JAMES HARTLEY – 50 YEARS AT KEELE

John Sloboda.

On 18th February 2015 the School of Psychology at Keele University hosted a “Celebration of the Work of Professor James Hartley”. It took place on the eve of his 75th birthday, and also marked 50 unbroken years of service to the same institution (http://www.keele.ac.uk/psychology/people/jameshartley/). I was one of five present and former colleagues privileged to speak at the event (the others being Mark Trueman, Lin Norton, Julie Harris-Hulme, and Lucy Betts). The event, attended by more than 50 colleagues and friends, was chaired by Professor Nicky Edelstyn who introduced the speakers. At the end, a presentation was made by Professor Fiona Cownie, Pro Vice Chancellor for Education and Student Experience. These were my heartfelt remarks in honour of a remarkable scholar and human being.

It’s a real privilege to be invited back to Keele to celebrate Jim’s half-century at Keele.

I joined the Keele psychology staff in October 1974 and by that time Jim had already been there almost a decade.

I came to Keele from University College London, where I did my PhD in one of the Medical Research Council’s Units attached to the Psychology Department there. UCL has always been a powerhouse of research, as was Oxford where I did my undergraduate degree, and I came to Keele fully socialized into the notion that research was the core of psychology academic life, with teaching being something one squeezed round the side of it in order to pay the bills. The people who taught me at both institutions were obsessive publishers, churning out several journal articles per year.

It was quite a culture shock to arrive at an institution with a quite different ethos. Keele of the 1970s was resolutely and explicitly an institution which placed undergraduate teaching and the quality of the relationship between staff and students as its highest priorities. I recall being told on my arrival by a quite senior member of the institution that research was a bit of a conceit, something that staff might want to do at the weekends – rather at the same level as playing golf, or doing the garden.

I naturally found myself seeking out and gravitating towards colleagues who looked more like the psychologists I had left behind in London and Oxford. Jim was one such. Although he was a conscientious and responsible teacher, research (and its encouragement in others) was always the “beating heart” of his contribution to psychology at Keele and the broader discipline.

The term “prolific” hardly does justice to Jim’s prodigious output, and even back in the 1970s my recollection is that he was psychology’s star researcher in the sheer quantity and consistency of his output. I hope others will delve into the content and structure of that work – with its intellectual and practical impacts. I

want to focus rather on what Jim’s approach meant particularly for the ethos of Psychology at Keele, and what he brought to colleagues and students as a result.

One very early achievement of Jim’s which marked itself indelibly on my aspirations was his success at finding ways of escaping Keele for substantial periods, to go to conferences in exotic places and – particularly – to be the kind of person that scholars elsewhere would invite to spend research sabbaticals with them. His period of leave taken in Bell Laboratories, USA, sometime in the 1970s was a very significant feather in his, and Keele’s, cap. But, more substantively, it set the tone for the steady growth of psychology as a research centre. You really can’t do world class research unless you have regular periods when you interact intensively with scholars in other institutions and countries. The insistence that sabbatical leave should be taken very seriously – and available to all - was a lasting legacy of Jim’s headship.

Equally significant was his ability to attract research visitors to Keele. One of these in the 1980s was David Jonassen, a distinguished educational psychologist, then Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Denver, Colorado. He and his family came to live on campus, and as a result made many friends, including myself. That in its turn led to a return invitation for me to call in on him while I attended a conference in Denver, just one of many ways in which what Jim started bore fruit for others.

For a significant period of his time at Keele, Jim acted as the unofficial historian of psychology at Keele. One of my treasured possessions is a small booklet, written by Jim, entitled “Psychology at Keele 1960-2000” prepared in connection with Keele’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

In that booklet, Jim compiled a list of all the books published by psychology staff up to that point.

In the 20 year period following Jim’s arrival at Keele, 14 books were published by the entire staff body, 7 of which had Jim’s name on the cover, and a further one contained a contribution by him. By the time he retired in 1997 he had added a further 5 titles to the list.

I want just to highlight one of these titles. The Applied Psychologist, co-edited with former colleague Alan Branthwaite, was the third in a set of books published by the department directly aimed at our own students (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Applied-Psychologist-Williams-John-Hartley/dp/0335202845).

This initiative was set in train during Jim’s 10-year tenure as Head of Psychology (from 1982-1992), and was one he explicitly encouraged and supported.

The idea was that members of the department would collaborate on writing bespoke chapters for a book which would become the course text for an undergraduate module.

There were three such books published (all by Open University Press), the first a developmental text, the second a cognitive one, and the third an applied one.

I’d point out two features of this initiative. Firstly, despite his devotion to research, Jim was equally devoted to ensuring that the fruits of research were mediated in effective ways to our students. He saw no contradiction between being an excellent and dedicated researcher as well as being an excellent and dedicated teacher, and has been an example for many in this respect.

Secondly, collegiality has always been second nature to Jim. Wherever possible he has found ways to encourage staff to collaborate rather than compete. Contributing to these co-written books was, in my memory, an enjoyable and sociable affair, and drew colleagues together into a better understanding of what inspired and enthused each of us. Jim’s close involvement was an essential part of that.

And that leads to a more personal observation, one which I am sure others will echo. The academic world is riven with rivalries and enmities. The stories of departments where colleagues have not spoken to each other for decades are – sadly - not apocryphal. Happy departments don’t just happen. They arise because of the consistent behavioural characteristics of key people, modelled, communicated and maintained rigorously. I’m talking about such things as modesty (in contrast to arrogance), thoughtfulness (rather than carelessness), friendliness (rather than hostility), and efficiency (as opposed to disorganization).

It has been qualities such as this, so evident in Jim, which has helped make working at Keele such a happy experience for me and many others. Over my lifetime at Keele, Jim has been successively a role-model, a mentor, a leader, and a crucial support in the times when leadership was my assigned task. That support sustained a growing friendship, and that ongoing friendship is one of the most important things which still brings me regularly back to Keele.

Long may the friendship continue, and long may your fruitful association with Keele’s psychologists continue. Thank you Jim for all you are and have done.