30 years at Keele:

Personal Reflections.

John Sloboda

1st October 2004

1974 OVERTURE

30 years ago today I joined the academic staff of Keele University, beginning a period of unbroken service to the present day. For 25 of those 30 years I have lived on the University Campus. These are my contributions to the collective memory, offered in gratitude for all that my time at Keele has brought me.

I wish I could say I was drawn to Keele by its distinctive educational philosophy. Actually I knew almost nothing about Keele prior to arriving here. It was a job in academia, just that. Already, by the mid-1970s academic jobs were not as easy to obtain as they had been in the heady expansionist 60s. My life as a PhD student in London involved rushing from one part-time tutoring job to another (which in my memory largely meant standing interminably at freezing bus-stops for buses that never came) to make ends meet. The prospect of working in one place all the time, and being able to rely on a regular salary, was what drove me to apply for the only 3 lectureships going that year, one in Warwick, one in Dundee and one in Keele. The only reason Keele got me was that it interviewed first, and I withdrew from the other competition prior to interview.

The selection process was interesting to say the least. All 8 shortlisted candidates for 2 psychology posts were asked to wait in the same room at the end of the interviews (there were no public research presentations in those days), and the successful candidates were called back into the room to be made offers one by one. It was made clear that there would be no time to “think about it”. If you didn’t say yes on the spot, an offer would simply be made to the next in line, and you would be seen off the premises.

The first time the door opened, a name other than mine was called in. After a 2 minute wait that seemed like 2 hours, the door opened again. My name was called. Once in the room I had 30 seconds to decide my future. I said yes. A bird in the hand.

Not only was I totally ignorant of Keele, I knew absolutely nothing about Staffordshire. A few weeks before moving to Keele, I brought a friend up to look around the city. As we drove past ugly decaying industrial plant and rows of squalid terraced houses, searching in vain for something of beauty, I began to wonder whether I had made a terrible mistake. Our visit was epitomised by our failure to find a restaurant that matched our metropolitan tastes. After interminable fruitless roaming we ended up at the Berni Inn on Milehouse Lane. We glumly ate our scampi and chips and I privately gave Keele 5 years, tops!

FIRST MOVEMENT – PASTORALE (1974 – 1985)

My memories of the period 1974 – 80 are dominated by sociability. Keele seemed an endless round of pleasant conversation, taken over leisurely morning coffee in the Chancellors Building Staff Common Room, lunch on high table in Keele Hall, afternoon tea in the Senior Common Room, supper parties, bridge evenings, university drinks receptions, graduation teas, departmental seminars, chapel lunches,

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country rambles, intervals of concerts, and simply wherever on campus one passed a colleague going in the opposite direction.

The professoriate of Keele (an exclusively male club on my arrival) had among them at that time conversationalists of olympic stature. There was always at least one to be found holding court in the various places where food and drink was consumed. Indeed, I got the firm impression that informal interaction, between staff, staff families, and students, was the core activity at Keele. Even teaching was dominated by free-ranging conversation. The tutorial, which was then defined by univeristy regulation as a group of between 4 and 6 students, provided real opportunities for staff and students to get to know each other as individuals. Tutorials were routinely held in staff houses, and many students formed longlasting bonds of mutual friendship with Keele staff and their families. The pastoral and welfare provision for students, both formal and informal, was astonishingly generous. As someone barely older than the average student, alone, and in a part of the country where I had no prior personal connections, the Keele community became my family. Having to learn the skills of politely terminating encounters with the most ardent of Keele’s conversationalists was a small price to pay for a real sense of belonging and mutual personal commitment.

My first two offices at Keele were in Nissen huts, two parallel rows of which dominated the centre of campus for more than 30 years. These quaint and inefficeint remnants of Keele’s wartime function as an army camp were much loved by their occupants, although Vice-Chancellors saw them as a baleful indictment on their inability to raise sufficient capital to get rid of them, an inability which plagued seven successive VCs.

The academic staff who arrived around my time in the mid-1970s mainly had one thing in common. We were recruited to help raise the research performance and aspirations of an institution which had, for its first quarter century defined itself primarily in terms of its teaching excellence and curriculum innovation. By 1974, however, the dual honours programmes which once uniquely defined Keele were commonplace among British universities, and soon the four-year degree programme with its distinctive Foundation year would come under relentless, and ultimately fatal, financial and recruitment pressures. It was determined that Keele needed to raise its research game. Many of those who arrived at Keele around my time now grace the Professoriate of universities around the world, some of us still at Keele. I think in particular of Jonathan Dancy (Philosophy), David Vincent (History), Angus Gellatly (Psychology), Peter De Cruz (Law) and Stephen Banfield (Music) who became friends as well as colleagues and now serve other universities in senior capacities with the utmost distinction, but who gave Keele much of the best of their careers, and contributed towards Keele’s increasing international reputation for research.

As far as I can see, Keele’s research policy was pretty simple in those days: appoint good people, pretty much regardless of their research interests, and then let them get on with it. There was generous support for conference attendance and sabbatical leave including a centrally funded competitive research leave scheme which I was fortunate enough to enjoy three times during my years at Keele. Library and technical support were also generous. If I wanted something I asked for it, and generally got it. This supportive “laissez faire” policy suited me down to the ground. It allowed me to

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develop a research area which would nowadays be considered a fringe “bad bet” – music psychology.

Although I had much friendly and supportive interaction with Keele psychologists in relation to undergraduate teaching, it took 20 years of my lone effort at Keele before the institution was ready to invest in further permanent staff to support a music psychology research group. Whether I would have fared better elsewhere is hard to say. I never seriously explored moving, for reasons which I certainly do not regret.

The first of these reasons was music (practical music making). Under the inspired leadership of George Pratt, Keele’s first academic music appointee (who left Keele to become Head of Music at Huddersfied University), Keele had a thriving amateur music life second to none when I arrived at Keele. The University Choral Society, an all-comers choir, had a membership of over 200. In 1975 I invited a few friends among students and staff at Keele to join me in a smaller-scale enterprise, a summer performance of Flanders and Swann’s “Captain Noah’s Floating Zoo”. This group enjoyed working together, and from this core, the Keele Chamber Choir was founded under my direction. In 1985 the choir was renamed the Keele Bach Choir, and continues to this day, as a “town and gown” auditioned choir, meeting weekly, and now under the direction of its 4th conductor, the excellent Matthew Willis. Its second conductor was a Keele music graduate, Marion Wood. For 20 years, from 1975-95 this choir dominated my non-work life, and brought great pleasure and fulfilment, as well as friendship. Regular involvement at the coal face of musical performance has been of inestimable value, not only personally, but in enriching my research, and ensuring it remained informed by the concerns of musicians as much as the research community. Among the longest-standing and most dedicated members of the choir were Denis & Kathie Dixon, Marjorie Seddon, Andor & Susan Gomme, Thelma and John Cliffe, John & Karin Cox, and Kay Williams. Denis (Chemistry), Andor (English), and Kay (Library) all shared with me the privilege of working at Keele full time for more than 30 years John Cox, who came to his chair of Psychiatry at Keele with a professional reputation as a tenor soloist was one of several singers who I also worked with as an accompanist, as I did in the early years with Marjorie Seddon.

There was also much instrumental talent among the longstanding Keele academic staff. I developed particularly fulfilling chamber music relationships with the flautist Oliver Goulden (French) and the string players Hans and Pam Liebeck (Maths). In fact, Oliver was the very first Keele academic to welcome me into his home. He had met a London flautist I used to accompany whilst on a visit to Schott’s music shop in London. She had told him I was coming to Keele, and I think his dinner invitation was waiting in my pigeonhole on my first day! The second reason that bound me to Keele was my developing friendship with a legendary Keele family, that of Gerry and Enid Nussbaum. Gerry and Enid were Keele students in its very earliest years, and Gerry’s first and only academic appointment was to the Classics Department at Keele. The family home has been on the Keele campus for 50 years, and it was a “home from home” for scores of the students and staff they welcomed into it over the years. In 1980 I married their eldest daughter Judith, and two years later our daughter Miri was born.

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In my memory the early 1980s are dominated by two parallel and all-consuming activities. The first was parenthood, and the second was the three-year labour of completing my first and only single-author book, “The Musical Mind”. Somehow these labours merge in my memory. Both were labours of love, both required considerable attention at unsocial hours, and both have yielded long-term joys and rewards that completely outweigh my efforts.

A third aspect of my early Keele life must be mentioned. This was the Keele University Chapel. Keele’s Chapel was somewhat unusual, not only in architecture. It has been planned from the outset as a building to be shared by Christians of all denominations. Not only this, but it was also a University building, home to concerts, degree ceremonies, and, of all things, examinations. It was the rehearsal hall for my choir. I got married there, and earlier this year over 200 people joined family and friends there to pay tribute to Gerry Nussbaum, who died in August 2004. There have been some points in my Keele career when hardly a day would seem to pass without some reason to be in the Chapel. This allowed me to come into close contact with a series of outstanding Chaplains, deeply committed to making the chapel a place of welcome for all, and a beacon for Christian Unity. Keele’s totally appropriate policy of limiting the normal tenure of chaplains to 6 years explains why I have such a long list of chaplains to whom I am indebted, for their example and their friendship (John Davies, David Lindsay, Mark Turner, Gillian Cooke, Rowan Clare, Catherine Lack – Anglican; Bernard Moss, Graham Patrick- Free Church; Ken Nugent, Brian McClorry, Sandy Brown, Richard Sullivan, Michael Miners – Roman Catholic). I am still in touch with most of them.

SECOND MOVEMENT - ALLEGRO CON BRIO (1985-1999)

My first decade at Keele was, from a professional point of view, pretty discipline-based. I got on with being a psychologist. All that changed with the arrival at Keele of Brian Fender, whose exciting but controversial decade as Vice-Chancellor saw my promotion to Senior Lecturer then Professor, and my adoption of increasingly more responsible roles both within the department and on the wider University stage, first as Dean of School in a short-lived and unsuccessful attempt to get cognate departments to work more closely together, then as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and finally as Pro Vice-Chancellor. These roles brought me into very regular contact with Fender and the most senior staff of the University. I found these roles absorbing, but on reflection wonder exactly what I achieved in these 12 years. Many achievements were pretty ephemeral – but that is perhaps the nature of day-to-day management.Far more prominent in my memory than what I did is my memory of some of the remarkable people my role allowed me access to. Of these, I think Tim Brighouse stands in a special category. His visionary and charismatic insights into what makes schools effective, and his ability to use these insights to empower teachers and policy makers, provided a remarkable and humane model of leadership. Keele was fortunate indeed to have his services as Head of the Education Department for a few years. He was one of Brian Fender’s most remarkable appointments.

Brian Fender was responsible for significant cultural change at Keele. He had no patience for the “cosier” aspects of the Keele community which he saw as

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paternalistic and inefficient. He democratised and modernised management (an interesting token of which was his immediate introduction of a “first-name” culture among staff). He was an effective champion for the appointment and promotion of large numbers of women academics, and made research competitiveness Keele’s number one priority. He also presided over a significant cut-back in the welfare provision offered to students and staff alike (much of it dictated by the need to worsen staff-student ratios in the wake of yearly government budget cuts). He saw students as adults, capable of organising their own support, and rather disapproved of lifetime campus residence among staff (including an increasing number of retired staff) which he saw as evidence of an unhealthy institutionalisation. Curiously, however, for an avowed atheist, he was a passionate champion of chaplaincy and chaplains, whom he saw as counsellors who worked nights and weekends when the paid counsellors went home. He took the trouble to develop sound personal bonds with the chaplaincy team – something I think both surprised and gratified them. I was, for a time, his “representative” to the chaplaincy and the sponsoring churches, and always felt totally supported by him in my dealings with chaplains and their ecclesiastical bosses – dealings which were not always straightforward!

The “clash of cultures” that the Fender era brought about was nicely summarised by his wry observation that you could set your watch by the moment that a certain longserving senior administrator left his office for the walk across campus to the Senior Common Room for his daily morning coffee and read of the newspapers. Although observations of this sort were made with his habitual bluff good humour, it did not conceal the impatience of a pragmatic and agile leader with the “plodding” and habit-ridden bureaucrat who inconveniently insisted on the importance of such things as the University Statutes and Regulations, an impatience which manifested itself in endless “re-organisations” of the administration, in his attempts to sideline those who didn’t see the world with his rose-tinted fast-lane vision, and promote those who did. There are both good and bad sides to this. On the positive side, Fender got things done, and many of the things were very effective, creative, and even liberating. On the negative side – he made too many enemies, and Keele became quite a divided community on many issues, leading to the celebrated call by Chris Harrison, lecturer in History and former Keele Undergradaute, then serving as a Senator, for his resignation – a call unprecedented in Keele’s history and one which is reported to have infuriated Fender. Keele’s finances, always fragile, were not always helped by his grander projects.

Nonetheless, Fender left Keele a far more self-confident institution, with a proper understanding of what it needed to do to succeed in the increasingly competitive research funding environment, and a much enhanced staff body with which to accomplish his vision. An extraordinary achievement of his 10-year tenure is that he personally chaired every permanent academic appointing committee, right down to the lowliest lecturer, a labour which had many of his vice-chancellorial colleagues blanching in disbelief. His willingness to “pick winners”, even if that meant some creative back-of-envelope work with the budget, was legendary. Many dazed departmental Heads told stories of imagining they were appointing one lecturer, only to find that at the end of the day Fender has appointed two, because they were too good to lose!

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It was Fender’s imaginative risk-taking which finally allowed me to build a permanent music psychology research group around me. In 1994, we appointed Richard Parncutt to a 3-year externally funded research fellowship in the department. Richard was “made” for the interdisciplinarity that Keele championed, and music psychology required, possessing higher qualifications in Music, Psychology, and Physics. His brilliance as a researcher convinced me that we would be foolish to lose him, and I proposed to Fender that we created a permanent position tailor-made for him. Fender agreed, provided that we undertook to develop a Masters Programme in Music Psychology to pull in at least part of the additional student income that would be needed to cover the extra salary costs. Thus Keele’s first “Lecturer in Music Psychology” was appointed in 1995, a post that has now had 3 incumbents (Richard Parncutt 1995-8, Renaud Brochard 1998-9, Alexandra Lamont 2001 to present). Other full-time staff associated with the group for longer or shorter periods of time were Jane Davidson (1991-3), Derek Moore (1993-4), Susan O’Neill (1995-2003), Katherine Ryan (1999-2002), and Mark Tarrant (2001 to present). To this must be added the important contributions of a series of successful PhD students in the group: Warren Brodsky, Susan O’Neill, Mitch Waterman, Jane Ginsborg, Graca Mota, Fred Seddon, Antonia Ivaldi, Anna Harrison, Geoff Luck

Although new campus buildings were not unknown, the Fender era inaugurated a spate of frenetic campus development that has continued almost unabated to the present day. New Halls of Residence, new academic buildings, substantial expansions to the Science Park, all transformed the campus. The Psychology department, which has also been expanding almost continuously since its foundation, has constantly moved around the campus, in search of premises large enough to contain its activities. I am now in my 8th office, and in the 5th building I have occupied since arriving at Keele.

Brian Fender’s predilection for appointing “bright young things” to academic posts, was certainly a needed fillip to an institution with a somewhat stable staffing profile through much of its earlier years. In the case of psychology, however, the lack of senior appointments was taking its toll on me. By 1997 I was the sole full-time Professor in a department (the three previous professors, the late Ian Hunter, James Hartley, and John Hutt having by then retired). The department contained no Readers, two Senior Lecturers, and around a dozen Lecturers, several of them recent recruits. Janet Finch, our current Vice-Chancellor accepted that the department was bottom-heavy, and agreed to the appointment of two new Professors, the first external senior appointments to the department since 1972. The department looked set to enter a new era of growth and research excellence.

THIRD MOVEMENT – PRESTO AGITATO (1999 – 2003)

It was in 1999 that I fully realised what a disaster the Blair “New Labour” government was, certainly for higher education, but more importantly, for the country and its role in the international community.

By 1999 it was clear that the government had no plans to reverse the damage that 18 years of Thatcherism had done to the finacial health of the Higher Education System. Far from it, government seemed seemed intent on continuing and exacerbating the

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squeeze on universities through a completely rigid and doctrinaire belief that we needed 50% of the country’s 18-year-olds in higher education, and an equally rigid insistence that there was no significant new treasury money to fund the increase. The only universities capable of surviving this regime without extreme pain were those that earned significantly more research money than Keele, and had greater historic reserves, built up through endowments and investments. Keele had already been bled dry by the cuts of the 80s and 90s.

The selective and competitive management of slender resources became the over-riding priority at every level of management. At the lowest level, departmental committees were forced to require colleagues to go through time-consuming hoops to bid for the odd £20 to buy a small piece of equipment, that in happier times would have just been ordered “on the hoof”. At the middle level, vast amounts of time were spent preparing for the different external assessments of a department’s work. My personal nadir was the academic year 2000-1 when, on rather unwillingly assuming the Headship of the Department, I found myself responsible, within one year, for an external asssessment of our teaching quality (the QAA Subject Review), an evaluation of our course provision by our professional association, the British Psychological Society, and an external assessment of our research quality (the HEFCE Research Assessment Exercise). These tasks, together with the demands of the largest staffing and student growth in the department’s history, and some tricky family issues, meant that by Summer of 2001 I was exhausted, depressed, and physically ill. My research ground to a halt. I knew that if something didn’t change, I would be dead before I was 60.

Of all the tasks I was required to perform as Head, the most unacceptable of all was the Quality Assurance Agencies’s Subject Reveiew of teaching quality. This exercise required the accumulation of a roomful of paperwork which took a year to put together, the obsessive grooming of staff to provide the answers the assessors wanted to hear, several hundred staff days of preparation at the expense of the teaching that was the very object of the assessment, and the humiliation of having our work scrutinised with forensic mistrust. I and my colleagues felt sullied by the entire disgraceful exercise. The stress caused to all of us as a result of this experience was such that a very painful and protracted staffing dispute arose, which would almost undoubtedly not have occurred were it not for the stress and exhaustion caused by the Subject Review. The dispute, of a ferocity and hostility unlike anything I had previously encountered in my 30 years in higher education, contributed to a deep erosion of departmental collegiality. At the time I publicly asserted that I would never again participate in another QAA exercise of that type. I hold firm to that commitment.

My lifelines in those difficult years as Head were a handful of colleagues, some within the department, some without, who were constantly supportive, through their actions as much as through their sympathetic and ready ears. Within psychology, I consolidated a senior management team, containing John Hegarty as Deputy Head, Mark Trueman as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Liz Robinson as Director of Research, and Pam Seddon as Departmental Co-ordinator. I couldn’t have hoped for more effective, thoughtful, good natured and honest colleagues. In all cases, my most profound relief is that I knew I could rely on them to get the job done, referring to me when needed, making their own decisions most of the time. Outside the

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department I was assisted by two successive Deans of the Science Faculty, Chris Arme and Ian Fairchild. Wise, experienced, and usually unflappable, they helped with problem-solving, encouragement, but above all, their campaigns fought on the behalf of the department to acquire University resources commensurate with the scale, quality, and ambitions of the psychology department. These campaigns were more often than not successful, no mean feat considering the numerous competing bids from across the system.

The bottom line, which has been a mixed blessing, is the department’s apparently limitless capacity to attract undergraduates. In less than 10 years the undergraduate intake has doubled from 150 a year to 300 a year. Needless to say, staffing provision has not kept pace. When I first arrived in 1974, the intake was around 60, and the staffing complement was not that much less than it is now. Our ability to”bring in the bacon” has made us the envy of many other departments, constantly under threat of staff losses because of student recruitment shortfalls. There have, however, been two monumental downsides to our success. Staff have always been hugely stretched, since new staff tend to follow rather than precede new students, sometimes by several years. And it is very difficult to create any meaningful sense of belonging in a student body pushing 1000.

The issue of staff losses is one which has been extremely divisive for the institution in recent times. In 2001, the Keele University Council raised, for the first time in the University history, the spectre of compulsory redundancies for academic staff. Had it followed through with this, it would have been the first UK University ever to take such a step in a systematic way. I was outraged, and was hugely heartened by the spirited and principled opposition that sprung up in every department, assisted and channelled by a very effective local Union committee. One of the afternoons I will long remember is a Senate meeting where, in a carefully worded speech, I urged solidarity and collegiality in resisting compulsory redundancies, even though I knew this would mean hardship for my own overworked colleagues in psychology who were pressing the institution for new staff. I was very heartened by the positive response to what I said. If my intervention helped University management to turn away from sacking its highly qualified and long-serving academics, then I consider this to be among my most significant contributions to the well-being of the institution.

World affairs have dominated my thinking and feeling since 1999. Although I was active in the anti-nuclear movement at the time of the cruise missile crisis, I had mistakenly taken my eye off the ball for most of the 1990s, believing that the end of the cold war was the prelude to an age of universal peace and plenty. Tony Blair’s single handed campaign to persuade Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders to start the first European War for 44 years stunned me into action. Kosovo became more than a preoccupation – it was an obsession. Luckily, some other Keele people shared my views. With colleagues from several other departments, but most centrally, Bulent Gokay and Kyril Dreszov of the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRE) I was drawn into a rich mix of activism and scholarship which has sustained and developed me in all sorts of ways.

Campus highlights of the momentous past few years have included the extraordinary seminar organised by Bulent in the Wesminster Theatre shortly after 9/11 where three SPIRE professors spoke of their deep fears for the international order to an audience

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of more than 500. Another highlight was the campus-wide demonstration on the outbreak of the Iraq War, when scores of students and staff took the microphone at a rally on the main concourse spontaneously expressing their pain and anger. The Keele AUT has also played a very progressive role – being one of the few local unions to organise against the War on Afghanistan. And in 2002, Jane Krishnades, a lecturer in law, creatively brought together a group of concerned academics under the heading of Keele’s “Alternative Globalisations Forum”. Through this forum I have developed a collaboration with Brian Doherty, also of SPIRE, researching the development and motivations of the UK anti-war movement.

My final highlight from this traumatic period is the foundation of a humanitarian project, the Iraq Body Count project. This web-based project, inaugurated in January 2003 and continuing to this day, was to provide an on-line constantly updated tally of civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict. Through my well-established networks of activists and scholars connected to Keele, I was delighted to be able to build the staffing backbone of this group around Staffordshire friends and colleagues. These included Bulent Gokay, Kay Williams, Torben Franck (son of former Keele student), and Darrell Whitman (a research student in SPIRE).

These developments have been deeply personally sustaining at a time when my more longstanding Keele activities and preoccupations have seemed of rather marginal importance. It has been the campus enviroment, and longstanding tradition of interdisciplinary collegiality that have facilitated these developments – in a way that may not have been so straightforward on a dispersed city campus.

FOURTH MOVEMENT - ANDANTE CON GRAZIA (2003 - )

September 18th 2003 is a date etched in my memory. It is the day on which I handed the mantle of Headship of Department onto John Hegarty my successor, and embarked on a wonderfully restorative year-long sabbatical. I felt well past my “sell-by date” as a University manager, and I made a simple and irreversable decision that my life as a University manager was over. I would devote the rest of my university career to teaching and researching only.

Early in my sabbatical, while in Montreal, Canada, I was offered a part-time position as Executive Director of a UK charity, Oxford Research Group. This group, working for non-violent solutions to conflict, had used my services as a volunteer since late 2002. I needed very little persuasion to accept. Not only did it allow me to put the search for peace at the centre of my working life, it gave me the perfect context in which to rewrite my Keele commitments to suit me. The response from Keele was positive, and I now offer two days of my working week to Keele, three days to Oxford.

In recognition of my contributions to the study of politics and international relations I am today starting a three-year appointment as honorary Senior Research Fellow in SPIRE. I am most grateful to Alex Danchev for suggesting this, and his successor as Head of SPIRE, John Horton, for making it happen. I am equally grateful to John Hegarty and other colleagues in psychology for helping shape a meaningful role which can be accomplished in two days per week.

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Among my duties will be to teach on the MSc in Music Psychology which we founded in 1996, and which is now just starting its 9th international intake. I shall also look forward to co-supervising a new PhD student, Karen Wise, who joins me this week, and moving forwards on a research project on “false tone deafness” – a study of people who are not tone deaf, but falsely believe themselves to be.

I feel I am taking life easier. This is possibly not the case. What is the case is that I am doing more of what I want to do, and much less of what I don’t like doing: and so I feel more rested and relaxed. Because Keele has assisted this to happen, I cannot hold grudges against it. Despite the difficult patches, overall life at Keele has been good, and it remains an institution with great capacity to remain creative and nurturing. What makes it so is what others have called its “social capital” painstakingly built up over decades: a social capital that resides in those multiple and overlapping networks of collegiality, mutual concern and friendship that cannot be legislated for. managed or assessed. Such networks exist and function well purely because individuals freely choose to invest their energies and commitments into them, and because the general environment remains hospitable to them. Keele’s modest size, its interdisciplinary structures and activities, together with its compact and deeply attractive campus, are the key environmental catalysts. These catalysts will be hard to destroy, no matter what governments and politicians throw at us. So I am hopeful for Keele, and my continuing place in it, all the friendship and collegiality I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy, and am happy to end these brief recollections with Keele’s founding motto, inherited from the Sneyd family of Keele Hall.

Thanke God for All

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(Note: These reflections are entirely personal, and the product of one day’s reminiscence. Had they been written on another day, they may have read quite differently! I take all responsibility for any errors of fact, whether commission or omission, and apologise for any offence caused, none of which was intended. Correspondence is welcome to John Sloboda, 7 Commonside Close, Stafford ST16 3FP, (john@sloboda.fsnet.co.uk).

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