating a variety of
other ways, even Bourdieu’s celebrated attempts at uncovering the power
structures underlying French higher-education institutions do not dwell
on the actual conflicts that take place within the system itself (Bourdieu,
1988; 1996). Collins’s (1998) broad-sweeping historical account of the
acrimony arising from conflict over limited ‘attention space’ within
the philosophical intellectual field (Collins, 2002) and Abbott’s (2001)
acknowledgement of the role of conflict in the evolution of academic
disciplines are similarly informative, but lack systematic fine-grained
empirical detail. Alongside certain isolated recent contributions (e.g.
those appearing in Gingras’s (2014) recent edited collection), this book
provides one of the first systematic sociological attempts to provide a
detailed empirical enquiry into conflict within the humanities, as located
within the modern academy.
Part I of the book provides a chronological description of the events of
the affair and an account of some of the functions that the dispute served
for both the participants and the ideas involved. It locates these events
within their broader (socio-historical) and narrower (institutional)
contexts, emphasising the manner in which such contexts impinged
upon the form and content of the resultant controversy. Part II investi-
gates the symbolic strategies and counterstrategies of the debate directly,
highlighting the manner in which staging, sacralisation, identification
of pollutants, use of narratives, appeals to universality and ascriptions
of stigmatising or dignifying labels were all drawn upon in the strug-
gle to position and ultimately fix reality in a manner that accorded with
the different participants’ positioning strategies. The book ends with

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Introduction: A Storm in a Teacup? 

an elaboration of the theoretical implications of the study, and with a

final note on the fact that such reality fixing is a Sisyphean task, forever
unfinished, and therefore that social constructions of reality must be
understood as perpetually provisional and contingent achievements.
Throughout the book, the terms ‘pros’ and ‘antis’ have been used as
shorthand to describe, respectively, those in support of inquiring into
the conditions surrounding MacCabe’s failure to be appointed (which it
should be noted is a slightly different category to those necessarily in
support of MacCabe’s appointment) and those against such an inquiry.
Though there appears to have been a high degree of internal heterogene-
ity within these two camps,2 in most cases, where one stood in relation
to the issue of whether or not to investigate what had occurred is, even
in retrospect, relatively easy to discern and so allows for a crude initial
organisation of the material, which has been refined where necessary.3
Moreover, as one would expect sociologically, and without the need
for complex statistical techniques such as Multiple Correspondence
Analysis, it will hopefully become clear that taking up certain positions
within the debate had a definite tendency to go hand-in-hand with the
adoption of certain others.

Notes
1 For example, Noel Annan suggests that ‘to anyone outside a university, the
frenzy which appointments and elections produce seems petty and absurd’
(1974: 68) and John Carey writes with reference to Oxbridge in particular,
that there exists a firm belief ‘that their grouses are of national importance’
(1975: 19).
2 Tanner, for example, claimed of the pro camp, that ‘[o]ur group has very little
in common but that we’re pluralists open to new ideas’ (Fisher, McGee, Rich,
1981: 1).
3 Distinct camps were apparently clear to the participants at the time: as Lisa
Jardine recalls, ‘we all knew where we lined up’ (1994).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0004
 Part I
The ‘MacCabe Affair’
in Context

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0005
 2
Chronology of Events
Abstract: This chapter provides a chronological description
of the events of the affair. To the extent that it is possible,
we try to avoid analysis altogether at this point, providing
as matter of fact an account of what occurred as we see
possible. Where facts are disputed, we draw attention to the
matter, highlighting the dissension rather than attempting
to resolve it via our own authoritative reading. The purpose
of this chapter is both to acquaint the reader with the
‘facts’ of the episode, as well as to provide a description
of the ‘raw material’ out of which the controversy was
forged. Nearer the end of this chapter, we discuss some of
the functions the controversy ended up serving for both its
participants, and the ideas involved.

Keywords: academic controversy; events; functions of

disputes; MacCabe affair

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006 
 Conflict in the Academy

Colin MacCabe had been both an undergraduate and then PhD student
at Trinity College, Cambridge, until 1974, and then a Research Fellow at
Emmanuel from 1974 to 1976. In the year that his Research Fellowship
came to an end he was awarded his doctorate, became a Fellow and
College Lecturer at King’s College, and was appointed to the now-
abolished position of ‘University Assistant Lecturer (UAL)’, which was
reviewed for the possibility of upgrading to the effectively permanent
position of ‘University Lecturer’ at the end of a five-year term.1 In this
position MacCabe was charged with the responsibility of teaching
‘English language in relation to literature since 1500’ (Inglis, 1995: 279),
and even prior to his term ending, unease with his presence within the
faculty was evident from the fact that after he had been appointed to
the Degree Committee, Professor Christopher Ricks resigned in protest,
prompting MacCabe himself to then resign, and Ricks, after some time,
and with some prompting from the Secretary of the Faculty Board, Mike
Long, to then return back to the committee (Correspondence relating to
nomination for election to various Faculty Board committees, 1970–82).
In spite of such early skirmishes, and Kermode’s claim that a ‘row about
literary theory was already brewing in the 1970s’ (1997: 254), the conflict
on which this book focuses only truly came to a head in 1980 when deci-
sions for appointments for the coming academic year began to be made.
Three separate bodies were responsible for implementing this decision-
making process: the Faculty Board (charged with ‘ensuring that teaching
within the faculty is appropriate and of a high standard’), the Upgrading
Committee (a subcommittee appointed by the Faculty Board, charged
with the responsibility of making recommendations for upgrading), and
the Appointments Committee (who acted to ratify the Faculty Board’s
Recommendation).
On 10 March 1980, the Upgrading Committee met to review the UAL’s
performance and recommend upgradings. The subcommittee received
reports from three senior professors, Christopher Ricks, Raymond
Williams, and Frank Kermode, as well as others, including John Barrell
and Richard Axton, who had all been to observe MacCabe’s (and the
other two UALs’) lectures, had read work written by the candidates,
and had received references from their chosen referees. In reference to
MacCabe’s lectures, whilst Kermode recalls that both he and Ricks had
‘found great improvements in them’ (Kermode, 2008), Ricks remembers
it differently – that he ‘did not think that they were very good’ (2013).
Inglis informs us that whilst Williams’s reports were ‘full of quiet praise’,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0006
 Chronology of Events 

of Ricks’s two reports (he had been to observe MacCabe’s lectures in

both the third and fifth year of his assistant lectureship term), the first
was ‘mildly approbatory’, the second ‘flatly hostile’ (1995: 280–1). The
Upgrading Committee voted twice – first for election, next against. The
outcome was that Heather Glen was put forward for election, a second
candidate was unsuccessful, and MacCabe was voted 3 in favour, 4
against (Reserved Minutes of the Faculty Board, 24 April 1980).
On 22 May 1980, the Faculty Board met in order for a vote to take place
requesting new lectureships to be created by the General Board. At this
meeting, extracts from MacCabe’s (1979) book on Joyce were apparently
mockingly read aloud by Mike Long, provoking John Barrell to formally
complain to the Chairman that the procedure of assessing his work had
been uncivil, biased, and unprofessional. Interestingly, in light of the debate
at the time within English Literature departments over whether a critic
should approach a literary text on a more intuitive or a more formal basis
(a debate we shall return to later on), a key criterion upon which MacCabe’s
work was apparently judged at this meeting, seemingly in a somewhat
sarcastic manner, was its discernible ‘distinction’, a criterion that certain
members of the Board objected to on the basis of its subjective vagueness
(Inglis, 1995: 281). The outcome was that Heather Glen was voted into her
University Lectureship (which was subsequently temporarily ‘revoked,
because of flagrant discrepancies in treatment, the animosity of the debate,
and disputes over criteria’ (ibid.)), and the outcome of MacCabe’s vote was
7 votes in favour, 7 against, and 2 abstentions (Reserved Faculty Board
Minutes, 22 May 1980). This led the Chairman of the Faculty Board (Leo
Salingar) and the Assistant Registrary2 to seek the advice of the Secretary
General of the Faculties on how to proceed, and on this advice a new
Faculty Board meeting was called. In advance of this meeting, the Regius
Professor, Frank Kermode, wrote to his colleagues appealing for ‘measured
tolerance’ so as to ensure that ‘our differences, and the effect they may
have on the application of our criteria for upgrading, should not interfere
with our professional judgement when the careers of University Assistant
Lecturers are at issue’ (quoted in Inglis, 1995).
On 5 June 1980, the Faculty Board meeting reconvened to consider
‘whether or not to recommend the temporary upgrading in the academi-
cal year 1980–1 of the University Assistant Lectureships’ (Reserved
Faculty Board minutes, 5 June 1980) and in spite of Kermode’s appeals,
passions had in the meantime only grown. Inglis reports Ricks outrightly
asserting that ‘Dr MacCabe’s book is a bad book’, after which Long is

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said to have delivered ‘a twenty-minute malediction’ over it (Inglis, 1995:

282). Nevertheless, the motion for the Board to agree to recommend
MacCabe’s upgrading, which was proposed by Kermode and Williams,
was carried by a vote of 10 in support, and 9 against, and Heather Glen
was also recommended once again for upgrading with strong support.
In respect to the MacCabe vote, Richard Axton and Christopher Ricks
asked ‘that their opposition to this motion be recorded in the minutes’
(Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 5 June 1980). The Chairman, Dr
Beer, had apparently abstained from voting, for which, it was reported,
he was later ‘heavily criticised’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1). Erskine-Hill later
presented what happened in this meeting as the Board ‘overturn[ing]
the recommendation of its Upgrading Committee’, an action which he
suggests ‘was, so far as I know, without precedent’ and one that was ‘rare
for it to try’ (SHD: 337). This vote, though narrow, acted to create the full
Lectureship for MacCabe to fill (Witherow, 1981c), but he still had to wait
for the outcome of the Appointments Committee to ratify the faculty’s
recommendation and appoint him to the post. The saga continued ...
The Appointments Committee met in October 1980 and was
composed of some the same individuals as the Faculty Board (including
Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams, Christopher Ricks, Leo Salingar,
and Richard Axton), though in a smaller number (five) plus two UTOs
not from the English Faculty, Edward Miller, the Master of Fitzwilliam
College, and Gordon Johnson, a historian and fellow of Selwyn
College (Stevens, 1981: 189). At the meeting, they voted on MacCabe’s
appointment and the outcome was 3 in support, and 4 against, acting
to overturn the Faculty Board’s recommendation.3 This generated a
problem, expressed by Raymond Williams as ‘when a Faculty Board,
by however narrow a majority, has recommended an upgrading and
then a Committee of much the same people plus two, do not accept the
decision, what happens? Where can it go?’ (SHD: 346). In a meeting of
the Faculty Board on 6 November 1980, it was reported that Heath Glen
had been appointed to her University Lectureship, that Colin MacCabe
had not, and that ‘at a future meeting the Board should take stock of its
procedures in connection with proposals for the temporary upgrading
of posts’ (Reserved Faculty Board Minutes, 6 November 1980).
In the interim, ‘backstage’ manoeuvring had apparently taken place so
that on 13 November 1980 at the Annual Meeting of the Faculty Board,
two of MacCabe’s most influential supporters, who were also two of the
most famous names in literary studies in England at the time, and two

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 Chronology of Events 

of the most senior figures in the English faculty – Frank Kermode and
Raymond Williams – were voted off the Appointments Committee. Two
other supporters of MacCabe, Stephen Heath and John Barrell, were
similarly voted off the Faculty Board. Since Williams and Kermode
were both professors, they remained members of the Board ex officio,
but whilst Williams ‘decided to stay on and fight on the Faculty Board’,
Kermode, the Edward VII professor, resigned from it, according to
some reports in protest (Walker, 1981a), and according to others due to
‘personal and health reasons’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1). Tony Tanner, another
supporter, resigned from his post as secretary of the Faculty’s Degree
Committee in disapproval (Walker, 1981a), and John Barrell resigned
from the Upgrading Committee ‘in light of the elections that had just
been made to the Appointments Committee’ (Reserved Faculty Board
Minutes, 27 November 1980).
Derek Brewer, an English fellow at Emmanuel College who had been
named to the reconstituted Appointments Committee, was subsequently
contacted by MacCabe to request that the vote be retaken, and after
some consideration, he decided to call for it to be so (MacCabe, 2009).
The vote was duly retaken, and the outcome this time was 4 in support
of MacCabe, 3 against. In order for MacCabe to be appointed, however, 5
votes out of the 7 were necessary.
After the Christmas vacation, on 23 January 1981, Williams and
Kermode spoke to an open meeting, attended by more than 600 students,
on ‘the troubles within the faculty’ (Walker, 1981c). John Beer refused
to attend, as did Christopher Ricks who, adapting a famous phrase by
Leavis, commented that ‘to come is to condone’ (Walker, 1981d). On 28
January 1981, the English students passed a vote of no confidence in the
Faculty Board, demanding that it be suspended until an independent
inquiry had been conducted into the procedure surrounding MacCabe’s
non-reappointment (Witherow, 1981c; Rich and Tolmie, 1981).
Stephen Heath, a University Lecturer and passionate supporter of
MacCabe, collected the signatures required by the University for a meet-
ing of the Senate (all holders of a Cambridge MA, or higher, degree) at
the University’s Senate House.4 The meeting was presided over by the
Vice Chancellor, the mathematician Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer,5 and
nearly all of the main players attended (excepting MacCabe, who was
on a British Council lecture tour of Europe, and Ricks, who had no
interest in being present); the majority also contributed. The debate took
seven and a half hours over the 3 and 4 February and those who had

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supported the call for the meeting requested that inquiries into both the
general ‘state of the English Faculty’, as well as the more particular case
of MacCabe’s non-reappointment be launched, during which time they
saw it fit that the faculty be suspended.
On 11 February, the General Board of the Faculties (12 senior members
of the Faculties plus the Vice Chancellor) met to consider the MacCabe
Affair, prior to which they had appointed a special committee to examine
what had occurred (Walker, 1981h). At the end of February, Christopher
Ricks delivered a lecture responding to the theoretical issues of the affair,
and denouncing the importance of ‘theory’ to advancing literary criticism
(Walker, 1981i), which was later published in the London Review of Books
(Ricks, 1981). In March, Raymond Williams also delivered a lecture to
the faculty, also later published (1983), on ‘The Crisis in English Studies’,
which attempted to both clarify the underlying theoretical divisions
of the controversy, as well as to shed light on the term ‘structuralism’
that had been bandied around with casual imprecision throughout the
episode.
It is unclear which camp first drew the media’s attention to the event,
and accusations of orchestrating the various media were hurled from
all sides in the affair (e.g. Simpson, 1990: 264; Heath, SHD: 330; cf.
Beer, SHD: 353; Sykes-Davies, SHD: 335). Nevertheless, involved they
certainly got and the quarrel was reported at university, local, national,
and even international levels, in print (including front pages, and replete
with witty puns),6 radio, and television (including the BBC’s widely
watched Newsnight), with interest peaking around January and early
February 1981. Part of this clearly followed the well-worn path of media
amplification, with the student newspaper, Stop Press, insisting that the
attention was unwarranted, and – somewhat ironically in an issue in
which they dedicated their lead cover story to the affair – ‘deserving of
the label of the most overblown media story of the year’ (1981: 4; also
Cohen, 1981: 4).
A little later, it was reported that MacCabe and Heath had brought a
libel case, which was subsequently dropped, against John Harvey, and
the University’s own historic special appeals court – the Septem Viri or
‘council of seven’ – were claimed to have been called into action over
charges that information from confidential meetings had been leaked
(Walker, 1981e; The Times, 1982; Williams & Collings, 1981: 46). However,
the student newspaper, Stop Press, quickly corrected the national and
international press, reporting that Heath ‘denied that he ever intended

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 Chronology of Events 

any legal action’ and further, that to ‘the best available knowledge the
Septem Viri has not been convened for over forty years’ (Moss & McGee,
1981: 1).

Functions

Commonsensically, we tend to view social conflict as a dysfunctional,

destructive, even pathological form of social interaction, harming indi-
viduals and groups through tearing the cohesive social fabric, and there
is of course much to justify understanding disputes in this way. However,
it is also clear, as Lewis Coser (1964) argued, that social conflict is able
to serve a variety of productive social functions, such as allowing for the
communication of dissatisfactions, defining group boundaries, providing
an impetus for more adequate forms of social organisation, and even
increasing social integration, especially, of course, for in-group members.
There is also evidence that once the ‘MacCabe Affair’ became public,
social pressure increased for participants to take sides. In this sense
rather than simply revealing pre-existing divisions, the controversy
also acted to create and solidify them, strengthening and simplifying
antagonistic identities. Using a classic Mertonian phrase, Axton (2014)
describes the episode as in part a ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’, commenting
that once the media got involved, ‘people were forced to show allegiances
that may not have previously been there’. Political agitators and organis-
ers of public demonstrations are well aware of this polarising capacity of
social spectacle; the manner in which dramatic events are able to elabo-
rate and radicalise contradictions, provoking participants into providing
a simple and mutually exclusive ‘this’ or ‘that’ response to the question
of, in the words of Florence Reece, ‘which side are you on?’ Since such
polarising processes go well beyond simply communicating information
about where participants stand in advance of a public conflict, and also
since they can perform a divisive role in removing nuance and in fact
manipulating, rather than reflecting, social situations, it is not clear to
us how helpful it is to understand such actions in classical functionalist
terms exclusively. Nevertheless, one preliminary observation about the
‘MacCabe Affair’ is that it certainly did help serve certain functions for
the careers of both its participants and the ideas involved.
In terms of the participants, it was noted at the time ‘the capital that
is being made out of what remains an internal dispute, however bitter

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 Conflict in the Academy

its nature or far-reaching its implications’ (Jenkins, 1981: 112). Inglis

remarks that ‘everyone in Cambridge had enjoyed the frisson of celebrity’
(1995: 283) and Simpson confesses that ‘it was hard not to feel a bit more
important than one had felt before’ (1990: 246). Public disputes, by their
nature, garner attention, and as well as generating grist for the journalistic
mill, that attention also enables participants to engage in what Norman
Mailer called ‘advertisements for myself ’ (also Collins, 1998: 38).
Very soon after the events, King’s College proposed to extend
MacCabe’s fellowship for another year, upping his salary to the same
remuneration he would have received had he been successful in being
appointed to a permanent University Lectureship, reportedly doing so
on the basis of their perception that he’d been given a ‘raw deal’ (The
Times, 1981b; Rix, 1981). However, MacCabe had no need to take up
their generous offer, for he was, at the age of 31, presented with the more
attractive proposition of a permanent professorship at the University of
Strathclyde (THES, 1981; Walker, 1981j: 26; Witherow, 1981f), becoming
not only the youngest professor in the United Kingdom, but also one of
only two professors in a department of 15 lecturers. The other professor
and chairman of the department, Alan Sanderson, described MacCabe
as ‘one of the ablest men of his generation’ (Witherow, 1981f). From
untenured, straight to Professor is an almost unheard of leap up the
British academic ladder, and even if it was in part a result of the ‘Affair’,
it may also add some support to what Simpson described as ‘a radical
disjunction between Dr MacCabe’s two reputations, inside and outside
Cambridge’ (SHD: 350).
MacCabe’s subsequent career – three years later he was Head of
Production at the BFI, the following year, Professor of English at the
University of Pittsburgh, and a little later, Professor of English at Exeter
University – renders the notion of him as ‘victim’ somewhat of a misno-
mer, as he himself readily admits, the ‘ “MacCabe Affair” ... enabled me to
leave Cambridge trailing clouds of glory and an overinflated reputation’
(MacCabe, 2010a).
His academic writing also benefited from events; his publishers
quickly cottoning on to the commercial value of what was described as
‘Cambridge’s worst academic controversy for a generation’ (Mulhern,
1981). With impressive speed, and only two weeks after the Senate House
discussion, his publishers took out an advertisement in the TLS, daring
potential customers with the explicitly allusive strapline ‘Controversial
and Original: Three books by Colin MacCabe’ (Figure 2.1).

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 Chronology of Events 

figure 2.1 Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1981, p. 233

Source: Reprinted with the kind permission of the Times Literary Supplement

Kermode resigned from the Edward VII Professorship in exasperation

at the whole episode, crossing the Atlantic to take up a post at Columbia
University in New York, commenting that ‘I packed it in as I got so tired
of it all ... it was making me ill’ (Kermode, 2008). He later offered the
bitter reflection that ‘Cambridge, of course, is exceptionally hostile to
any kind of thought at all, as far as the English Faculty is concerned’
(Kermode, 1987: 105). This left the senior professorship vacant, and
Christopher Ricks – a lead figure in opposing MacCabe’s appoint-
ment – was promptly appointed in 1982. Inglis (1995: 285–6) implies that
Williams’s own retirement in 1983 (five years early) may itself have been
partly connected to a sense of disillusionment with the English Faculty,
contributed to in no small measure by the MacCabe dispute.

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In terms of the careers of ideas, rather than people, focussing upon the
immediate victory of the antis in blocking the possibility of MacCabe
being appointed to a permanent position diverts attention somewhat
from the fact that the kinds of nouvelle vague theory MacCabe was
understood to represent have now become more or less mainstreamed
as at least one essential element within the plurality of approaches taught
in English departments throughout the United Kingdom, including
Cambridge. For better or for worse, Erskine-Hill was simply wrong in
suggesting that ‘such positions ... must be regarded merely as a passing
folly’ (SHD: 338). Surveying the current paper options available from the
Cambridge English Faculty, Ricks is likewise off the mark in comment-
ing that ‘everyone now teaches, at least at undergraduate level, in a
rather valuably old-fashioned way’ (quoted in Wroe, 2005);7 as Higgins
remarks, ‘if anything has come to dominate contemporary literary stud-
ies, it has been the combination of theoretical and textual analysis’ (2013:
140).8 After the decision had been made not to upgrade MacCabe, a
students’ report to the Faculty Board stated that ‘many students consider
it very important that the field of study in which Dr MacCabe worked
should be continued to be represented within the Faculty’ (Unreserved
Minutes of the Faculty Board, 22 January 1981), and the evidence appears
to show not only that it did continue to be represented, but also that its
representation has, since the 1980s, in fact grown.
A final interesting function that the affair served, apparently thanks
to the distraction that the spectacle produced, was the introduction of
a feminist paper into the Cambridge English curriculum. Lisa Jardine
talks of how, since ‘feminism was no part of the poststructuralist debate’
that was taking place around the figure of MacCabe, the proposal of a
new paper on the ‘Literary Representation of Women’ managed to go
through a Faculty Board meeting ‘on the nod’ and ‘under the cover of
darkness’ (Jardine, 1994).

Notes
1 At Cambridge University, admissions, and small-group or one-to-one
‘supervision’ teaching is conducted within the colleges where students
live, and which employ a certain number of College Teaching Officers
(CTOs) who usually do not hold any University post. Most lecturing
however, is delivered by the university’s relevant faculty or department, via

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 Chronology of Events 

University Teaching Officers (UTOs). Many UTOs who are employed by

the faculty or department also have college positions (including College
Lectureships), though increasingly some choose to opt-out of college
membership altogether. Many of the participants suggested that the post of
University Assistant Lecturer (which was only abolished in the 1990s) was
an undesirable one (Holloway, SHD: Cribb, SHD; Gathercole, SHD: Erskine-
Hill, SHD; Stevens, SHD; Beer, SHD), an issue that Ricks claims even united
two of the main opposing protagonists in the fracas: ‘MacCabe and I, we
discovered, agreed that Assistant Lectureships ought to be abolished’ (Ricks,
2013). MacCabe recalls things differently however: that ‘I always defended
Assistant Lectureships as a way that Cambridge could try people of promise
without committing to them for 40 years’ (2014). Either way, a ‘Proposal for
the Abolition of University Assistant Lectureships in the Faculty’ by Ricks
received wide support (Unreserved Minutes of the Faculty Board, 5 March
1981). For those who did oppose them, the objections focused on two main
points: firstly, Holloway claimed that ‘Assistant Lectureships are not fully open
and competitive appointments ... no single appointment at that level has brought
someone in from another university for over twenty years ... Lecturers
upgraded from Assistant Lecturer are persons originally appointed after in
effect internal competition only, and then given a permanent appointment
on no competition at all’ (SHD: 342). Secondly, since the post did not exist
in other English universities and was therefore ‘anomalous in comparison
to methods of appointing elsewhere’ (Axton, 2014), its status in terms of the
Faculty’s long-term commitments to the employee were apparently unclear;
as Ricks (2013) put it, there was ‘uncertainty over whether the lectureship
was, or was not, renewable. There was a kind of dubiety as to what the status
of the position of Assistant Lectureship was’.
2 The ‘Registrary’ is another archaic term unique to the nomenclature of the
University of Cambridge, referring to the senior administrative officer of the
University, assisted in the post by three subordinate officers, of which the
‘Assistant Registrar’ is one.
3 In a further Faculty Board meeting on 16 October 1980, Stephen Heath
‘expressed his disquiet about procedures which had preceded ... the
Appointments Committee [meeting] during the Summer’ (Reserved Faculty
Board Minutes, 16 October 1980).
4 On this occasion, the university made the unusual decision to dedicate half of
the seats in the Senate House to English students who did not yet hold their
MA degree (Walker, 1981b).
5 Interestingly, in spite of rising to the apex of its administrative structure,
Swinnerton-Dyer himself recounts twice applying, and twice failing, to be
appointed to a University Assistant Lectureship in mathematics at Cambridge
(Swinnerton-Dyer, 2008).

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 Conflict in the Academy

6 For example, ‘Unquiet Flow the Dons’, wrote Newsweek (Williams and Collings,
1981), and ‘Cambridge Scholars Wage Literal Warfare’ was the title of a Times
Higher article (Midgley, 1981).
7 There is also now a popular MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at Cambridge,
for which MacCabe has acted as external examiner, and the incumbent King
Edward VII Professor of English Literature has written widely on screen media
of various kinds.
8 For a similar, though more critical, assessment of this ‘domination’, see Maskell
and Robinson (2001: 174).

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 3
Contextualising the Dispute
Abstract: This chapter locates the affair within both its
broader (socio-historical) and narrower (institutional)
contexts. Firstly, it draws attention to the post-Robbins
expansion of higher education, the relatively more rapid
expansion of the social sciences vis-a-vis the humanities
and the changing nature of English studies via its
incorporation of insights emerging from the social sciences
and from French theory. It stresses how these factors both
facilitated and provided symbolic weaponry in the dispute.
Secondly, it highlights the role played by Cambridge
University’s relatively unique collegiate institutional form
in structuring the resultant conflict, showing in particular
how colleges provided pools from which ‘performance
teams’ were recruited. Overall, it argues that such material
contextualisation is essential for fully comprehending the
symbolic dimensions of the affair addressed in Part II.

Keywords: Cambridge University; English studies;

French theory; massification of higher education;
Oxbridge colleges; performance teams; social sciences
and humanities; structuralism

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0007.

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 Conflict in the Academy

Socio-historical context: the Robbins reforms and

the rise of the social sciences

In order to avoid the blind spots created via an exclusive focus upon
specific ‘disciplinary histories’ at the expense of ‘intellectual history’
more generally (Collini, 1988), this section attempts to situate the
MacCabe Affair within its broader intellectual historical context. This
chapter highlights the importance of the rise of the social sciences that
occurred alongside the explosion in scale and demographic heteroge-
neity of students within British universities during the 1960s (Savage,
2010). It suggests that this unprecedented shift in the form and scale
of the British higher education sector was linked to a cleavage of what
Lamont (2009) calls ‘epistemological styles’ within English Studies,
one side of which intended to retain the discipline’s mooring within a
traditional humanistic frame, and another which instead hoped to shift
both the discipline’s methods of analysis, as well as its object of study
in accordance with insights developing out of cognate disciplines, in
particular, the burgeoning social sciences.1 This section also intends to
show how English Studies’ late establishment in England, and especially
in Cambridge where the subject initially faced resistance, combined with
Cambridge’s subsequent influence in defining what came to be seen by
many as an almost paradigmatic approach across the discipline in the
United Kingdom (the situation was more complicated in the United
States and elsewhere), contributed towards creating a situation in which
perceived threats to this particular centre of the discipline, and its estab-
lished approach towards criticism, were felt particularly acutely. As will
become clear in the second part of the book, these broader socio-histori-
cal and education policy developments can also be seen to have provided
resources of symbolic weaponry that were subsequently deployed in the
performative enactment of the ‘MacCabe Affair’.
We would like to suggest that the story of the MacCabe controversy
ought to be placed within a broader account of disciplinary profession-
alisation, one which raises the question of what exactly a discipline is – a
question much easier to answer in the so-called hard sciences than in the
humanities. Is it, as Rorty (2006) has suggested, simply a matter of the
ritualistic reading and referencing of one set of books rather than another,
and the justifying of one’s claims to one community of practitioners rather
than another, or does it point towards something more essential in method
and content? One thing that appears clear is that disciplinary reproduction

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

is unable to take place effectively without to some extent disciplining those

who refuse to operate within its prescribed confines. Most of the time
this disciplining (or what might otherwise be called ‘boundary policing’)
happens in tacit ways through rewarding work that builds upon, and can
be understood and judged in terms of, a discipline’s established corpus,
and punishing that which does not. Such mechanisms help ensure a neces-
sary focus to branches of intellectual endeavour and a coherence of aims
and criteria of judgement which allow for the discipline to reproduce and
extend itself in a recognisable form throughout time. However, operating
simultaneously to this imperative of disciplinary reproduction, there is
also an equally important countervailing pressure for disciplinary innova-
tion and development, and such innovation often occurs through contact
with, and importation of approaches from, other disciplines.
Even though English Studies eventually rose to occupy one of the
most central positions within both the academy and the national school
curriculum, the formal study of its own national language was institution-
alised strikingly late within English universities (Doyle, 1986). English first
emerged not in England at all, but rather in Scotland, India, Germany, and
France (Baldick, 1987; Doyle, 1986; Finkenstaedt, 1983; Viswanathan, 1989).
In England, it was initially considered a rather lowly pursuit – a pastime
for leisured bourgeois women, or a civilising and calmative force for the
lower classes and colonial populations.2 Reading literature was considered
capable of elevating minds and lowering passions, impressing upon its
participants the cultural achievements of the more refined classes, and
providing an arena for vicarious wish-fulfilment, where bourgeois or aris-
tocratic lifestyles could be safely lived out in fantasy by those denied access
in reality, and as such served similar ideological roles to religion (Eagleton,
1983: 23). When it did first institutionalise in England in the 1820s, its home
was in the newly established University of London, rather than the medi-
eval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though it had arrived at the
Scottish medieval University of Edinburgh, in 1762. It gained much ground
as a discipline in England with the explosion of the redbrick universities
at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in 1921 the Government’s
Newbolt Report, ‘The Teaching of English in England’ (Board of English,
1921), was published, which set out the foundations of the way in which
English Studies was to develop as a professional discipline, defining a
canon of works, and used subsequently for the training of school teachers
in English. The principal reason for the exaggerated tardiness of its arrival
at Cambridge – the first actual Professorship of English Literature did not

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 Conflict in the Academy

arrive at Cambridge until 1911, with a School of English and only being
established in 1917 – was the dominance of the Classical curriculum.3 To
put this in context, the first department of our own subject, sociology –
usually considered a fledgling discipline – was established at the LSE some
ten years earlier, in 1907. Prior to the establishment of the School of English
at Cambridge, the subject had been taught as one section of the Medieval
and Modern (later Modern and Medieval) Languages Tripos, and until
a full English Tripos arrived in 1919, the subject was only intended to be
studied as a specialisation (a Part II, in Cambridge parlance4), after having
initially studied another subject, most likely Classics, for the first two years
of one’s degree. A full tripos of Modern English Studies, without an Anglo-
Saxon element, did not appear until 1926 (MacKillop, 1995: 207; 212).
In spite of this late start, after the Great War it began to develop very
rapidly, eclipsing the Classics as the central humanities discipline, with the
Cambridge School, characterised by its critical and analytical approach
(in distinction to Oxford’s philological and scholarly one) playing a
central role. The influential, zealous, bolshie, and highly opinionated F. R.
Leavis was key in championing the essential importance of the discipline
in Cambridge and beyond, and in establishing what arguably became
the orthodox humanistic approach to analysing literature until at least
the 1960s and to some extent, and in some locations – as this particular
case shows – far later too.5 The influence of Leavis, and his wife, on the
manner in which the Cambridge English School developed far exceeded,
however, the institutional recognition that the university offered to either
of them. When faced with the indignity of being offered the opportunity
to provide a term’s lectures Q. D. Leavis strongly declined, reminding a
representative of the Faculty that ‘without the contribution made by my
husband and myself to English studies at Cambridge there would have
been no English School here for people like yourself and the Chairman
of the Faculty Board to flourish in’ (Cambridge University Archives, June,
1965). For F. R. Leavis the close analysis of great works was understood
to be at the heart of literary criticism and this analysis was considered a
deeply moral pursuit, whereby the critic employed his or her whole intui-
tive humanity as a test for the work’s sincerity and merit, so that reading
well was seen to hold the possibility of cultivating the moral sensitivities
of the reader. This centrality of the basic instinctive human response to
literature, over and above any methodologically formalistic model of
analysis extended to Leavis’s distrust of other formalised modes of ration-
ality and thought, such as those that characterised scientific reason and,

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

as he saw it, the utilitarian presumptions of modern society more broadly

(e.g. Leavis, 1980). Leavis’s impact also extended beyond the universities
through many of his disciples becoming influential secondary school
English teachers, preaching his gospel far and wide throughout the land.
In some quarters, the experiences of WWII had provoked suspicion
towards this antebellum belief in the humanising forces of an education
in English Literature, since, as Steiner pointed out, it was now impos-
sible to ignore how little humanistic acculturation had done to avert the
barbarity of war. ‘We know now’, he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe
or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to
his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them
without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant’ (Steiner, 1967: ix).
Forces of pluralism had also slowly battled their way into the study
of English literature during the late 1960s and 1970s (Easthope, 1991),
especially outside Oxbridge. In part this occurred through the arrival of
a more socially diverse student and staff body and a broadening of the
gaze of the discipline to include cultural creations that had traditionally
been excluded from the narrow version of the canon that Leavis’s ‘great
tradition’ (1980 [1948]) came to represent.6 Awareness was also begin-
ning to dawn that different forms of English were being spoken and
written by a diverse array of people throughout the anglophone world,
and to match the new subjects of study, a new plurality of theoretical
perspectives (feminist, Marxist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, phenom-
enological, hermeneutic, structuralist, and by the time of the ‘MacCabe
Affair’, poststructuralist and deconstructionist) also began to arrive on
the scene (Jones, 1981: 9). Notions of the wholeness or completeness of
a literary work were made problematic, and the historical, social, and
political contexts in which texts were produced (a matter that had been
self-consciously bracketed in Cambridge under the influence of I. A.
Richards’s formalism)7 were put back into the centre of critical reading.
The shift is expressed well by the novelist and literary professor
Malcolm Bradbury in his description of his own career through English
departments:
During the 1950s, when I was a student, the dominant mood in the study
of English literature was a moral and humane one; literary studies were the
essential humanist subject ... But with the expansion and hence the increased
professionalisation of the subject, the tune changed: there was a hunger for
literary science. By the 1960s, a volatile mixture of linguistics, psychoanalysis
and semiotics, structuralism, Marxist theory, and reception aesthetics had

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 Conflict in the Academy

begun to replace the older moral humanism. The literary text tended to
move towards the status of phenomenon: a socio-psycho-culturo-linguistic
and ideological event, arising from the offered competencies of language,
the available taxonomies of narrative order, the permutations of genre, the
sociological options of structural formation, the ideological constraints of the
‘infra-structure’. (1981: 137)

These transformations occurred alongside, and in part as a conse-

quence of, the explosion in higher education that followed the Robbins
Report in 1963, which prompted a profound change in the demographic
makeup of the universities: massification of higher education meant
that the university was no longer the preserve of a white male ruling
class it had once been. Moreover, independently from the composition
of the new students and staff, the teaching strain of the unprecedented
post-Robbins leap in numbers studying English during the 1960s,
combined with the recession that hit in the later 1970s, and the long-
anticipated funding cuts that followed,8 appear to have had a particular
bearing on the feelings of unease within the Cambridge English Faculty
around the time of the dispute. One of the few points of relative consen-
sus within the storm that erupted was that the student–staff ratio in
the faculty – which had reached 25:1 at one point, and was 22:1 at the
time of the affair, compared to 12:1 as the recommended national norm
(Williams, SHD; Stevens, 1981) – was at least a facilitating factor (e.g.
Knights, 1981; Stevens, 1981; Cribb, SHD; Beer, SHD; Williams, SHD;
Heath, SHD; Kirk, SHD; Sykes-Davis, SHD; Holloway, SHD; Wilson,
SHD). Some blamed the colleges, since they admitted students whom
it was then the Faculty’s job to lecture (e.g. Williams, SHD: 346), others
argued that the Faculty itself had been ‘sheltering behind the Colleges’
(e.g. Cribb, SHD: 348; Clemmow, SHD: 360),9 whilst still others blamed
the university for not providing enough posts to the faculty and fail-
ing to enforce a quota system to cap the burgeoning student numbers
(Holloway, SHD: 342). Whether the issue was to be resolved by increas-
ing the number of University posts (e.g. Heath, SHD; Barrell, SHD) or
by cutting the number of students (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD), most agreed
that at present there were simply not enough University posts for the
number of students, nor adequate material resources to accommodate
the enlarging faculty (Knights, 1981).
However, whilst the humanities were expanding at a fast rate during
this post-Robbins period, they were not (at least outside Cambridge)
expanding anywhere near as rapidly as the social sciences, whose theories

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

and methods were making significant incursions into the humanities

themselves (Savage, 2010). Importantly with regard to the MacCabe
Affair, the emergence of ‘Theory’ in English departments was not merely
an import from abroad (most obviously from France), but (with notable
exceptions, such as the work of Barthes) also an import from other disci-
plines, in particular, the social and human sciences (Steiner, 1981: 135).
Whilst exogenous insights from the social sciences were not entirely
neglected by the Leavis model of criticism (MacKillop, 1995, has in fact
claimed that a sociological sensibility was central to the Leavis crowd
vis-a-vis the Bloomsbury set), and whilst the aspiration to science, and
an interest in anthropology in particular, had in fact been linked directly
to Richards’s earlier project,10 as Donoghue notes, for Leavis, ‘a critic’s
relation to other pursuits, notably philosophy, history, and sociology,
was a vital matter only when it had the effect of making his criticism
more aware’ (1981: 135). Such thinking was welcome, in other words, only
to the extent that it might be used to aid the primary concern of serious
valuation of a work.
Many of the social scientific influences could be perceived as under-
mining the established mode of English criticism, due to the possibility
that it might dissolve, or at least ‘de-centre’, the central category on
which literary study was assumed to be based: literature. Wider society
had begun to turn away from poems, plays, and novels as their primary
source of cultural expression and experience, and a certain minority
of the Cambridge English Faculty were suggesting that those media to
which their attention had increasingly been drawn could themselves
be productively analysed in a similar manner to literature (even if the
interest in this broader range of media within the Cambridge Faculty
more generally extended nowhere near as far as other English depart-
ments elsewhere in the country). Heath, for example, was interested in
cinema, Williams had been introducing film into his lectures, MacCabe
had just published his book on Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group
(MacCabe, 1980) and after the affair went on to develop ‘screen theory’
with Heath and others.11 The expansion of the term ‘culture’ to cover
practices and creations beyond the more restricted zones of what might
here be called ‘high culture’ was of course a characteristically social
scientific – and in particular, anthropological – move to make (Tyler,
1891), and one that Williams (e.g. 1958) had been hard at work elabo-
rating. Leavis, by contrast, had been clear that genuine culture could
only ever be the preserve of a gifted ‘tiny minority’ whose role it was to

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 Conflict in the Academy

protect against the majority’s philistinism, and where to possible guide

the cultural discrimination of the masses (Leavis, 1930; Carey, 1992, for
variations on this theme); his, like Richards’s before him, was a vision
of modern cultural decline. As had previously been the case with the
Classics, a Newmanesque idea of the university (the ‘creative centre of
civilisation’) and in particular English Studies within it (as ‘chief of the
humanities’), was key to Leavis’s elitist account of how this decline was
to be countered, and an idealised version of Cambridge,12 and indeed
Leavis’s, and his collaborators’ role within Cambridge, provided the
immediate model (Leavis, 1943). Leavis had been born and raised in
Cambridge (and eventually died there), and he wrote about his Scrutiny
colleagues in an oft-repeated quote, and seemingly without any sense
of possible overstatement, that ‘We were – and we knew we were –
Cambridge – the essential Cambridge – in spite of Cambridge’ (2013
[1962]: 76).
Echoes of Leavis’s famous public feud with C. P. Snow (Leavis, 2013
[1962]; Snow, 2001 [1959]) over the relative merits of the more ancient
humanistic mode of understanding, and the more modern scientific
one, can be readily discerned amidst the din of the MacCabe Affair.13
Whether or not it was in fact accurate, as we shall see later, Snow’s
disparaging description of the ‘mainly literary’ ‘traditional culture’ as
‘behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining ... occasionally
letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means’ (Snow, 1956)
bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the main strategic
positioning characterisations of the antis, which the pro camp intended
to fix. Snow, moreover, had been in support of the social science-
favouring Robbins expansion, whereas Leavis had been deeply opposed
(Collini, 1993: xl), and another of Leavis’s public feuds had been with
Noel Annan – a key champion of the importance of the social sciences
to universities, and in particular, a key supporter of the introduction of
sociology into Cambridge.
Further evidence that the MacCabe Affair was related to the perceived
threat of social scientific approaches to the more humanistic modes
of criticism (and hence two distinct ‘epistemological styles’ having
developed within the Faculty) comes from the fact that both the pros
and the antis associated the kinds of work MacCabe came to represent
with the social sciences. At the time, Francis Mulhern, for instance, drew
attention to the influence of the Althusserian sociologists Barry Hindess
and Paul Hirst on MacCabe’s work (Mulhern, 1981), and Sykes-Davis

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

used the term ‘linguistic sociology’ (SHD: 336) to mock what he saw
as MacCabe’s defective approach (an epithet that might reveal as much
about the perceived status of sociology at Cambridge, or at least the
status in which it was held by the speaker, as it does about MacCabe’s
own work, e.g. Rose & Ziman, 1964: 121). Kirk, a professor of Greek at
Cambridge, defended the perspectives ‘that anthropology, sociology,
linguistics, and psychology have opened up for us’ and chastised factions
of the English Faculty for ignoring them (SHD: 345; also Beaton, 1981:
199). Malcolm Bradbury used the term ‘literary science’ in the passage
quoted earlier, and MacCabe discusses how the radical Parisian theory
of the 1960s, from which his own work drew inspiration, was grounded
in a ‘fundamentally anthropological approach’. He went on to claim that
whilst Cambridge had been ‘the pre-eminent English school through
the middle decades of the 20th century’, by the time he arrived, ‘it was
desperately in need of rejuvenation’ from ‘the vast new resources being
opened up by linguistics and anthropology’ (MacCabe, 2009; 2010a).
The situation was also described in similar terms in a letter written to the
Times Literary Supplement:
In an age in which the powerful intellectual movements of Marxism and
modern sociology and anthropology have cast convincing doubts on the
absoluteness of cultural values, and in an age of active contact with cultures
in which literature and literary studies have not enjoyed the privileged posi-
tion they traditionally have in our own, the elite status once claimed for
them, particularly at Cambridge, must now be actively defended if it is to be
maintained. (Beaton, 1981: 199)

One of the more drastic solutions proposed by members of the pros’

performance team in order to overcome the evident fractures within
the Faculty was the possible foundation of a break-away Department
of Modern English Studies headed by Frank Kermode (Heath, SHD:
331; a proposal seconded by Clemmow, SHD: 362), and the primary
reason offered for this radical proposal again centred on English Studies’
ambivalent relationship to the social sciences. As Williams put it,
In Cambridge especially we have to ask a hard question: can radically differ-
ent work still be carried on under a single heading or department when there
is not just diversity of approach but more serious and fundamental difference
about the object of knowledge (despite overlapping of the actual material of
study)? Or must there be some wider reorganisation of the received divi-
sions of the humanities, the human sciences, into newly defined and newly
collaborative arrangements? (Williams, 1983: 211)

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 Conflict in the Academy

England was therefore late to institutionalise the formal study of the English
language and its literature within its universities, and that the University
of Cambridge was even later than elsewhere in the country. Once it did
become established, however, it managed to displace the former central
humanistic discipline, Classics, and establish itself as the core humanity.
What’s more, Cambridge English, through its charismatic proponents
such as Richards, Empson, and Leavis, came to be seen by some as defini-
tive of the paradigm, not just in the universities, but also outside them,
in part through the Cambridge extra-mural ‘extension lecturing’ system
(Doyle, 1986), and in schools too, both through its control of a widely used
examination board, and through its former students going on to teach in
secondary schools up and down the country. This contextual environment
had two primary effects upon the MacCabe incident.
Firstly, since English had only relatively recently secured its profes-
sionalised position in Cambridge and elsewhere in England, and since
the paradigm of English studies in general was understood by many to
be so bound up with Cambridge English in particular, this set the scene
for great potential anxiety arising once this centre was considered to be
under threat, especially from an enemy within. Leavis’s primary concern,
after all, had been to ensure that English became disciplined: ‘isn’t a disci-
pline notably what English has, in this period of emancipation and high
prestige, not provided? The charge is hard to resist’, he wrote (1943: 33).
Too much pluralism, too quickly, could be understood as undermining
the discipline’s recently won status. Christopher Ball, an English don at
Oxford, wrote at the time that the fears produced through the accommo-
dation of ‘theory’ in English studies might have in fact concealed a deeper
anxiety common to all relatively young disciplines: ‘the possibility that the
subject is not really an academic discipline at all’ (Ball, 1981: 136). As Wyn
Grant has noted in reference to the history of the discipline of Political
Science in the United Kingdom, ‘intellectual openness and tolerance of
eclecticism has its merits, but if it is allowed to become too uncontrolled
it can lead to a lack of rigour in the deployment of methodologies and
techniques, which undermines the systematic comparison that the subject
has to offer if it is to be distinguished from polemic or idle speculation’
(2010: 24). Similarly, English Studies appears to have been attempting to
maintain this precarious balance between pluralism and innovation on
the one hand, and coherence and continuity on the other. In reference to
John Beer’s suggestion in the Senate House (SHD: 355) that five separate
strands of scholarship had emerged in the Cambridge English Faculty

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

(traditional, international, close reading, analysis of literature in social and

cultural contexts and an alignment of the study of literature with more
popular media), Bergonzi writes that
In one sense such pluralism is admirable, a fine instance of the multiplicity of
interests and the free play of minds which one expects in a great university.
Yet not all approaches can easily coexist; choices may have to be made, and
voices imply exclusions ... What looks like desirable diversity from inside a
subject can seem mere fragmentation and incoherence to those outside it, or
not very securely within it. (1990: 16)

Institutionalising and sustaining the coherence of disciplines within

the humanities, which are by their very nature ‘fissiparous disciplines’ –
inherently prone towards internal division, may involve far more self-
conscious ‘disciplining’, in Leavis’s sense, than is necessary in the more
commonly mono-paradigmatic sciences.
Secondly, even though many of the theoretical shifts in approach
that were being debated during the MacCabe Affair had already taken
place long before in other English Studies departments elsewhere in the
country (Williams, 1983: 211), Cambridge had to some extent come to be
perceived, or at the least perceived itself to be (and it was the perception
that was important) an ‘indispensable’ touchstone for any mainstream
shift in the discipline’s character, something similar to what Actor-
Network Theorists have called an ‘obligatory passage point’ for legitimis-
ing a redefinition of the discipline (Callon, 1986). Since it was considered
to have played such a significant role in English Studies’ recent estab-
lishment, the possibility of any drastic local changes to its form could
be understood to involve far more profound and wide-ranging cultural
ramifications, and therefore the symbolic effects of an incident such as
the MacCabe controversy could become inflated well beyond any of its
actual local and practical consequences.
Finally, though it is not necessary for our purposes to elaborate here
on its details, a broader socio-historical contextual factor worth noting,
and one that again had wider symbolic repercussions, was the election in
May 1979 of Margret Thatcher as Prime Minister, an event that immedi-
ately signalled the end of the post-war neo-Keynesian consensus. Later,
we will suggest that even before the most radical cuts to universities that
arrived in 1981, this recent shift in national government and the political
polarisation it automatically produced throughout the country, gener-
ated a public climate in which narratives that played upon struggles

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 Conflict in the Academy

between the conservative Right and the progressive Left gained a degree
of symbolic resonance that was in many ways unthinkable before
Thatcher’s arrival at No. 10.

Proximate contexts: colleges, collective cultures, and

performance teams

As well as the conflict being embedded within, and partially facilitated

by, broader socio-historical contexts, the fractures that revealed them-
selves and became further developed in the MacCabe Affair were also
embedded in more proximate institutional settings, which helped organ-
ise the divisions and allegiances that arose and shaped the symbolic form
of the public dispute. This chapter suggests that taking into account the
institutional particularities of Cambridge is important both to under-
standing some of the pressures within the English Faculty at that time of
the affair, as well as helping explain the form that the subsequent debate
took. It argues that colleges were both the primary pools from which
members of ‘performance teams’ were enlisted, as well as the entities
that helped solidify corporate bonds and organise collective thought
and action (Douglas, 1986), and therefore that these institutional struc-
tures played an important role in determining aspects of the symbolic
dimension of the conflict in a manner that cannot be captured through
the methodological move of ‘bracketing out’ such factors in advance.
Beyond Cambridge, it also shows how other institutions, national and
international, became enlisted as actors in the affair.
Whilst the idea of an academic college, like the idea of ‘Literary Theory’
itself, came initially to England from Paris, and then to Cambridge via
Oxford, some historians have even made the claim that the distinct ‘idea
of a collegiate university was born in Cambridge’ (Brooke et al., 1988:
92). The collegiate system itself, and the relationship among the colleges,
the Faculties, and the central university administration, means that the
university cannot be adequately understood as a singular institutional
entity, but must instead be seen as a pluralistic federation of heterog-
enous, occasionally imbricated, and to borrow a structuralist term ‘rela-
tively autonomous’, institutional settings. Though the university predates
the colleges, during the 15th and 16th centuries the colleges became
dominant, and retained this dominance up until the 19th and early 20th
centuries when – especially with the reforms brought about by the 1922

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge – the university was

enabled to reassert itself. It is in this sense – as the separate legislative
and administrative body known today – that Halsey has claimed that
it ‘would be no outrage to assert that until recently, there has been no
university’ (1992: 150). Nevertheless, though they are less autonomous
than in Oxford, the colleges still hold much of the power in their control
over admissions, in some cases in their vast wealth, and in the provi-
sion of a large proportion of (especially undergraduate) teaching and
academic posts.
Colleges are often not merely workplaces, but homes too, for both
students and also for some of the fellows. Each college provides a distinct
self-governing institutional arena in which a unique culture is given the
opportunity to develop, often one rather different from that found within
other colleges, as well as that found within the Faculties. The various overt
rites and rituals which still take place within the colleges and the more or
less participatory and formally democratic nature of their governance,
at least for fellows, help promote and serially reconfirm senses of shared
solidarity. Moreover, the less formalised everyday ‘interaction rituals’, as
Goffman (1967) called them, that occur within all institutional settings
but especially those that operate within a common physical space, help
solidify their participants as members of a moral community, defined
in distinction to, indeed often against, the various other moral commu-
nities under the university’s broad umbrella. Ritualised face-to-face
encounters develop around Committee Meetings, within shared office
corridors, in Senior Combination Rooms or Fellows’ Drawing Rooms,
and across High Tables, promoting the creation and solidification of the
college clans in senses of mutual moral obligation. If the forging of moral
community proves effective, then each college member comes to believe
that his or her own college represents the best the university has to offer.
Further, whilst nestling loyalties, solidarities, and friendships are encour-
aged to congeal within colleges, rivalries are likewise ritually fomented
between them, both formally, through such things as sporting, academic
performance, and internal league table contests, and informally through
competition for the highest quality student applicants, the most eminent
university post-holders, the most agreeable entertainment, or the most
generous donor benefactions.
As was noted by some outside of the Faculty at the time (e.g.
Dougherty, SHD: 356), colleges are also especially important for large
subjects such as English studies, in which a single college usually employs

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 Conflict in the Academy

multiple fellows and in which, compared with the more laboratory-based

sciences, small-group supervised discussion remains at the centre of an
undergraduate education. A representative of the university’s adminis-
tration even told The Guardian that the ‘English Faculty is the only one
at Cambridge that has still not moved from College-based teaching to
a Faculty system’ (Walker, 1981b). One consequence of the particular
importance of colleges to the English Tripos was that the manner and
content of what was taught to students varied greatly among different
colleges. As an undergraduate put it at the time, a ‘student who has
been taught at Pembroke might as well be in a different universe from a
student being taught in Jesus. ... For most English students, if all Faculty
teaching was swept away tomorrow it would leave a barely noticeable gap
in their education’ (Evans, SHD: 351). On top of this, it appears that there
was little guidance nor incentive for those teaching within the colleges
to make their tuition accord with the faculty’s vision, so that as Penny
Wilson put it, from ‘the point of view of someone in my position as a
College Lecturer, and from the point of view of most undergraduates,
the Faculty exists primarily as an examining body’ (SHD 358). Lectures
in the English Faculty were notoriously poorly attended (e.g. Kermode,
1997: 253), and one student revealed to the Senate House audience
that, ‘one of the first things that I was told by my supervisor last term
was it was “not necessary” to attend lectures or seminars organised by
the Faculty in order to pursue the course with success, or satisfaction’
(Johnson, SHD: 358).
As well as structuring emotional solidarities and rivalries, in the
MacCabe Affair, colleges also supplied pools from which colleagues could
be extemporaneously enrolled into what Goffman called ‘performance
teams’ and mobilised as allies in the symbolic struggles that ensued.
Goffman stressed that such ‘performance teams’ are often ‘secret societies’,
in that ‘if a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent
and character of the cooperation that makes this possible will be concealed
and kept secret’ (1990 [1959]: 104). This ad hoc use of pre-existent organi-
sational ties – what Bourdieu (1986) called ‘social capital’ – has been well
documented in protest movements (e.g. Calhoun, 1997), and others (e.g.
Collins, 1998; Farrell, 2001) have shown the importance of considering
collaborative intellectual networks in understanding the evolution and
content of ideas themselves. As Goffman described it, a performance team
is ‘a set of individuals whose intimate cooperation is required if a given
projected definition of the situation is to be maintained’ (ibid.). They are

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

therefore a coordinated set of actors collectively aiming to produce or

maintain a particular sense of reality. King’s and Jesus – two colleges that
were notably detested by Leavis – were also the two principal institutional
pools from which the pros’ team was recruited. Jesus was home to Raymond
Williams, Stephen Heath, and Lisa Jardine, and King’s to Frank Kermode,
Tony Tanner, John Barrell, Norman Bryson, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and
David Simpson, all of whom spoke out in support of MacCabe. It was also,
of course, home to MacCabe himself. Kermode, who as we noted earlier
left his university job for America in a state of exasperation at the faculty’s
apparent recalcitrance on the issue of reform (Watson, 1981), neverthe-
less retained a life fellowship at King’s, which he described as a ‘pleasing
connection’ to an institution to which he continued to feel a sense of
loyalty (Kermode, 1997: 258). Simpson describes the King’s English fellows
at that time as a ‘group diverse enough, indeed, but sharing a common
distance from the mainstream of the faculty’ (1990: 256). Howard Erskine-
Hill, a vocal opponent of MacCabe’s, appears to have reconciled the lack
of fit between his institutional home within Jesus College and his opinions
concerning Literary Criticism, by leaving his fellowship at Jesus in 1980
and moving to what was perceived by some as the far more traditional
Pembroke College, in which two other members of the anti team (Ian
Jack and John Dougherty) resided. Lisa Jardine, another English fellow of
Jesus at the time, who also ‘stood up to be counted’ as a pro (Jardine, 1994),
claims that Heath and Erskine-Hill were unable to even talk to one another.
Richard Axton, who Stop Press reported was ‘widely believed’ to have, with
Christopher Ricks, gone ‘counter to the earlier decision of the Faculty
Board and voted against [MacCabe’s] upgrading’ (Fisher et al., 1981) was a
fellow, alongside Ricks, at Christ’s College. Even for those allies who were
not directly involved in the teaching of English at Cambridge, but who
were nevertheless recruited into performance teams to take part in the
MacCabe spectacle, college location appears to have remained important.
For instance, the economic and political historian, Gareth Stedman-Jones
who spoke in support of the pros’ concerns in the Senate House debate,
was also a fellow of King’s, just as John Dougherty, a mathematician who
spoke against them, was a fellow of Pembroke.
Outside Cambridge, the pros’ network was broadened through their
relative success in enlisting more distant elites in their performance
teams, whose apparent absence of immediate stakes in the dispute
may have appeared to add implicit legitimacy to their cause. For
instance, from Oxford University they received a petition signed by

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 Conflict in the Academy

300 academics, written support from Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths’

Professor of English literature and expert on James Joyce (the subject of
MacCabe’s aforementioned book), and an article published in Time Out
by Terry Eagleton (1981). Eagleton, it is worth mentioning in light of this
discussion of networks and institutional settings, had been a doctoral
student of Raymond Williams, and subsequently went on to take up a
research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, too. It was also reported
that the pro camp received letters from Yale University, home to the ‘Yale
School of Deconstructionism’, which had by this point become emblem-
atic in the United States of many of the kinds of theory apparently at
stake in the MacCabe dispute, as well as from several French universities,
all ‘urging a reconsideration of the MacCabe Issue’ (Walker, 1981h).14
Beyond the manner in which Cambridge’s actual institutional
form may have influenced the shape of the affair, later on we will also
discuss how cultural ideas of Cambridge circulating within the public
imaginary – what we might call the university and its colleges’ popular
‘symbolic form’ – also helped organise and frame the conflict that took
place.

Notes
1 Specified in a much looser manner to Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm, Lamont
defines ‘epistemological styles’ as ‘preferences for particular ways of
understanding how to build knowledge, as well as beliefs in the very possibility
of proving those theories’ (Lamont, 2009: 54), and although she is more
concerned with ‘epistemological styles’ as they map onto discrete ‘disciplinary
cultures’, the term appears equally relevant to when multiple ‘epistemological
styles’ develop within a single discipline.
2 A sense of its social standing can be grasped from a participant in the
congregation debate before its establishment at Oxford opining that ‘women
should be considered, and the second and third-rate men who were to become
schoolmasters’ (Palmer, 1965: 111).
3 Heath quotes from a participant in an early discussion in the Senate
House over a proposed English Lectureship who suggested that ‘learning
English ... should be kept within the first ten years of one’s life ... literary
attainments should be acquired through erudition in the Greek and Latin
languages’ (Heath, 1994: 23–4).
4 At Cambridge University, a bachelor’s degree is organised into a ‘Tripos’,
which is divided into two parts, each typically lasting either one or two years
depending on the discipline.

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 Contextualising the Dispute 

5 A journalist wrote at the time of the MacCabe quarrel that ‘the shadow of
Leavis hangs heavily over Cambridge’ (Jenkins, 1981: 112).
6 In particular, for example, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
at Birmingham University (founded in 1964), thanks to an exile from
English Studies – Richard Hoggart. Under his, and subsequently Stuart Hall’s
leadership, not only was French and Italian theory incorporated into cultural
critique, but the object of critical attention was itself also vastly expanded to
include a focus upon ‘low’ as well as ‘high’ cultural expressions.
7 Richards’s approach to literary analysis had a profound effect on
systematising and formalising the discipline and distancing it from its
earlier dilettantish and belletristic characteristics, which acted to retard
its institutionalisation. Part of his influence was to produce a method of
literary analysis that could be readily examined in a methodical manner. His
method of ‘practical criticism’ emerged in the mid-1920s from his practice of
distributing brief poems, highly variable in quality, and with no indication of
author or date, to students who were to provide written feedback on them.
He published the results of these exercises in his landmark (1929) Practical
Criticism in which he documented in detail the various ways in which the
students failed to respond appropriately, critically, or with originality to the
poems. He prescribed a close encounter with texts themselves which focused
on an analysis of the complex relations between their internal compositional
elements. Whilst this approach to textual analysis, and its later development
by Empson, allowed for formalisation, it also had the effect of treating texts
as autonomous things, abstracted from the contexts of their production. This
was both different from the traditional manner of approaching a literary
work through paying attention to the work itself alongside an understanding
of the author and his or her times, as well as the more recent work inspired
by Williams, which re-embedded literary texts within the contemporaneous
social forces which helped give rise to them.
8 Though Thatcher had previously been Education Secretary in the early 1970s,
it was soon after her arrival as Prime Minister that the most stringent Higher
Education cuts were announced. In 1981, the Treasury gave the Universities
Grants Committee a month to plan an 18 reduction in their budget over the
next 3 years, involving a loss of approximately 3,000 posts.
9 Kermode (2008) recalls discovering ‘that there were undergraduates who
had been through their three years and had never been taught directly by a
member of the Faculty’.
10 Malinowski had in fact written a supplementary chapter to Ogden and
Richards’s (1923) The Meaning of Meaning, which had been interested
amongst other things in the ‘sociological and scientific understanding of
language’. However, it was precisely over this issue of allying English Studies
too closely with more scientific forms of analysis that Leavis (far from

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 Conflict in the Academy

uncharacteristically) fell out with Richards, even though he had earlier

attended, and been inspired by his lectures as a student, and in many ways
carried on much of his critique, and his wife, and close collaborator on
Scrutiny, Queenie Roth had been supervised in her PhD, and likewise heavily
influenced by him.
11 To complicate the picture, Ricks, a prominent anti, had already begun his,
later much elaborated, project of treating the popular lyrics of Bob Dylan as
worthy material for serious literary analysis (1975).
12 In his (1943) ‘Sketch for an “English School”‘, the Cambridge English tripos is
the illustrative case throughout.
13 Leavis’s reputation for relishing public controversy, combined with his
avoidance of the Faculty that had done so much to retard his, and indeed
his wife’s, promotion, earned him the affectionately satirical moniker from a
grateful former student of the ‘Ogre of Downing Castle’ (Jacobson, 1963).
14 Institutional contact also appears to have been important in framing the
tumultuous relationship between Ricks and Kermode who had worked
together at Bristol before Kermode had moved to Cambridge via UCL.
Kermode described how he ‘thought it would be a help to get Christopher
Ricks, whom I admired, here ... but that was like dropping a match into the
powder, after which there was bitter enmity on all sides; I knew Ricks well
and thought we were not so different in our views about things and that if we
worked together we might be able to make some sense of the place, but we
couldn’t; ... one issue was Colin MacCabe ... Ricks was violently opposed to
him, not without reason’ (2008).

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 Part II
Symbolic Struggles and
Performative Positioning
Having discussed the socio-historical and institutional
contexts of the affair, this section intends to deal with the
symbolic and dramaturgical aspects of how the dispute
itself was enacted, focussing, in particular, on the Senate
House debate. Controversies can be understood as liminal
events since they are defined by a breakdown of collective
norms and subsequent struggles over the reconstruction
of symbolic classifications (Turner, 1974). We demonstrate
how these struggles are best captured through adopt-
ing a pragmatically synthetic approach which combines
elements of recent cultural sociology with the perspective
of positioning theory that has been developed elsewhere
in relation to public intellectual interventions and engage-
ments (e.g. Baert, 2015). The former is seen as helpful
in decoding the symbolic landscape upon which the
performances depend in order to compel their audiences.
It therefore highlights issues such as staging, sacralisa-
tion, play, fantasy, pollution, appeals to universality and
the deployment of stigmatising or dignifying symbolic
labels. The latter is seen as productive in its ability on the
one hand, to show how actors strategise both alone and in
teams to position and fix social reality, and on the other,
to emphasise the contextual constraints and enablements
that act upon symbolic manoeuvring.

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 Conflict in the Academy

We begin from the assumption that the pure fact of MacCabe’s failure
to receive tenure was simply that: an empirical occurrence without inher-
ent significance in its ‘facticity’ one way or another. Facts, such as those
described in the ‘events’ section earlier, are unable to speak for themselves,
but rather need to be told in a particular way in order to acquire symbolic
meaning (Alexander, 1984: 303). Facts only acquire meaning, and become
more than ‘mere facts’, once coded in meaningful ways and located within
culturally comprehensible narratives from which they derive their signifi-
cance. Further, the presence of such narratives is itself contingent upon the
wider cultural context in which the particular telling of the events takes
place. It is worth mentioning, for instance, that nothing much was made of
the fates of two other University Assistant Lecturers who also came up for
tenure at the same time as MacCabe, one of whom succeeded, the other of
whom failed to be appointed, raising the obvious question of how and why
a controversy occurred in the specific MacCabe instance.
Drawing upon anthropological insights into symbolic classifica-
tion systems, as well as elements of structural functionalist sociology,
Alexander’s (2003) analysis of the Watergate Scandal suggests that a
symbolic hierarchy exists within which the facts of events can be publicly
narrated, and that controversies are defined by the presence of significant
disputes over both the systems of classification into which particular
events are to be placed, as well as (drawing implicitly upon Parsons) the
level of value-generalisation at which such facts are told. Narrating facts at
the more profane level in this symbolic hierarchy signals that whatever has
occurred has done so within the terms of a continually and tacitly func-
tioning set of norms and values, and is therefore remarkable – in the literal
sense – only to the extent of reporting activity aimed towards the achieve-
ment of everyday goals and interests. Narrating facts at a more sacred
level in this symbolic hierarchy signals that collective norms, or at an even
higher level of generalisation, shared societal values, have been brought
into question and therefore that a state of systemic crisis is at hand.
Though far more consequential than the MacCabe Affair as an event,
the Watergate scandal was in fact more simplistic in its symbolic dimen-
sion. Effectively, the struggle was over whether the facts of the break-in
to the Watergate Hotel were to be told at the level of everyday goals and
interests (i.e. the level of ‘politics as usual’) as the Nixon administration
wished, or, as eventually took place, at the more sacred levels of societal
norms and values, hence signalling systemic crisis and the need for
fundamental purification and renewal. As we describe in the following

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 Symbolic Struggles and Performative Positioning 

two chapters, the MacCabe Affair, by contrast, was more complicated,

in that different parties tried to position the narrative of events so that
different aspects of the controversy were seen as either sacred, and
therefore in need of protection, or profane, and hence easily dealt with
at the level of workaday faculty administration. Moreover, whilst we
find this model very useful in bringing to the surface the often latent
and undetected symbolic substratum of social life, our concern works
against reaching for levels of abstraction necessary for modified forms
of general functionalist theory, and instead towards paying due attention
to the distinctness of empirical contexts, developing theory in a more ad
hoc, pragmatic, and grounded manner to address such specificity.
In what follows we provide examples of strategies and counterstrate-
gies employed first by the pros, and then by the antis, in order to position
both actors and ideas in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the
Durkheimian poles of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. These strategies and coun-
terstrategies are understood as performative since their successful enactment
was aimed towards bringing into being, or solidifying, some meaningful
social reality that was not present, or not consensually established, in
advance (Austin, 1962). In other words, the performances were not merely
reports on what had occurred or opinions on what should occur, but
rather forms of social action aimed at bringing about certain changes in
the arrangement of the symbolic landscape through which the affair was
interpreted by those who bore witness. Although some attention is paid to
the performative success or failure of these strategies, the focus is primarily
on simply highlighting their presence and delineating their form.
Since the majority of the actors made their living from the professional
analysis and use of the English language they were therefore highly sensi-
tive to the power of drama, oration, and rhetoric, as well as the seduction of
linguistic aesthetic, which added both to the quality and clear theatricality
of the events, thus rendering them particularly amenable to dramaturgical
analysis.1 Furthermore, argumentation, by its very nature, has a tendency
towards rhetorical escalation, a process which often triumphs over what-
ever pacifying intentions actors may start out with. For instance, reflecting
back on his own intervention, Kermode, who was by all accounts far from
pugnacious in temperament, laments that ‘in the course of the controversy
I had unwittingly acquired the polemical manners of the opposition’ (1997:
256–7). Nevertheless, we intend to demonstrate that the fruitfulness of
such an analysis need not be restricted to cases of symbolic dispute in
which the dramatic is so clearly pronounced.

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 4
Examples of Symbolic
Strategies Employed by the Pros
Abstract: This chapter provides three examples of
performative positioning strategies employed by those we
dub the ‘pro’ camp, showing how they were in turn met
with counterstrategies. Firstly, we stress the importance
of staging the centrepiece of the dispute in the hallowed
ground of the university’s historic Senate House.
Secondly, we show how raising the issue of MacCabe’s
non-reappointment to the level of the sacred was a
key strategic investment for the ‘pro’ camp. Thirdly, we
show how the ‘pros’ attempted to position the ‘antis’ as a
conservative grouping, both culturally and politically, and
therefore implicitly position themselves as progressive,
as well as attach the affair to a well-worn narrative of
an out-of-touch, stick-in-the-mud Old Guard resisting
necessary progress.

Keywords: conflict; dramaturgy; narrative;

performance; sacred and profane; staging; strategies
and counterstrategies

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0009.

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

Holding the debate in the Senate House

Stages, and their sets, convey crucial background information to an

audience about the context and significance of an act, and are therefore
key to framing successful performances (Goffman, 1974). Control over
a stage means control over a central aspect of what Alexander calls ‘the
means of symbolic production’ (2004: 91). One strategic achievement of
the pro camp was securing the Senate House as the stage upon which
the main debate would be acted out. Whilst Cambridge is more gener-
ally a highly ritualistic university, the Senate House in particular holds a
privileged place within the university’s ritualistic geography. It is in many
ways the university’s main agora, and is considered distinctly hallowed
ground. It is where many of the key ritual events of the university, such
as students’ graduation ceremonies, take place, and previously where
the most powerful governing body (the Council of the Senate) would
meet in order to periodically reconfirm or revise the collective values
and unified actions of the university.2 It is a space, in other words, trans-
formed into place through ritualised performance and the sedimenta-
tion of historical meaning and myth (Massey, 2005); a place radically
separated from the mundane working spaces of everyday faculty life.
Where faculty meetings are limited and closed spaces of performance,
debates that occur in the Senate House implicitly address the university
at large. The simple achievement of securing the Senate House as the
stage for the exchange of views that took place therefore signalled that an
intervention into the conscience collective of the university may well ensue.
In addition to the event itself, a transcript of the debate that took place
was published in the Cambridge University Reporter, the official journal of
the university. The transcription of the proceedings into an object that
could be consulted and scrutinised beyond the finite time and space of
the Senate House debate itself vastly broadened the reach of the debate
as an effective ‘means of symbolic production’, and so too, the extension
of the network of those potentially invested in the affair.3
As the speakers made their interventions in the Senate House, they
did so by addressing their comments to the Vice Chancellor as ‘Sir’,
adding to the dramatic effect of a courtroom or parliamentary house.
Therefore, whilst no inquiry had been launched (nor in fact ever was),
on the symbolic level, the format and mise-en-scène of the proceedings
gave the impression that the faculty itself was standing trial, and that
some misdemeanour against the sacred was at issue.

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 Conflict in the Academy

But of course on the level of the real, the faculty was not on trial, and
the antis well knew it. The contribution that a stage and its set makes
to what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is only
successful if the actors collude in playing by the script which accords
with the set, and the antis had no intention of doing so. The antis’
counterstrategy therefore involved lowering the tone of the proceedings
so as to desacralise the event, deprive it of its ritual status, expose the
performance as mere verisimilitude, and so return it to the level of the
profane. One tactic to this end involved employing humour and casual
indifference to undermine the pros’ efforts towards ‘impression manage-
ment’ (Goffman, 1990 [1959]). In contrast to the sacred and solemn
tone that was, quite literally, set by the austere neo-classical building,
the jocular triviality with which many of the antis delivered their own
performances signalled to the 600 strong audience not only a sense of
security in the knowledge that MacCabe’s supporters had already lost the
battle and nothing that happened in the Senate House would reverse the
Appointment Committee’s decision, but also that the ‘MacCabe Affair’
had nothing at all of the sacred about it.
For instance, commenting upon the term ‘structuralism’ which had,
as we shall see later, become a key semantic weapon in the debate, the
surrealist poet Sykes-Davis whimsically joked that ...

like all words that end in the suffix -ism it has no ascertained meaning –
always excepting ‘prism’, and perhaps ‘schism’, for the sake of its usefulness
in discussing the English faculty though, I am glad to learn that there is no
schism here ... I can for example, say quite grammatically, and what matters
more, truthfully, that not all members of the Faculty of English are brushed
with the same tar. If you see one or other of them smeared with a gooey black
substance, you should not assume that he has rubbed against some structure
or structuralist. He may be a perfectly honest man. (SHD: 336)4

Humour, especially in the affective responses it is able to evoke in the

form of collective and contagious laughter, has the advantage in symbolic
struggles of encouraging shared ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim, 2001 [1912]),
helping solidify a sense of community amongst those who are ‘in on
the joke’. Further, it has the added benefit of avoiding the necessity to
employ outright invective, which runs the risk of losing favour with one’s
audience. The use of humour, if effective in eliciting amusement, acts
as a shield and alibi for degrees of offence that would be unthinkable
in its absence. Bakhtin (1941) famously described this subversion of the

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

dominant projected text as ‘carnivalesque’, and showed how it greatly

enlarged, if just for some short time, the range of possible acceptable
behaviour. The capacity of humour to draw factions of the audience
and performer together in shared amusement was also often combined
with a variety of other rhetorical techniques, such as sarcasm, insincere
politeness, pretend sympathy and surrealism, all of which drew their
performative power from the dramatically potent realm of play. Long,
for instance, affected the transparently disingenuous notion that he was
‘not, of course, for a moment, suggesting that Dr MacCabe himself leaked
all these private and confidential matters to the press’, and feigned his
concern that ‘the whole business subjects Dr MacCabe to cruel exposure’
(SHD: 343). Erskine-Hill’s carefree contribution discussed the events
as if they had occurred in a parallel universe and university. Alluding
to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, a novel in which the central protagonist
is himself blocked from access to the university, and summoning a
performance within his own performance, he told the fictional tale of
the non-reappointment of ‘Mr Y’ at the ‘University of Christminster’, and
how a press campaign had been launched in protest in ‘The Grauniad’ and
identified as such in the ‘Christminster Evening News’, claiming that the
whole episode had, like his story itself, a ‘surreal, somewhat fabricated
air’ to it (Erskine-Hill, SHD: 338).5 He concluded his show on an equally
arch note by implicitly poking fun at literary theory’s grand pretensions,
reporting that when ‘I last visited Christminster it was still a moot point
whether Mr Y had been helped or hindered by these events, for he had
become as it were deconstructed in the crisis, and reconstituted rather as
a configuration of conflicting signs than a man of fact’ (ibid.).
The antis’ disruption of the pros’ projected definition of the situation
did not go unchallenged however, and the pros worked away at reinstat-
ing a fitting solemnity and realism to the proceedings, reasserting their
claim that a crisis had indeed occurred. Heath, for example, retorted that
‘[w]e can’t put our heads in the sand anymore. We can’t lull ourselves
with stories of Christminster anymore. When Dr Long tells us that we
shall have to put things off and let a lapse of time go by, we have to disa-
gree. The state of the Faculty needs urgent attention’ (SHD: 362).
Such confident nonchalance and attempts at either casting the events
in a surreal light or else mischievously lowering the tone were all
conducted in the spirit of play. Performance is saturated with play and
it is no coincidence that we refer to formally framed performances as
‘plays’. Whilst the ritual of the Senate House debate projected an enforced

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 Conflict in the Academy

and rule-bound rigidity, the playfulness of the antis’ jibes and fantasies
aimed at subversion, at a ‘loosening up’ of the show, and an ushering in
of a more permissive atmosphere. On a performative level, what play has
going for it is its seductive quality – its tempting call to ‘let go’ and ‘feel
good’, a siren song which when sung effectively, only the most joyless
audience is capable of resisting. However, whilst play, and especially the
heightened form of play found within direct humour, vastly expands
the range of permissible behaviour within a scene, it is, like all perform-
ance, also a delicate balancing act – constantly running the risk of blithe
flippancy. Just as the pros’ attempts at demonstrating the gravity of the
injustice that had occurred could, if not carried out with care, fall into
an unappealing po-faced humourlessness, so too the antis’ quipping and
projection of a lighter, more spirited sense of play, risked being received
as instead misjudged facetiousness.
These examples point to a more general insight into social perform-
ance – that audiences collude in determining a performance’s dramatic
success, and that the performers themselves are aware of this fact. In this
sense, a successful performance ought properly be understood as always
to some extent a co-creation involving necessary input from both actors
and audience, an implicit rule that structures all dialogic social interac-
tion. Both sides of the social interface that constitutes a performance are
required to ‘play along’ in order for the symbolic communication inher-
ent within it to come off effectively. If an audience remains incredulous,
then the performance has failed, and in the Senate House, the audience
was not only the official audience (those who had filled the seats to watch
the debate, and those who subsequently read its printed transcript), but
also all those who were themselves also participating in the debate.
And so one element of the strategic struggle went on – the pros in their
performative earnestness, struggling to elevate the debate to the higher
realms of collective norms and values; the antis in their performative
playfulness, equally intent on demonstrating that so little was at stake in
the proceedings that it was hardly worth taking them seriously at all.

MacCabe’s non-reappointment as a sacred issue

As we have mentioned, in order for the pros’ case to hold any legiti-
macy, it was crucial that they were able to raise the central issue at
stake – MacCabe’s non-reappointment – to the level of the sacred and

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

demonstrate that his failure to receive a permanent lectureship revealed

that the central values of the faculty, and by responsibility and associa-
tion the university more generally, were under threat if his dismissal went
unanswered. They attempted to achieve this by showing that the events
had not only threatened propriety in terms of breaching the meso-level
norms regulating proper employment procedure, but even further up
the symbolic ladder, that a violation of the higher values of fairness,
intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place. Achieving the goals
of this strategy would mean a necessary acknowledgement that a crisis
had occurred and that ritual purification and renewal was therefore
necessary.
One common tactic within this strategy was to demonstrate that
prejudice and bias had triumphed over sober and disinterested judge-
ment in considering MacCabe’s suitability for upgrading. As Lamont
(2009) has shown through an analysis of the usually confidential world
of academic evaluation involved in ‘peer-review’, the search for ‘quality’
is a particularly difficult matter when standards of assessment are at vari-
ance. Rather than actual skullduggery at play, Chapter 4 could be read
to suggest that it was actually a matter of incompatible, yet sincere and
well-intentioned systems of professional judgement at work, a possibil-
ity in fact proposed by some of the participants reflecting back on the
incident (e.g. Axton, 2014; Glen, 2014). In this case, the ‘MacCabe Affair’
could be understood as at least in part a case of two well-meaning, yet
irreconcilable ‘epistemological styles’ of professional peer-assessment
arising within one unfortunate faculty.6 One strategic effort of the pros’
camp, however, was aimed towards demonstrating that this was not in
fact the case and that ulterior interests had indeed served a greater role
than ought be acceptable.
Kirk, for instance, asserted the obviousness that there had been
‘some anomaly in the process of assessing this young scholar’s claims’
(SHD: 346), and Williams similarly suggested that ‘most people who
listened to it [the upgrading meeting] would know that it could not
be summarised as a dispassionate enquiry into an individual’s specific
contribution’ (SHD: 347). Heath likewise suggested that ‘the proper
standards and procedures of intellectual judgement did not obtain in the
consideration of his work, that anomalies have been rife throughout the
proceedings pertaining to his upgrading ... that Dr MacCabe was in no
way treated in an equivalent fashion to other candidates for upgrading
past and present’ (SHD: 330). John Barrell, bound by the confidentiality

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 Conflict in the Academy

rules of faculty meetings and so unable to make public the exact details
of what had taken place,7 assured the audience that notes he had taken
during these meetings ‘would, I am sure, convince any reasonable man
that, if the decision not to upgrade Dr MacCabe was not entirely based
on an objection to the kind of approach he was taking, nevertheless
such objections were influential on the discussion to quite an improper
degree’ (SHD: 332), and Stedman-Jones argued that ‘no coherent ration-
ale of the basis upon which the upgrading decision was made has yet
been produced’ (SHD: 360). Some members of the anti team also failed
to help their own cause on this point by unwittingly providing the pros
with apparent evidence in their charges of bias. For example, Erskine-
Hill, in reference to those in support of new forms of theory, told the
Times Higher Education Supplement that ‘anybody who encourages that
sort of position is not likely to be at the top of the list for an appoint-
ment’ (Midgley, 1981: 3).
Occasionally this strategy of positioning the antis as biased also
spilled over into accusations of wilful cruelty, with the effect of position-
ing MacCabe’s figure closer to that of victimhood, or even (in the more
portentous interventions) martyrdom. For example, Inglis called the
Faculty Board meeting in which Long had delivered his ‘twenty-minute
malediction’ over MacCabe’s book a ‘tribal blood sacrifice’ (1995: 281),
Steiner (who felt he had himself, at an earlier moment, experienced
comparable injustice at the faculty’s hands) characterised the faculty
as having ‘become notorious for its internecine detestation and inci-
vilities’ (Steiner, 1981: 135), Kermode referred to MacCabe as a ‘victim’
(1997: 258) and a ‘scapegoat for corporate guilt’, and described having
witnessed ‘repulsive behaviour’ (SHD: 335; Walker, 1981c), Heath told
The Guardian that it felt as if ‘a McCarthyite purge of the faculty’ was
taking place (Walker, 1981a: 28), and Tanner described it as ‘the most
unjust thing I have seen in my academic life’ (Walker, 1981a: 1). MacCabe
later described himself as ‘the victim of parochial envies and jealousies’
who had felt ‘like a small boy ... set upon by a gang of bullies’ (2009).
As a counterstrategy, the antis attempted to disrupt this projected ‘defi-
nition of the situation’ and de-sacralise MacCabe’s non-reappointment
by claiming that the decision was in actual fact taken at the profane level
of routine appointments considerations. John Harvey, for instance, told
The Guardian that the ‘debate about Dr MacCabe turned very largely
upon his teaching performance, his ability and his competence’ (Walker,
1981e: 22), and Long told the Senate House that whilst it ‘is intrinsically

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

possible – indeed I think very likely – that Jacques Lacan might help
a Joycean to write well, especially on Finnegans Wake, [that] does not
mean, if one may say so at this moment with delicacy, that it has actually
been done’ (SHD: 344). The counterstrategy, in other words, aimed at
‘defining the situation’ as that of a relatively straightforward case of a job
candidate being beneath the standards required for the appointment;
positioning him as simply not up to the task at hand, and therefore the
decision against making him permanent, as a routine, clearheaded,
unremarkable, and profane one.
Whatever the actual underlying mechanism that had drawn all the
attention upon the English Faculty, it is clear that on the performative
level, the very fact that so much attention was indeed being paid to the
events could be taken as an indication that something untoward must
indeed have occurred, or otherwise, why all the fuss? A student in the
Senate House, for instance, suggested that ‘[i]f all were well in the English
Faculty we would not be here’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360). The very fact that
the debate had been called, and the very fact that the national press was
still busy printing stories about the events (whether or not these stories
were in substance behind the pros’ cause) sustained a performative risk
of undermining the antis’ claims that this was simply ‘business as usual’.
This placed the antis in somewhat of a ‘Catch 22’ predicament, since
their substantive efforts to inform audiences that the scandal had indeed
been overblown or orchestrated (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 335) continually
ran the performative risk of simply drawing further attention to an affair
which they were invested in claiming was no affair at all. To perform
nothing – an absence – is a very difficult performance to pull off, reveal-
ing how although the performative and the actual levels of social reality
may frequently act to support one another (‘facts’, needless to say, add
credence to a dramatic case), they do not necessarily do so since they
operate under different rules, and on occasion the one may in fact act to
undermine the other.

Positioning the antis as a conservative Old Guard

Performative success also involves telling a compelling story that is able
to resonate with the audience to whom it is addressed. Another example
of a strategy employed by the pros to secure such success was to position
the antis as out-dated and conservative, both culturally and politically,

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 Conflict in the Academy

and so attach the affair to a well-worn narrative of generational conflict:

that of an out-of-touch Old Guard stubbornly resisting necessary
progress.
Abbott’s analysis of the fractal development of academic disciplines
suggests that every 20 or 30 years a new generation of scholars comes to
the fore and displaces the old (2001: 23–5). Collins has also suggested that
‘conflict in intergenerational lineages is nothing anomalous; indeed it is
a main pattern of intellectual history’ (Collins, 1998: 13; also Outhwaite,
2009). Here, however, we are not so interested in evaluating the veracity
of this account of generational strife (certain obvious facts, such as that
two of the main protagonists in the pro camp – Williams and Kermode –
had entered their 60s, appear to contradict it), as in the manner in which
the narrative served as an available resource to be deployed within the
struggle. Alexander discusses how
social performances, like theatrical ones, symbolize particular meanings only
because they can assume more general, taken-for-granted meaning structures
within which their performances are staged. Performances select among,
reorganize, and make present themes that are implicit in the immediate
surround of social life – though these are absent in a literal sense. (2004: 91)

The generational narrative expressed itself within the controversy through

allegations that the antis were a ‘reactionary caucus’ (Fisher et al., 1981: 1)
of ‘superannuated Leavisites’ (MacCabe, 2011) who had failed to confront
their own ‘professional bankruptcy’ and instead irresponsibly embarked
upon a policy of ‘planned parochialism’ (Steiner, 1981: 135) involving a
confident ‘march boldly into the past’ (Simpson, SHD: 350). A student
suggested that it was ‘about time that they [the antis] responded to the
needs of the times’ (Dettmer, SHD: 359) and Tony Tanner told Stop Press
that ‘there is a group in the faculty who are frightened of any thought of
change and can therefore properly be called reactionaries’ (Fisher et al.,
1981: 1). The same student newspaper reported that Erskine-Hill – who
was later to become a lead figure in opposing Cambridge’s offer of an
honorary degree to Derrida, and even later defected from the Anglican
church on account of their decision to ordain women priests – had been
‘described by one of his colleagues as “reacting to new criticism like
most people react to nuclear war” ’ (ibid.). Even the international media
lent its support to this narrative, Newsweek reporting that ‘the MacCabe
dispute is at bottom a battle between conservatives and experimental-
ists’ (Williams & Collings, 1981: 45). In effect, the pros were attempting

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

to position the antis as confronting a situation of what Pierre Bourdieu

(1984: 142) called ‘hysteresis’, that is a state in which their habituses,
formed as they were within another cultural field, were no longer suited
to the imperatives of the field of contemporary English Studies. The
dinosaurs could either evolve to their newfound environment, or die
out. The additional fact that almost all the young students that spoke
in the Senate House spoke out in support of an enquiry, and that the
undergraduate student representative on the Faculty Board reported that
an ‘almost unanimous motion’ had been carried in support of MacCabe
at an open meeting of the undergraduate students, likewise provided
additional ‘sticking power’ to the story of intergenerational conflict.
The familiar Old Guard vs. Young Turk narrative was not only already
present in the general cultural repertoire that surrounded the affair, but
was also given additional force by the ‘immediate surround of social life’
provided by Cambridge University in particular. This location provided
added resonance to the reception of the narrative since occurrences
within the ancient universities, and especially Oxford and Cambridge,
tend to arouse a great deal of usually deeply ambivalent public interest,
and much of the public imaginary that feeds this interest focusses in on
the institutions’ apparent unwavering defence of tradition; the widely held
belief in their obstinate recalcitrance on issues of reform. Whether or not
there is any actual truth to these imaginings of Oxbridge is and interest-
ing question, though one that is strictly irrelevant here; it is the fact that
such beliefs are popularly held that is important. Indeed the script that
Cambridge University invests a great deal of effort into ensuring that
as little as possible ever changes appears to have been embedded in the
public repertoire since at least the turn of the century, when Cornford’s
(1994 [1908]) amusing satire was described as having provided a charac-
terisation of that ‘ineffectual class’ responsible for the university’s admin-
istrative machinations ‘more nearly to the truth than they will like’ (The
Cambridge Review, 1908: 262). Cornford describes, and prescribes, a series
of mechanisms which will allow the ‘Young academic politician’ to rid
himself of the naive notion that he is there to affect change, and instead,
continue the well-established tradition of ensuring the avoidance of any
form of institutional development or progress whatsoever. He discusses,
for instance, ‘The Principle of Unripe Time’, which involves the idea ‘that
people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that
moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet
arrived’, stressing that ‘Time, by the way, is like the medlar; it has a trick

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 Conflict in the Academy

of going rotten before it is ripe’ (Cornford, 1994 [1908]: 105). The cultural
stereotype of the Oxbridge don, as we see it expressed in a multitude of
popular portraits, both critical and affectionate from Tom Sharpe’s (1974;
1995) fictional satires to Noel Annan’s (1999) biographical sketches, is of a
fusty character, whose eccentricities depend upon the removal from practi-
cal necessity that his (the classical stereotype remains almost invariably the
unmarried male) cloistered archaic existence affords him, and who treats
any prospect of ‘progressive development’ in the running of university or
college affairs with the utmost suspicion. Again, whether or not it bears
any resemblance to reality, the popular cynical image of the Oxbridge don
(much of which seems to have arisen from a period prior to the reforms
of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Roach, 1959: 235–6) is of an individual
comfortable in his sinecure, perhaps more interested in the quality of the
college claret than in the quality of their own research, let alone the quality
of an undergraduate’s education (e.g. Rose & Ziman, 1964).
This strategy of positioning the antis as an outmoded Old Guard also
helped reinforce the second example of a symbolic positioning strategy
described earlier, since by placing the affair within the cultural narrative of
progressives vs. conservatives, MacCabe’s denial of tenure was again cast
as having occurred independently of professional considerations, and as
instead ‘related to a sense among Cambridge traditionalists that the time
had come to mount a strong resistance to further incursions by the tendency
MacCabe was thought to support’ (Doyle, 1986: 130). Since this tendency
was itself linked to the introduction of ways of thinking developed abroad,
a further dimension of this strategy involved positioning the antis as either
suspicious of foreign influences or else outright xenophobic. Moreover,
because Cambridge as a place is tied so strongly to a particular mythologised
and classed imaginary of England as a place, and English Studies is in turn
intimately wedded to the English nation to a degree that other disciplines
simply are not, the notion that its conservative defenders might themselves
be prone to nationalism and intent on preventing Gallic deconstructionists
crossing the fortress-like thresholds of the university’s ancient buildings was
a narrative fortified with even greater potential credence.
Casting the antis in a xenophobic role simultaneously meant position-
ing them as anti-professionalisation, not simply vis-à-vis formalising
methods (such as some versions of ‘scientific’ structuralism claimed to
offer) but also in respect to their opposition to the inexorable trend of
an internationalisation of the academy and the modernising movement
towards closer integration with other academic systems such as France.
This strategy may also have found a symbolic buttress in the written
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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

support for the pros’ cause, mentioned earlier in the book, that had
arrived from America and France.
Similarly, the capacity of the pros to cast themselves as representative
of the foreign influence found support in the fact that many of MacCabe’s
prominent supporters were interested in ideas from across the channel.
Stephen Heath, for instance, ‘taught much in French’ (Inglis, 1995: 279),
had written – in French – a study of the French literary theorist Roland
Barthes (Heath, 1974), and had also translated some of his work into
English (Barthes, 1977). Frank Kermode, who had encouraged the read-
ing of French theory in his seminar at University College London before
coming to Cambridge, describes being influenced by ‘the much despised
French theorists, people like Derrida, who was quite unjustly treated as a
kind of madman around here [Cambridge]’ (2008). During his doctoral
studies MacCabe had spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure,
where he had, by his own account, ‘sampled Parisian intellectual life to
the full’, working with Althusser and Derrida, and attending Barthes’s
seminars and Lacan’s lectures (2010c). The ‘theory’ which permeated
his first book (1979) was as distinctly French as the subject matter of his
second, on the new-wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (1980).8
In his lecture to the faculty, Williams told his colleagues that in
protecting the established canon ‘what is often being defended ... is not
just a body of writing ... but a national identity ... a stand, a last redoubt,
from which more general notions of Englishness, of values, of tradition
are defended against all comers; until even native dissidents (to say noth-
ing of all those foreigners) are seen not merely as different but as alien –
speaking not our language but some incomprehensible jargon’ (1983:
195). This slide from ‘English’ as a body of literature to ‘Englishness’ as a
set of values which were ‘not merely academic’ was also acknowledged by
other commentators on the affair (e.g. Scruton, 1981: 137), and it is clear
the exclusions it implicitly carries. Others highlighted English academic
parochialism more broadly, noting the reluctant and sluggish national
response to theoretical developments on the Continent (e.g. Bradbury,
1981: 137; Donoghue, 1981), and accusing the antis of harbouring ‘an
in-built fear of what is going on elsewhere in the world’ (Heath, quoted
in Williams & Collings, 1981: 45). Again stressing how the new forms of
literary theory and cultural studies were linked to the social sciences,
Steiner, for example, stated that outside ‘Britain, the paramount fact in
modern literary studies has been the application to these studies of ways
of reading, of techniques of analysis, which drew ... on other disciplines in
the sciences humaines – i.e. linguistics, epistemology, the social sciences,
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 Conflict in the Academy

psychology, anthropology’ (Steiner, 1981: 135), and discussing the English

reaction to structuralism in particular, Bowie, suggests that ‘academics
in the relevant fields froze, read nothing, and said nothing’ (1981: 136).
A Professor of English at New York University, Denis Donoghue, also
waded in on this point, but instead emphasised a possible national
defence against developments across the Atlantic:
is the current row at Cambridge between ‘England’ and ‘America’; that is,
between those who want an English curriculum for an English university
taught by teachers unassailably English in their sensibility, rather than neo-
American, or even neo-French, and those who are charmed by American
flexibility and diversity? The fact that Leavis used the word ‘Americanisation’
to suggest an appalling process of levelling, a failure to discriminate between
the objects demanding attention, is enough to show that the issues are in
some sense political. (1981: 136)

Donoghue was pointing to the fact that American universities had

travelled much further towards the adoption of a variety of different
approaches within the same pluralistic English department; a fact that
he himself suggested could in reality be the result of more superficial
gesturing. However, given the scant evidence that such developments in
America were much in the minds of the direct participants in Cambridge
at all, his comments might also be read as a demonstration of how
distantly observed events are so often translated into local concerns; how
audiences necessarily read performances through the prism of their own
local cultural and historical markers.
A further permutation of this strategy of positioning the antis as
reactionaries was to suggest that their cultural conservatism was a direct
political conservatism too, and that the apparent dispute over English
criticism was in fact expressive of a deeper clash of political convictions
(Birchall, 1982; Doyle, 1986; Lewis, 1982: 3; Simpson, 1990: 251). This
charge was of course in turn met with forceful resistance.
Reflecting back on the incident, Ricks, for example, comments that
‘there’s all this stuff about me being very right-wing – I’m just a life-long
Labour voter, I’m not very right-wing, even though there was a political
undertone to it ... the notion that those who hold up Empson and Leavis
as great critics are somehow right wing is simply wrong’ (Ricks, 2013).9
Defending against a student newspaper’s description of him as a ‘promi-
nent conservative’, Erskine-Hill claimed at the time that he had ‘never
been against change or novelty as such, never ignored junior members’
opinions, never been the automatic spokesperson for the existing arrange-
ments’ (SHD: 337). Against the charge that a moratorium had been placed
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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

on discussion of tripos reform since 1977 (Fisher et al., 1981) and also that
the findings of a working group set up by Kermode to investigate teaching
in the faculty had been actively dismissed (Kermode, 1997: 251; 2008),10
others, such as Sykes-Davies claimed that reform had already taken place.
‘No university’, he maintained, ‘has done more and few have done as much
as Cambridge to promote intelligent and useful interest in non-literary
English ... It has generally been our policy to reform ourselves when need
arises’ (SHD: 336; 337). Likewise, Stevens claimed that contemporary
critical approaches were already well integrated into the faculty, and that
‘in Part II of the Tripos an undergraduate who wishes to concentrate on
modern literary theory and its applications can devote at least half of his
working time to it, and possibly more’ (1981: 191).
These claims were themselves, in turn, challenged by students as
being ‘in any practical sense, untrue’ (Johnson, SHD: 358). Perhaps more
damaging for the antis’ case however, at least from the stance of dramatic
coherence within a particular performance team, was that their declara-
tions of intellectual openness and pluralism also clashed directly with
other remarks coming from within their own ranks, such as the claim
that forms of literary theory under the banner of ‘structuralism’ were
‘[l]ike all other Parisian fashions ... very passing’ (Sykes-Davis, SHD: 336).
Indeed, as we will see later, whatever their actual status as conservative or
not, a crucial performative inconsistency with the antis’ defence against the
notion that they were opposed to the newer forms of literary theory came
from within their own performance team, via open expressions of precisely
such opposition and resistance. In struggles over successfully ‘defining a
situation’, dramatic coherence appears to be of crucial importance.
Perhaps more effective was the antis’ counterstrategy of mirroring the
pros’ approach directly, and claiming that it was in fact they, the pros, who
were corrupted by political bias. One reason this allegation had a chance
of holding (Witherow, 1981a; Hughes, 1981: 257) was that Marxism had
by and large been the envelope within which the structuralist message
had originally been delivered to a British audience (Easthope, 1988), and
the pro camp had – as we shall see below – become strongly associated
with structuralism during the affair. This is not to say that the pros’
judgements were in fact prejudiced by political preoccupations; whilst
MacCabe had in his youth been a member of the Communist Party
(Simpson, 1990: 258) he described himself to The Guardian at the time as
being ‘a very inactive member of the Labour Party’ (Walker, 1981g), and
is reported to have later tried to sue The Times for calling him a Marxist
(Inglis, 1995: 276) – hardly what one would expect from a card-carrying
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 Conflict in the Academy

revolutionary. Rather, it is to say that the broader symbolic landscape

from which this counter-narrative was woven again added cultural
support to its dramatic viability and ‘performative power’.
The main purpose of this section has been to show how background
cultural narratives are able to be marshalled in support of particular
positioning moves, imbuing them with a degree of dramatic viability
that extends beyond simply allowing the facts to ‘speak for themselves’.
It should also be noted that paying attention to narrative ‘types’ in this
manner is able to open up possibilities for generalising beyond specific
case-based insights and identifying common narrative forms shared
across a variety of different research sites, thus providing ‘a bridge
between ... hermeneutic inquiry ... and the impulse towards general
cultural theory’ (Alexander and Smith, 2003: 25).
Having, in this chapter, examined a selection of examples of symbolic
positioning strategies deployed by the pros’ performance team, we will
now turn, in the following chapter, to some of the strategies embarked
upon by the antis.

Notes
1 Given the constitutional issues that comprised much of the substance of
the affair, the more poetic elements of the interventions found themselves
necessarily intertwined with the dry bureaucratic speak of administration.
2 It was also where Snow delivered his aforementioned Rede lecture.
3 Though we find ourselves in unequivocal disagreement with their positing
of agency in ‘things’, Actor-Network Theorists have similarly stressed the
importance of paying attention to objects and ‘inscription devices’ as ‘actants’
in controversies (e.g. Callon, 1986).
4 Sykes-Davis also employed humour in his contribution to the debate
through recounting his good behaviour in responding to a prying journalist’s
unsolicited phone call by offering him his suit measurements before promptly
hanging up the phone (SHD: 335).
5 The technique of ‘mise-en-abyme’ is a time-honoured theoretical move, one
effect of which is to divert attention away from the governing performance
through evoking a sense of dramatic disorientation.
6 Midgley reported at the time that the ‘most extraordinary aspect’ of the affair ‘is
the almost total failure of either side to understand the other ... the apparently still
deepening chasm of mutual incomprehension separating the two sides’ (1981: 3),
and Bergonzi writes that ‘often the contestants did not share the minimum
common ground that makes argument possible’ (1990: 10).

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Pros 

7 It was reported in The Guardian that Barrell (supported by Kermode)

appealed to the Vice Chancellor to release them from the rules of academic
confidentiality so that they could describe in detail what had happened
within the committee meetings that led to the MacCabe Affair (Walker,
1981c).
8 Interestingly, in Simpson’s (1990) retrospective account of the affair, written
unambiguously from the position of a pro, he likewise finds it salient to note
MacCabe’s Irish heritage.
9 Ricks was clear about his lack of sympathy towards framing literary criticism
through theory of any kind (Ricks, 1981), and that explicitly included
political theory. As Jardine comments ‘Ricks wasn’t interested in the politics,
just in criticism’ (Jardine in Inglis, 1995: 285).
10 In reference to the reception of the report that emerged from this working
group, Kermode (2008) recalls that the faculty simply ‘didn’t want to discuss it’.

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 5
Examples of Symbolic
Strategies Employed
by the Antis
Abstract: This chapter provides three examples of
performative positioning strategies employed by those we
dub the ‘anti’ camp, showing how they were in turn met
with counterstrategies. Firstly, we show how the ‘antis’
attempted to hold up the canon of English literature and
certain methods of literary criticism as sacred entities, in
demand of protection from forces of profanation. Secondly,
we focus upon the semantic struggle of positioning what
was imprecisely termed ‘structuralism’ as a pollutant,
imbued with moral threat. Thirdly, we highlight the strategic
positioning move of claiming that consensus in fact ruled,
and therefore that no controversy had in fact occurred,
noting the difficulties, given all the attention that had
already been paid to the incident, of maintaining this stance.

Keywords: danger; dramaturgy; pollution; purity;

sacred and profane; strategies and counterstrategies;
structuralism

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0010.

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

English literature and literary studies as sacred

The first example of a symbolic strategy employed by the antis was their
effort to remind the audience of the principle that English literature was
itself an evidently sacred thing, embodying a set of values that demanded
protection from any possible corrupting or polluting forces. This strat-
egy relied firstly, upon constructing ‘the canon’ as a totem for English
literature at large – a core collection of works that provided a coherent
representation of the primary and sacred objects of the discipline itself,
and secondly, the defence of a particular established method of literary
study as definitive and coextensive with proper literary studies in general.
Defending the purity of these two elements from possible contamination
was projected as not merely a technical, but also a moral concern. Ian
Jack, for example, stated that it is our responsibility ‘to keep the attention
of students focused on great writers’ (quoted in Wheen, 2005: 77), Ricks
reminded The Guardian that ‘it is our job to teach and uphold the canon
of English literature’ (quoted in Walker, 1981a: 26), Erskine-Hill stressed
that the ‘first loyalty of us all is to our subject’ (SHD: 337), and Long
suggested that the usual suspect – ‘structuralism’ – ought not be given
any ‘special privileges’, since ‘along with all the other methodological
“isms” [it is] irredeemably secondary, and in some sense irredeemably
unimportant, in comparison with literature itself ’ (SHD: 344).
The implicit moral load being placed on English literature here is of
interest in its exemplifying one of the most common rhetorical tropes of
the fracas – the remarkably frequent appeal to higher (often universal)
concerns above factional or personal interests. As well as ‘English litera-
ture’, higher concerns here included claims to be speaking on behalf not
of one’s own interests, but rather in the name of ‘truth’, ‘the academy’,
‘facts’, ‘the Faculty’, ‘justice’, ‘the Tripos’, ‘the students’, ‘intellectual integ-
rity’ or ‘the University’. For instance, Sykes-Davis remarked that ‘those
who have set the press in motion and requested this meeting ... could
hardly have been more inept, or have caused greater harm to their own
Faculty and to the University’, and that it is ‘to the academy in the broadest
sense that our responsibilities are due’ (SHD: 335; 338, emphases added).
A student supporter, Mr Johnson, reminded those gathered that the
inquiry into MacCabe’s non-appointment, which he fully supported,
‘should have the interests of the English students at its heart, for it is for
them that the Faculty is run’ (SHD: 358, emphasis added), and Gareth
Stedman-Jones made an appeal for an inquiry ‘both in the interests of

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 Conflict in the Academy

the reputation of the English Faculty in particular and the University’s good
name in general’ (SHD: 360, emphasis added). Dramatically, such claims
to be acting on behalf of something purer and more universal than
personal gain or petty retribution draw attention away from whatever
personal or partisan positioning moves may simultaneously be taking
place, and towards more lofty, venerable concerns. Cynics might argue
that religious and political figures have been practicing such attention-
shifting sleights of hand for time immemorial; distracting their followers
with baubles of the sacred to free up unhindered space for more base
manoeuvring.
Similarly to Orwell’s (1946: 257–8) diagnosis of the malleable emptiness
of much popular political terminology, it is also worth noting that very
different positions in the MacCabe dispute often claimed to be acting on
behalf of precisely the same higher concerns. Whilst, for example, Sykes-
Davis (SHD: 335) claimed to be motivated solely by protecting the inter-
ests of the faculty, Williams did so too, but from a diametrically opposed
position, arguing that ‘I am not here to attack the English Faculty but to
find, and help to find, conditions for the renewal of that enterprise, and I
believe that those who have called today’s discussion are centrally moved
by that intention’ (SHD: 347).
Aiming directly for the sacred heights, MacCabe himself recounted
that his motivation for persuading Derek Brewer for the vote on his
appointment to be retaken ‘was not a question of my future but one of
simple justice’ (MacCabe, 2009, emphasis added). In some cases the
fact that one’s actions were being led by higher concerns that may in
fact potentially threaten one’s private interests was stated explicitly.
Erskine-Hill, for example, commented that if his voting had displeased
some senior professors in the department (presumably Williams and
Kermode) ‘I should apologise for this displeasure, but might vote the
same way again, believing that I should not thereby jeopardise the latter
part of my career’ (Erskine-Hill, SHD: 337).
Occasionally, higher and lower concerns were placed side-by-side
in interventions to emphasise the danger of having one’s actions led by
dishonourable concerns, and the importance of taking the high road. For
instance, Woodward, the undergraduate students’ representative on the
Faculty Board, pointed out the problem ‘of individuals bearing factional
politics to the Board, apparently for the English Tripos, but in disregard
of its students’ (SHD: 340, emphasis added). Kermode also presents this
comparative technique in suggesting that when ‘prejudice, and a desire for

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

political advantage, take the place of disinterested discussion and enquiry, it

will sometimes be an unfortunate individual who must bear the shock of
the conflict’, and in his appealing to the Faculty Board to attend ‘not to
its own fancied rights but to the needs of its students’ (SHD: 335, emphasis
added).
From a structural perspective, this comparative technique is also
important in showing that the description of a motive as base is always a
relative, rather than absolute, designation. Douglas’s famous analysis of
‘dirt’ as the prototypical pollutant made clear that pollution always takes
this relative form. What we tend to think of in absolute terms as dirt,
she demonstrated, is better understood as simply ‘matter out of place’,
which when placed within another context would not be considered a
pollutant at all. She writes that there ‘is no such thing as absolute dirt: it
exists in the eye of the beholder ... Dirt offends against order. Eliminating
it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the envi-
ronment’ (1966: 12). Likewise there were plenty of other contexts within
the university in which the charges of ‘self-interest’ or ‘personal gain’
that made sense as forms of corrupting bias in the Senate House debate
would be considered perfectly acceptable, even laudable, motives; it was
the context, not the content, that made them polluting. This insight is also
relevant to the historically contingent notion of ‘fairness’ in considera-
tion of MacCabe’s upgrading, for the notion that appointments should
be conducted via open competition, and judged on the basis of merit
rather than patronage, would have seemed scandalous for the majority
of Oxford and Cambridge’s history (Abbott, 2001: 125; Annan, 1999: 6).1
It is only in the particular and recent historical context of the sensi-
bilities of late-20th-century employment procedure that the MacCabe
Affair becomes comprehensible in this sense at all, since it is only in this
context that the charge of bias as a pollutant of fair judgement might
hold. Looked at in this way, one element of the symbolic struggles that
took place within the ‘MacCabe Affair’ can be understood as laying claim
to contingent purification practices aimed at reorganising the environ-
ment of the faculty so that appropriate interests were functioning within
their appropriate contexts, contingently defined as such in terms of both
time and place.
In response to the strategic appeal to the canon of ‘English literature’
as sacred (at least within the context of an English literature faculty), the
pros launched a counteroffensive of arguing that this canon was in fact
the product of the profane forces of historical contingency and power.

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 Conflict in the Academy

Williams, for example, reminded the faculty that, ‘the “canon of English
Literature” is not given; it is produced’ (1983: 193), and went on to spell
out some of the historical ways in which this production had occurred,
emphasising, again, the salient link between nation, language, and
literature:
you have in sequence, first, a restriction to printed texts, then a narrowing to
what are called ‘imaginative works’, and then finally a circumscription to a
critically established minority of ‘canonical texts’. But also growing alongside
this there is another and often more potent specialisation: not just literature,
but English literature. (Williams, 1983: 194)2

The ‘canon of English literature’ had been constructed by mere mortals,

and was therefore open to revision and reconstruction by present and
future generations of such mortals. What ended up within, and what
was excluded, was the outcome of profane considerations, and did not
somehow miraculously rise above them. Automatic reverence to an
established canonical conception of ‘English literature’ ought therefore,
according to Williams’s argument, itself become a political question,
rather than an automatic reflex to be drilled into students.
One generalisable insight that might be gleaned from this first
example of a symbolic strategy of the antis is the historical and cultural
contingency of positioning moves in cases of controversy and dispute.
The same convincing performance will fail to find the same success
in altered times and places. Taking into consideration variable back-
ground cultures is key to comprehending the performative viability of a
particular strategy and when there are conflicting ‘epistemological styles’
present within the same time and space (as in this particular case), one’s
performative strategy must appeal as widely as possible. Performative
success, in other words, becomes far more challenging in complex social
contexts in which there are multiple audiences to be persuaded.

Positioning ‘structuralism’ as a pollutant

If we continue to think in structural terms, it is clear that designation of

the ‘sacred’ depends upon the existence and identification of its counter-
part, the ‘profane’. If, as discussed in Chapter 3, English Studies was to be
the primary humanistic discipline that, having successfully eclipsed the
Classics, most defined the national culture, and Cambridge English had

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

come in the eyes of some to define what the study of English in general
should mean, then the symbolic environment was arranged in such a way
that the antis could position any threat to Cambridge English, as not only
threat to the local practice of English Studies in Cambridge, but also to the
discipline at large, and what’s more, even an implicit threat to the national
culture itself. In this manner, the emotive momentum and symbolic
weight of the affair quickly snowballed, rapidly assuming proportions
well beyond its local effects in terms of whether or not a young lecturer
was to be offered a permanent post. As the affair proceeded, this threat
also became increasingly associated with, and condensed into, a single
catch-all term: ‘structuralism’, which, in spite of repetitive protestations
that it was of absolutely no relevance or value to the debate whatsoever,
participants and commentators seemed incapable of ceasing to use (e.g.
Stevens, 1981; Simpson, 1990: 263; Williams, SDH: 347).3
The term was frequently used by the antis as a simple epithet, aimed
at stigmatising their opponents (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 336; Long, SHD:
343), and as a label it therefore quickly became imbued with a host of
moral, rather than simply classificatory significations. In this manner it
served as an imprecise shorthand for everything the antis believed was
wrong with the kinds of work they understood MacCabe and others to be
supporting. As Simpson puts it, it became ‘the term that the “business as
usual” faculty majority chose as their omnium gatherum definition of the
enemy’ (Simpson, 1990: 246; also Lewis, 1982: 3), and the various streams
of labelling theory that developed in the wake of Becker’s (1963) study of
Outsiders and Goffman’s (1963) examination of Stigma, have illustrated
how labels are capable to some extent of bringing certain types of subject
into being through ostensibly merely alerting us to their existence. In
this particular case, however, in order for this stigmatising strategy to
work, the term itself needed to be (re)positioned as in fact the pollutant
the antis wished to claim it was, and more specifically, as one threatening
to the kinds of literary study that the previous section suggested the antis
were intent on sacralising. If this could be achieved, then disinfecting
the faculty of its influence might then be taken as being of paramount
importance.
Towards accomplishing this end, Erskine-Hill suggested that in spite
of the scientific pretensions some of them held structuralists embraced a
radical relativism he dubbed ‘cognitive atheism’ in which ‘one interpreta-
tion is as valid as another’, and ‘touchstones, criteria, different degrees of
probability, and indeed the concept of truth’ itself are carelessly thrown

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 Conflict in the Academy

to the wind (SHD: 338). He also highlighted its terminological impre-

cision, and the fact that amongst the various definitions there is ‘little
that the philosopher could recognise as a theory to define them’ (ibid.),
suggesting that those who readily associated with it were themselves
muddled in their thought. As we have already highlighted, in addition
to positioning it as a sophistic doctrine, the antis also alluded to the fact
that like most pollutants ‘structuralism’, and its authors, were foreign
things, both in national and disciplinary terms (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD:
336); so as Bowie noted, it became ‘almost a matter of public hygiene not
to read them [the ‘structuralists’], and to discourage the student popula-
tion from doing so’ (1981: 136).
Commentators on the affair, such as the conservative philosopher Roger
Scruton, aided the antis’ efforts in positioning the term as a contaminating
threat by flipping the notion (described in Chapter 2) that Leavis’s approach
was elitist on its head. He did this by suggesting that it was in fact the new
French theory that MacCabe & Co. were understood to be championing
that was the truly elitist culprit, because it was this approach that failed to
address itself to an idealised common reader and instead spoke its own
private, technical, and esoteric language. ‘This explains’, he wrote,
at least in part why semiotics and all its hermetic offshoots should have
entered into so overt a conflict with the traditional Cambridge school. For
the entire claim of Cambridge English to academic centrality – a claim
which it has substantiated at least as well as Cambridge philosophy – rests
in the fact that it has addressed itself not to the high priesthood of an arcane
religion, but to a recognisable ideal of the reader of literature. Hence it has
achieved the only kind of objectivity that a humane subject can acquire, that
which pertains not to science, not to magic, but to human values themselves.
(Scruton, 1981: 137)

Likewise, another commentator, clearly assuming that structuralism was

somehow necessarily a form of radicalism (an assumption discussed in
the preceding chapter), pointed to the irony that compared to Leavisite
criticism ‘structuralist writing is so obscure that it totally bars any
working-class adult, the liberation of whose class is the declared aim of
the philosophy behind such writing, from any comprehension of it at all’
(Hughes, 1981: 257).
Seen contextually, one challenge with maintaining this strategy of
positioning structuralism as a toxic force, as with the former strategy
of defending a predefined and stable notion of ‘English literature’, was
that at some point it inevitably came into conflict with the attempt to

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

convince doubters that the anti camp were welcoming of new ideas,
capable of identifying their merits, and willing to integrate them into
faculty teaching. There was again, in other words, a problem of coher-
ence across the strategic repertoire, which may itself have signalled a
greater diversity of opinion within the antis’ ranks. Moreover, its sting
was somewhat removed when those whom the label was contrived to
discredit readily adopted it as a banner of pride. For instance, the Regius
Professor of Greek, Geoffrey Kirk, proudly asserted his endorsement
of ‘structuralist analysis’ suggesting that it ‘is an approach, or set of
approaches, that cannot be simply ignored in any respectable university
in Europe’ adding – rather dubiously given the circumstances – that it ‘is
one that often increases understanding’ (SDH: 345). Kirk also suggested
that the antis were simply ignorant, and that ‘to label the whole structur-
alist movement as mindless and somehow wicked is the reaction, I am
afraid, of those who usually do not have the faintest idea what it is really
about’ (SHD: 345; also Bowie, 1981: 136).
Also addressing this apparent ignorance, and actively detaching its
moral from its technical connotations, Williams (1983) attempted to care-
fully parse out the various definitions of the term in his faculty lecture,
showing how whilst some were able to operate within the ‘dominant
paradigm’ of literary studies, others made a fundamental break from it.
Interestingly, he suggests that on at least one dominant understanding of
the term – that which points towards analysis of language and literature
as ‘an internal rule-governed system’ – structuralism might in fact be
understood as a ‘long-lost cousin who had emigrated from Cambridge
via Empson in the late twenties and early thirties’, visited North America
where it had been associated with New Criticism, and then returned
back to Cambridge via France in a somewhat altered form in the 1960s
(1983: 206). He was suggesting that the approach of ‘practical criticism’
initiated by the Cambridge critic Richards (who had left for Harvard
in the late 1930s), and developed by his student Empson was in some
sense a form of literary structuralism avant la lettre.4 The significance of
this counterargument in terms of positioning ‘structuralism’ was that
contrary to the antis’ claims, it could in fact be understood – at least in
one of its guises – as having originated in germ form within the very
faculty and social body that was now misidentifying it as alien and
attempting to expel it (see also Jones, 1981: 9).
Writing elsewhere, in The Guardian, Williams (1981) also argued
that since the figures that made the Cambridge tradition famous – for

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 Conflict in the Academy

example, Richards, Empson, the Leavises, and Knights – were themselves

iconoclastic rebels against the gentleman–dilettante model of literary
scholarship that they felt oppressed the discipline of their day, the new
work that MacCabe and others in the faculty represented in fact showed
a greater fidelity to this spirit of Cambridge English than the apparently
defensive behaviour of the antis (Mulhern, 1981: 27–8; also Eagleton,
1981). Heath also suggests that Richards and Leavis’s deep interest in the
modernist literature of their era (Eliot and Lawrence, in particular), had
failed to be carried over into the following generation of literary critics
at Cambridge. Leavis’s tradition instead ‘served as an embattled standard
that excluded contemporary creative work, and his influence generally
fed into an academic establishment of canonical texts, of what counted
in and as “doing English” ’ (Heath, 1994: 32). Leavis had even had a
brush with the law in his efforts to teach Joyce’s banned book, Ulysses,
in his lectures at Cambridge (Chaney, 1985: 251) and had, incidentally,
famously experienced his own set of hurdles in securing a faculty post.5
Mulhern, however, incisively pointed out how the other side of the
‘Cambridge tradition’, which the antis were in fact demonstrating a far
greater adherence to, was the unrelenting, and to some extent success-
ful, drive to establish English Studies as the ‘moral control-point of the
entire culture’, a status to which ‘no other discipline entered a rival claim’
(1981: 28; also Leavis, 1943). Mulhern’s point again adds support to the
notion that a strong contextual facilitating factor in the affair was a sense
that the new forms of literary analysis understood to be championed by
MacCabe threatened English Studies’ recently won status as the central
humanistic discipline – the new Classics.
It was of course certainly in part this understanding of the discipline
that the 1980s ‘radicals’, and indeed most prominently Williams himself,
mounted a challenge against, bringing us to a second positioning move
made by Williams during his lecture. That is, one of solidarity with
another connotation of structuralism; that associated with the ‘radical
semiotics’ which had inspired MacCabe’s writing. On this understanding
of the term, he suggested that structuralism did directly confront the
dominant literary paradigm, and at the same time made contact with
his own later work on ‘cultural materialism’, which involved ‘the analysis
of all forms of signification, including, quite centrally writing, within
the actual means and conditions of their production’ (ibid.: 210). Both
approaches shared an emphasis upon subjectivity in comparison with
more determinate structuralist analyses (Higgins, 2013: 139), and likewise

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

insisted on including ‘the paradigm itself as a matter of analysis, rather

than as a governing definition of the object of knowledge’ (Williams,
1983: 211). This account accords well with Simpson’s understanding of
the perceived threat in MacCabe’s approach: ‘not that it proposed some
alternative within a range of alternatives; nobody minds that ... [but]
that it promised to put things together in a new way’ (1990: 263). It also
provides a link to claims that Williams was the actual target of the hostil-
ity directed, by proxy, towards MacCabe (Jardine, in Inglis, 1995: 285).6
What is interesting about both the antis’ strategy of positioning struc-
turalism as a pollutant, as well as the various counterstrategies mounted
by the pros to re-dignify the term, is that they demonstrate how ideas
themselves, or even ideas about ideas such as ‘structuralism’, can become
the objects of positioning moves just as effectively as can individuals
themselves, at least to the extent that individuals or groups are put into
association with such ideas.7 Furthermore, the fact that different strate-
gies operating side-by-side can act to both support, as well as undermine
one another, again highlights the importance of achieving coherence
across one’s strategic repertoire if one’s overall performance within
symbolic struggles is to ‘come off ’ convincingly.

‘Move along now, nothing to see here’

A final example of a symbolic strategy employed by the antis was that

of claiming that in actual fact there was no conflict within the English
Faculty at all, and therefore, as Stevens put it ‘no “crisis” in any proper
sense of that abused word’ (1981: 191). Long, for example, argued that
the debate had artificially constructed ‘a polarity that simply isn’t there’
(SHD: 344) and Stevens suggested that whilst the ‘English Faculty is said
to be in a state of confusion and disarray, the evidence of this is hard
to come by’, claiming that he was ‘much more conscious of common
aims, common interests, a common pursuit, than I am of anything else’
(SHD: 345). Dougherty suggested that the pros had organised ‘a siege’
of an otherwise happy faculty (SHD: 356) and Sykes-Davis managed to
combine the notion that consensus ruled within the faculty with a thinly
veiled swipe at Williams, in commenting that one ‘professor, famous on
page and screen, has addressed an open meeting on “The Crisis in the
English Faculty” and when he declares a crisis, conscientious objectors
must beware’ (SHD: 337).

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 Conflict in the Academy

This strategy can also be understood as linked to the attempt at

upsetting the notion that the Senate House debate had any meaning
whatsoever, let alone meanings of a sacred nature, concerned with
the higher values of the faculty or university more generally. Long, for
instance, expressed this quite directly through his denial ‘that the circu-
lated description of “the state of the English Faculty” has any validity at
all’ (SHD: 343), and Stevens proposed that it was ‘merely polemical to
represent the Faculty as engaged in an ideological battle – and a gross
distortion of a complicated reality to imagine any clique working off
their “intellectual hatred” on a single individual’ (SHD: 345).
Occasionally, rather than this perhaps more far-fetched description of
an actual consensual state of affairs, this strategy instead took the form
of an appeal to the anti camp to be done with their complaints in order to
allow harmony the possibility of returning. Sykes-Davies, for instance,
expressed his confidence that the faculty still had ‘the resources of good-
will to co-operate together’ (SHD: 338). Beer optimistically commented
that it ‘would be pleasant to think that we might one day be able to look
back upon these events as a serious winter diversion which marked the
beginning of a new period of intellectual progress and understanding’
(Beer, SHD: 355), and on the second day of the debate, Dougherty called
upon those who had the previous day ‘approached this lectern stern-
faced’ to ‘turn their thoughts ... to Schiller: “O friends, no more these
sounds ... that all men may be brothers!” ’ (SHD: 357).
Of course, MacCabe’s supporters challenged the antis’ attempted
repositioning of the symbolic landscape in this way: disputing their
contention that either nothing had occurred or that grievances had been
adequately dealt with and that it was now time to move on. They did
this by repositioning such claims as instead expressions of smug compla-
cency on the part of those incapable of acknowledging the wrongdoing
that they suggested had so clearly taken place. One undergraduate
speaker told the Senate that ‘I consider any call for peace, retrenchment,
and perhaps a little reform to be disingenuous’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360).
Another suggested that ‘what is truly horrifying is that so many dons
don’t seem really to care ... The responsibility for the Faculty’s poor shape
rests on those who have done nothing, or have done very little. Rests on
those who maintain today that there is no crisis in the English Faculty’
(Dettmer, SHD: 359). Yet another insisted that ‘the faculty is in a state
of collapse’, and that the cause was plainly ‘the Board’s irresponsibility’
(Woodward, SHD: 339). In the same vein, on the matter of whether or

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

not there was ‘a case for enquiring into the State of the English Faculty’,8
Professor Kermode stressed that ‘the answer must be: indeed there is,
and everybody knows it’ (Kermode, SHD: 333).
The struggle over whether or not an affair had taken place was like-
wise linked to whether or not the media had amplified or otherwise
accurately reported events. Whilst the antis almost universally insisted
that the ‘press has greatly exaggerated the bitterness in our Faculty’
(Sykes-Davies, SHD: 338), and was responsible for ‘wildly irresponsible
distortions’ (Stevens, 1981: 193; also Beer, SHD: 353; Erskine-Hill, SHD:
338), the pros instead suggested that ‘the press has not conjured up a
ghost’ (Clemmow, SDH: 361), and that whilst reports ‘may have been
misleading in detail ... they have been absolutely right in substance’
(ibid.), that ‘the evidence shows that the press tried assiduously to get
the facts straight, and to provide some honest account of the intellectual
differences involved in the quarrel’ (Simpson, 1990: 245). Kermode, for
example, summarised the reporting as having ‘not been such that the
larger public can know much about the facts of the matter; but those
who know more are unable to contest the truth of its general impression’
(Kermode, SHD: 333).
However, as mentioned earlier when discussing the first two exam-
ples of the pros’ own positioning strategies, the largest threat to the
antis’ claims that there was nothing of interest to see, was the dramatic
difficulty of convincing an audience that there was no fire (or that the
fire had already been put out) beneath the continuing billows of smoke,
whether or not that smoke had itself been artificially generated. Such
an enormous amount of attention had already been drawn to the affair
that on a performative level, positioning the commotion as having in
fact been magicked out of thin air was a challenging one to maintain.
More generally, even if the antis’ strategy managed to prove convincing
to the immediate audience, the controversy now had a momentum and
logic of its own. It had, at a certain ill-defined point, left the exclusive
hands of those immediately invested in the events, and entered a larger
public sphere, in the process gathering new investments (e.g. those of
media producers intent on selling their wares, those of media consumers
hungry for scandal and sensation, and those of an indeterminate number
of participants engaged in debates over literary studies elsewhere, who
could draw upon the episode as an analogue and parable for their own
local struggles). In this sense, it is difficult to draw a clear boundary
around the event in either space or, as we suggest in the following chapter,

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 Conflict in the Academy

time. In what MacCabe described as the ‘age of celebrity’, control of the

status of the event had at a certain point ended up at the whims of more
distant, indeterminate, and far less controllable social forces. In fact, a
quarter of a century later, analysis of its possible meanings, and therefore
the active positioning of its symbolic script, even managed to end up in
the unlikely hands of two nosy sociologists.

Notes
1 Even as late of the mid-19th century, Annan describes how Canon Barnes of
Christ Church, Oxford remarked that ‘“know what we’re coming to ... I’ve given
studentships to my sons. and to my nephew’s children, and there are no more
of my family left. I shall have to give them by merit one of these days”. An old
fellow of Merton was urged to award a fellowship to the candidate who had
done best in the examinations. “Sir, I came here to vote for my friend’s son, and
vote for him I shall, whatever the examiners say”. To award by merit had echoes
of the French Revolution’ (Annan, 1999: 6).
2 He goes on to ask, ‘Is “English” then the language or the country? If it is
the language, then there are also fifteen centuries of native writing in other
languages: Latin, Welsh, Irish, Old English, Norman French. If it is not the
language but the country, is that only “England” or is it now also Ireland,
Wales, Scotland, North America, Old and New “Commonwealths”?’ (ibid.)
3 One place we might begin to understand what the participants were referring
to when employing the term ‘structuralism’ is the index of MacCabe’s (1979)
Joyce book. Here we find a list of authors – Althusser, Barthes, Cixous, Derrida,
Foucault, Irigaray, Jakobson, Kristeva, Lacan, Saussure – some of whom would
nowadays be grouped under the heading ‘poststructuralism’, itself a notoriously
inadequate label, and one which commanded less widespread currency
in the early 1980s. The name ‘Levi-Strauss’ is conspicuously absent. The
anthropologist Edmund Leach was Provost of MacCabe’s college up until 1979,
and the primary exponent of anthropological structuralism at Cambridge, but
his scathing review of MacCabe’s edited collection of essays on Lacan (Leach,
1981) seems to underline the distance between the approaches going on under
the same label within these two disciplines.
4 Steiner (1981: 135) also reads Richards’s work in this way.
5 In spite of being the most famous, and influential literary scholar of his
generation, Leavis was only made a part-time lecturer in the faculty in 1936
at the age of 41, a full-time Lecturer only in 1947 at the age of 52 and a Reader
(the position he retired from two years later) in 1959. Before that, he was
based at Downing College, where he became a Director of Studies in 1930.

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 Examples of Symbolic Strategies Employed by the Antis 

Steiner (2007) notes how until he properly joined the faculty, Leavis was
unable to examine or be a member of the boards that set the tripos, with the
consequence that his students ‘paid a terrible price’ for their allegiance to their
charismatic mentor.
6 Alternatively, MacCabe himself suggested that ‘in fact it had been the
“Kermode affair” and it was Frank Kermode who had always been the
principal target’ (MacCabe, 2010a; 2010b), and Bergonzi writes that ‘it has
been suggested’, though he does not tell us by whom, that in fact ‘the gallophile
Stephen Heath was the real target’ (1990: 11).
7 This latter qualification differentiates our position from the more radical
accounts of the ‘life of things’ given by some theorists adopting the Actor-
Network approach.
8 This was the official title of the Discussion of the Senate that had been called.

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 6
Conclusion
Abstract: This chapter draws together some of the principal
arguments made in the preceding chapters, advancing the
theoretical implications for studying controversies more
broadly, both within and outside of the academy. We stress
the utility of adopting a pragmatic approach to theoretical
synthesis that responds directly to the idiosyncrasies of
context. Whilst acknowledging the virtues of recent cultural
sociology, we elaborate how this case analysis demonstrates
the methodological difficulties of treating social life in
its ‘purely cultural’ aspect. We conclude by noting that
controversies should not be treated as bounded events, as
they inevitably emerge out of prior facilitating conditions,
and like all symbolic contributions to reshaping our shared
cultural life, their future impact or revival is forever
unpredictable.

Keywords: cultural sociology; pragmatism;

symbolic and non-symbolic

Morgan, Marcus and Patrick Baert. Conflict in the

Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0011
 Conclusion 

Through a combined analysis of, in Part I, the facilitating contextual

settings and, in Part II, the performative enactment of the ‘MacCabe
Affair’, this book has attempted to demonstrate the socially struc-
tured drama that lies at the heart of disputes within the academy. We
understand this project to be important in prompting reassessment of
historical disputes that have unfolded within the humanities and social
sciences, including those (such as the late 19th-century Methodenstreit,
or the 20th century Historikerstreit, for instance), which have perhaps
contained far greater intellectual content and consequence, but which, in
part through virtue of obtaining classical status, risk becoming sanitised
of their performative and strategic substance, and instead formalised
into purely intellectual affairs.
It has argued that when disputes, controversies or crises occur, consen-
sual symbolic classification systems break down and need to be actively
reconstructed by agents invested in maintaining these systems. Whilst
there may have been highly variant understandings over the form that
this reconstruction should take, it is worth highlighting that all the vari-
ous parties with direct investment in the affair tacitly agreed that some
such reconstruction was required, even if such reconstruction involved
simply reaffirming the importance of maintaining the established and
dominant symbolic sorting frames, burying hatchets and moving on.
We have argued that barriers to consensual reconstruction presented
themselves in the MacCabe case at least in part through the presence of
divergent ‘epistemological styles’ having emerged within the same faculty,
each at variance with the other’s mode of judging the issues at stake, and
each concerned, through a variety of symbolic strategies and performa-
tive positioning moves, to convince the various audiences of their own
particular ‘definition of the situation’. In opposition to other performa-
tive perspectives that assume more stable roles from which social action
might be read, positioning theory was seen as useful here in its alerting
us to the significance of spontaneity and relationality in struggles over
meaning-making, showing the manner in which actors contended, both
individually, as well as in ‘performance teams’, to position themselves,
their adversaries, and their own, and others’ ideas in meaningful relation
to one another and in such a manner as to lend support to particular stra-
tegic goals. The Senate House debate in particular was seen as providing
a relatively bounded exemplification of this process, providing a staged
opportunity for those participating to dramatically position themselves in
front of one another and before a gathered audience. Whilst emphasising

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 Conflict in the Academy

the spontaneity of the reconstruction of symbolic classification systems

in this manner, we have also tried to stress the importance of the wider
socio-historical and narrower institutional contexts in which position-
ing took place, as well as the significance, highlighted by recent work in
cultural sociology, of the background symbolic landscape from which
narratives were drawn and which influenced whether or not perform-
ances were judged as compelling.
Since the reassembly of symbolic classifications is such a deeply
contested process, power, in the Weberian sense of one agent, or group of
agents, being able to exert their will in the face of resistance from another,
is therefore at the heart of understanding the outcome of such disputes
(Weber, 2013: 926). Though we have hinted at the importance of both
symbolic and material forms of power as they are typically carried within
academic environments – through, for example, such things as seniority
and title in hierarchies of rank, institutional location and the capacity to
have one’s voice heard and vote counted on various boards and commit-
tees, the social capital provided through academic and extra-academic
networks (such as media-contacts), and the cultural capital inherent in
scholarly reputation, as well as the wider power that the government
exerts over all publicly funded institutions – a more complete analysis of
academic controversies would need to flesh out in greater detail where
else such power resides, how it is concealed and revealed and the vari-
ous ways its operation succeeds or fails. Here however, and especially in
Part II of the book, we have primarily focussed only on one dimension
of power; a type of symbolic power that Alexander (2011) describes as
‘performance power’. This is a kind of power which although capable
of being abetted by other forms of material or institutional power, also
operates independently of them, and succeeds in asserting itself on the
basis of an altogether different set of effective criteria. In this under-
standing, to ‘be really powerful means that social actors, no matter what
resources and capacities they possess, must find a way to make their
audiences believe them’ (Alexander, 2011: 89), and this depends upon a
variety of factors including the capacity to maintain coherency across
all the various elements of one’s performance, as well as marshalling
background narratives and codes to which audiences are receptive, and
projecting, in Goffman’s earlier terminology, a unified ‘definition of a
situation’ across a given performance team. Like all non-coercive forms
of power, its efficacy also depends to some extent on those audiences
over whom it is exercised, and it is for this reason that we suggested in

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 Conclusion 

the previous chapter that performances must always be understood as

‘co-created’ situations.
In spite of this neglect of the other forms of power that help determine
the outcome of disputes and controversies, our analytical focus has been
upon the symbolic form that the controversy took, rather than attempt-
ing to account for the actual outcome (in terms of success or failure) of
the various struggles that occurred, and for this concern, aspects of the
methodological approach of the new school of American cultural sociol-
ogy have proven particularly useful.
Nevertheless, pace this school’s methodological suggestion of the
necessary ‘bracketing out of wider, non-symbolic social relations’ in
order to allow for ‘the reconstruction of the pure cultural text’ (e.g.
Alexander & Smith, 2003: 14), we would like to suggest that ‘bracket-
ing out’ material contexts may in fact on occasion constrain the social
analyst’s ability to understand the ‘purely cultural’. Primarily, we would
argue, this is because other than on an analytical level, there is in fact
no such thing as ‘pure cultural texts’, that in all actual empirical social
contexts the symbolic and the material invariably coexist. This fact is
of course hardly denied by cultural sociology (as e.g. McLennan, 2005
appears to suggest), in that its argument is simply that ‘bracketing out’ is
a necessary methodological move – a means towards greater understand-
ing of the distinctive facet of social life it takes as its primary under-
examined object of study.
Our concern is not that cultural sociology neglects the significance of
material forces in social life, but rather that the methodological move of
‘bracketing out’, if carried out in strict and absolute terms, risks reifying
‘the cultural’, with the consequence of potentially mistaking it, once we
return to a theoretical level, as a social force somehow emanating from
nowhere. It also begs the methodological question of at which point ‘the
material’ (we place this word in brackets to avoid the reverse reification)
is let back into one’s analysis? In distinction from McLennan’s (2003)
concern that the new cultural sociology evinces an ‘idealist bias’ on a
theoretical level, our concern is more that it evinces an a priori meth-
odological bias towards the cultural which may, ironically, and depend-
ing on the empirical context, act to hinder our ability to ‘reconstruct
the pure cultural text’. Our case analysis has, we hope, demonstrated
that even when primarily concerned with recovering the frequently
neglected symbolic dimension of social life, without also making a
methodological effort to account for material and institutional contexts,

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 Conflict in the Academy

one’s understandings of cultural texts themselves may become impov-

erished. We hope, in other words, to have shown that the symbolically
focussed analysis of Part II of the present book was enhanced by having
first, in Part I, attempted to provide a non-symbolic contextualisation of
the affair.
For example, paying attention to the various material transforma-
tions that were taking place in English higher education at the time
of the affair, such as the post-Robbins expansion of the universities,
and the very specific and relatively unique effect that these material
transformations had upon Cambridge in particular, augmented our
ability to understand the particular salience of the pros’ ‘purely cultural’
critique of Leavisite elitism. The special resonance of the ‘purely cultural’
narrative of a fuddy-duddy and conservative ‘Old Guard’ resisting the
inevitable rise of the ‘Young Turks’ (again we place ‘purely cultural’ in
inverted commas, since clearly this narrative is, strictly speaking, not
‘purely cultural’) was likewise enhanced by paying attention to the
fact that a highly divisive conservative government had recently been
elected to national office. We could have gone further, and suggested
that other obvious material facts, such as Cambridge’s geographical
status as a market town located outside the symbolically modernising
urban metropolis, likewise added weight to the cultural power that
this narrative of it nurturing stick-in-the-mud, parochial resistance to
change might hold. We also attempted to show how the material factors
of local institutional contexts also helped account for the composition
and allegiance of ‘performance teams’. Intentionally ‘bracketing out’, for
example, the role played by colleges in providing the material loci for the
‘interaction rituals’ that helped bind their members into shared moral
communities, and purposely ignoring their ability to serve as pools from
which potential recruits became enlisted, would have undermined an
understanding of the form and efficacy of the ‘purely symbolic’ perform-
ances that subsequently played themselves out.
By the same token, the collective, and ‘purely cultural’ anxiety (which
was capitalised upon by the antis, and no doubt provoked their initial
horrified response to MacCabe’s possible appointment) over threats to
the character of a recently established and institutionalised discipline
that had taken on the mantle from the Classics of being the core human-
ity, with all this word’s deep moral connotations, makes far less sense in
the absence of a material account of the institutional explosion of the
social sciences and the apparent encroachment of their methods into

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 Conclusion 

literary analysis since the 1960s. Neither is it irrelevant to the symbolic

force of the arguments (though this point has not been elaborated
earlier) to reflect upon the cultural consequences within the university,
of Cambridge’s broader reluctance to offer material support to the
developing social sciences (anthropology and economics excepted) in
anything like a comparable degree to the support they enjoyed in the
newer plate-glass universities that sprouted up during the 1960s.
In opposition to the suggestion that only ‘after having created the
analytically autonomous culture object does it become possible to
discover in what ways culture intersects with other social forces, such as
power and instrumental reason in the concrete social world’ (Alexander
& Smith, 2003: 14), our analysis implies that in some instances the
inverse in fact holds: only after reconstructing these ‘other social forces’,
as we attempted to do in Part I, does it become possible to fully describe
the analytically separable ‘culture object’, as was our aim in Part II of
the book. Bracketing may indeed prove useful at particular moments in
the analysis of social situations, and cultural sociology provides a rich
amalgamation of methodological tools in aiding that process when it
is appropriate, but sociology is also a pragmatic pursuit and it does not
help in advance of a research encounter to specify when such appropri-
ate moments in fact are. Just as there is a danger, which cultural sociol-
ogy has been particularly effective in alerting us to, in allowing one’s
methodological choices to be led by the assumption that material forces
are always ‘in the last instance’ determinate, so there is a price to pay in
the methodological decision to treat material contexts as a priori epiphe-
nomena of underlying cultural codes. In the end, it must always be an
empirical rather than theoretical question as to the relative significance
of cultural or material forces. As Weber famously put it, we must not
‘substitute for a one-sided materialism an equally one-sided spiritualistic
causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible,
but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of
an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical
truth’ (Weber, 1992: 125).
In one sense, the case we have presented earlier is perhaps not best
understood as a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, since much
of what we’ve described has been concerned less with ideas and more
with revealing the performed nature of disputes as cultural constructs
with an emphasis upon the social and institutional environments which
inevitably influenced their expression. However, in another sense, since

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 Conflict in the Academy

new ideas, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are often
forged in alliance with those they approve of, and in opposition to those
they reject, simply studying the form and structure of academic conflict
in this manner may also help reveal insights into the substantive devel-
opment of ideas themselves (e.g. Collins, 2002: 52–3).
Finally, it is important to stress that symbolic conflicts, wherever
they occur, should not be considered bounded events since they are
never entirely complete or conclusive. Instead, because struggles over
the reorganisation of shared symbolic life are ongoing, they are perhaps
better understood as politics temporarily frozen in time (Unger, 1987:
145). This can be demonstrated by the fact that many of the same issues
touched upon here were still being contested long after the conclusion
of the ‘MacCabe Affair’, and indeed continue to be so in various popular
debates (e.g. Dawkins, 1998; Searle, 1990; Selden, 1986; Wheen, 2005).
Most obviously in this respect, a decade following the departure of
MacCabe for Strathclyde, another affair exploded in Cambridge, with the
ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deny the university from awarding an
honorary doctorate to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Not only
did this event involve many of the same individuals and networks as the
earlier MacCabe dispute (Smith, 1999), but its symbolic form also bore
a remarkable resemblance to the case we have used as the focus of this
book. Such comparable examples1 also help demonstrate the generalising
possibilities of case-specific cultural analysis in their capacity to unpick
cultural codes and determine symbolic narratives which are shared
across a variety of localised settings, and to do this without slipping into
the classical structuralist hubris of believing that in doing so, universal
features of the cultural repertoire are somehow being uncovered.
Whether or not such formal universal features (of symbolic disputes, or
any other cultural phenomena) in fact exist, is again, we would contend,
not a question that can be established in advance of careful empirical
reconstruction.

Note
1 A further related example that unfolded almost immediately after the
MacCabe Affair in 1981 erupted when a University Assistant Lecturer in Social
Psychology at Cambridge, David Ingleby, failed to be upgraded to a permanent
post. Ingleby, whose ideas about ‘critical psychiatry’ (1981) had also been

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 Conclusion 

influenced by French theorists such as Michel Foucault, was recommended

by all 11 members of the Social and Political Science (SPS) Committee (SPS
had not yet become a faculty at this point, and was therefore institutionally
weak within the university) for upgrading. The Appointments Committee,
which consisted of no other social psychologists, turned the upgrading
recommendation down even after two appeals were made, and 90 students and
various eminent academics, including Charles Taylor at Oxford, petitioned on
his behalf (Flather, 1981; Jones, 1981).

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 Bibliography
SHD: All references refer to the Senate House Debate
on the ‘State of the English Faculty’ (3–4 February 1981),
the transcript of which was published in the Cambridge
University Reporter, 18 February 1981.

Cambridge University Archives material

Assorted papers relating to Faculty governance,

administration, appointments and teaching,
1961–81.
Correspondence relating to English Faculty Board and
committee membership and office holding, 1979–82.
Correspondence relating to nomination for election to
various Faculty Board committees, 1970–82.
English Faculty Board Correspondence 1979–81.
English Faculty Board Minutes 1980–1.

Interviews

Prof. Sir Christopher Ricks, 17 October 2013, London.

Prof. Heather Glen, 14 August 2014, Cambridge.
Prof. Colin MacCabe, 22 September 2014, via phone
conversation.
Prof. Fred Inglis, 14 October 2014, via phone
conversation.
Dr Richard Axton, 28 October 2014, Cambridge.
Other anonymous interviewees.

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0012
 Index
Althusser, 30, 55, 72
Annan, Noel, 9n1, 30, 54
anthropology, 3, 5, 29, 31, 42,
56, 79
Assistant Registrary, 13, 21n2
Axton, Richard, 12, 14, 17, 37
Ball, Christopher, 32
Barrell, John, 12, 13, 15, 37, 49,
59n7
Barthes, Roland, 29, 55, 72n3
Beer, John, 14, 15, 32, 70, 71
Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 36, 53
‘bracketing out’, 6, 34, 77, 78
Bradbury, Malcolm, 27–8, 31
Brewer, Derek, 15, 62
Bryson, Norman, 37
Cambridge University, 2, 12,
18–20, 26–38, 39n4, 45,
53–7, 64–8, 78–80, 82
Cambridge University Reporter
(journal), 45, 82
Christminster, 47
Classics, 26, 30
English Studies, 26, 30, 32,
64, 68, 73
College Teaching Officers
(CTOs), 20n1
colleges, 20n1, 28, 34–8, 78
conflict, 7–8, 12, 63–4, 66, 69
academic, 80
generational, 52–3
social, 17
DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013
symbolic, 34, 80
conscience collective, 45
Cornford, Francis MacDonald,
28, 34–8, 53, 78
counterstrategies, 8, 43, 46,
50–1, 57, 69, see also
symbolic strategies
critical psychiatry, 80–1n1
cultural sociology, 5–6, 41,
76–7, 79
‘bracketing out’, 6, 34, 77, 78
danger, 62, 79
Derrida, Jacques, 52, 55, 72n3,
80
Donoghue, Denis, 55–6
Dougherty, John, 37, 69, 70
Douglas, Mary, 34, 63
dramaturgy, 6–7, 41, 43, 45,
47–8, 57–8, 62, 71, 75
Durkheim, Émile, 43, 46
Eagleton, Terry, 38
Edward VII Professorship, 15,
19, 22n7
English Faculty
Board committees, 12–14
Board minutes, 4, 13–15,
21n3
Cambridge University, 2
English literature, 13, 66
education, 27
professorship, 22n7, 25, 38
as sacred, 61–4

 Index
English studies, 2, 5, 16, 24–6, 30–3, 35,
39n6, 40n10, 53–4, 64–5, 68
English Tripos, 26, 36, 39n4, 40n12, 62
‘epistemological styles’, 24, 30, 38n1, 49,
64, 75
Erskine-Hill, Howard, 14, 20, 37, 47, 50,
52, 56, 61–2, 65
Foucault, Michel, 72n3, 81n1
French theory, 23, 38, 39n6, 54–6, 66,
81n1
Glen, Heather, 13, 14
Goffman, Ervin, 3, 35–6, 45–5, 76
defining a situation, 3, 47, 51, 57, 75,
76
Guardian, The (newspaper), 36, 50, 57,
59n7, 61, 67
Harvey, John, 16, 50
Heath, Stephen, 15, 16, 21n3, 29, 37,
38n3, 47, 49, 50, 55, 68, 73n6
higher education, massification of, 24,
28, 30
Hindess, Barry, 30
Hirst, Paul, 30
Hoggart, Richard, 39n6
humanism, 24, 26, 27, 30
humanities, see social sciences
humour, 46–8, 58n4
Ingleby, David, 80n1
Inglis, Fred, 12, 13, 18–19, 50
interaction rituals, 35, 78
Jack, Ian, 37, 61
Jardine, Lisa, 9n3, 20, 37, 59n9
Johnson, Gordon, 14
Joyce, James, 13, 38, 51, 68, 72n3
Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 47
justice, 61, 62
Kermode, Frank, 7, 12–15, 19, 31, 36–7,
39n9, 40n14, 50, 52, 55–7, 59n10,
59n7, 62, 71, 73n6
Kirk, Geoffrey, 31, 49, 67
Kuhn, Thomas, 7, 38n1
Lacan, Jacques, 51, 55, 72n3
Leach, Edmund, 72n3
Leavis, F. R., 15, 26–7, 29–30, 32–3, 37,
39n5, 40n10, 40n13, 56, 66, 68,
72–3n5, 78
linguistics, 27, 31, 55
linguistic sociology, 31, 43, 55
literary studies, 14, 20
dominant paradigm, 67
literature, 27, 29, 31
modern, 55
as sacred, 61–4, 65
literary theory, 12, 34, 47, 55, 57
Long, Mike, 12, 13, 47, 50, 69–70
MacCabe, Colin, 12, 14, 18, 19, 40n14
McCabe Affair, 2, 3, 9
chronology, 12–17
functions of, 17–20
non-reappointment as sacred issue,
48–51
proximate contexts, 34–8
socio-historical context, 24–34
‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, 46
Manchester School of Anthropology, 3
Marxism, 27, 31, 57
massification, higher education, 28
Miller, Edward, 14
mise-en-scène, 45, 58n5
Mulhern, Francis, 30, 68
Multiple Correspondence Analysis, 9
narrative, 3, 8, 28
background, 76
cultural, 78, 80
event, 42–3
generational conflict, 52–3
Old Guard vs. Young Turk, 53,
54, 58
nation, nationalism, and national
language, 54–6, 64–6
Newsnight (BBC television), 16
non-symbolic factors, bracketing out,
6, 34, 77, 78
DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013

Old Guard, positioning the antis as,
51–8
Outsiders, The (Becker), 65
Oxbridge colleges, 9, 23, 27, 53–4
parochialism, 50, 52, 55, 78
peer-review, 49
performance, plays, 47–8
performance teams, 23, 31, 34–8, 57–8,
75–8
performative, 6, 43
planned parochialism, 52
pluralism, 27, 32–3, 49, 57
pollution/pollutants, 8, 41, 61, 63, 64–9
positioning
antis as conservative Old Guard,
51–8, 78
antis as reactionaries, 56
structuralism as a pollutant, 64–9
positioning theory, 5–9, 41
post-Robbins expansion, 23, 28, 30, 78
practical criticism, 39n7, 67
Practical Criticism (Richards), 39n7
pragmatic approach, theory, 5–6, 43, 79
profane, 42–3, 46, 50–1, 63–4
professional bankruptcy, 52
Reece, Florence, 17
Registrary, 13, 21n2
Richards, I. A., 27, 29, 30, 32, 39n7,
40n10, 67, 68
Ricks, Christopher, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20,
21n1, 37, 40n11, 40n14, 56, 59n9, 61
rise of the social sciences, 24, 28–31
Robbins expansion, 30
Robbins Report, 28
Rorty, Richard, 5, 24
sacred
English literature and literary
studies as, 61–4
MacCabe’s non-reappointment as,
48–51
and profane, 43, 46
Salingar, Leo, 13, 14
Sanderson, Alan, 18
DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013
Index 
Scruton, Roger, 66
Senate House debate, 7, 37, 41, 45–8, 63,
70, 75–6, 82
Simpson, David, 3, 18, 37, 59n8, 65
Snow, C. P., 30, 58n2
social capital, 36, 76
social sciences
humanities and, 3, 8, 23, 75, 78–80
literary theory and cultural studies,
55
rise of, 24–34
staging, Senate House debate, 4, 7, 8,
41, 44, 52, 75
Stedman-Jones, Gareth, 37, 50, 61
Steiner, George, 27, 29, 50, 52, 55, 72n4,
73n5
Stop Press (newspaper), 16, 37, 52
strategies, see symbolic strategies
structuralism, 6, 16, 27–8, 46, 72n3
English reaction to, 55
literary theory, 57, 61
positioning, 54, 64–9
student numbers, 28
Swinnerton-Dyer, Peter, 15, 21n5
symbolic classification system, 41–2,
75–6
symbolic conflicts, 34, 80
symbolic strategies
English literature and literary
studies as sacred, 61–4
MacCabe’s non-reappointment as
sacred issue, 48–51
‘move along now, nothing to see
here’, 69–72
positioning structuralism as a
pollutant, 64–9
positioning the antis as conservative
Old Guard, 51–8
Senate House debate, 45–8
Tanner, Tony, 9n2, 15, 37, 50, 52
Taylor, Charles, 81n1
Thatcher, Margaret, 33–4, 39n8
Time Out (Eagleton), 38
Times Higher Education Supplement
(magazine), 50
 Index

Times Literary Supplement (magazine), Watergate Scandal, 42

18, 19, 31 Williams, Raymond, 12, 14–16, 19, 29,
37–8, 39n7, 49, 52, 55, 62, 64, 67–9
Ulysses (Joyce), 68 ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, 46
University Teaching Officers (UTOs), Wilson, Penny, 36
14, 20–1n1
Upgrading Committee, 12–15 Young Turks, 53, 78

DOI: 10.1057/9781137521309.0013