When in 1998 I had been a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta I was slightly envious of Mike McQuaide’s post on Emory’s Oxford campus. This was because the Oxford campus was much like a village, affording Mike an opportunity to get to know a small and manageable number of undergraduate students well. The contrast between Oxford and the larger and more cosmopolitan Emory community was one thing; but the contrast between Oxford and UCL was quite another. UCL’s site in busy Bloomsbury in central London made even Emory look attractively communal and self-contained. Moreover, I lived a not inconsiderable commute away. Relatively new to Twitter, I tweeted my frustration one day: wouldn’t it be wonderful, I mused aloud, to belong in an out-of-town university campus community. To my surprise this elicited a response. Rachel Brooks, then Head of the Department of Sociology at Surrey, said ‘why don’t you email me Graham?’ I did, and the upshot was that in May of 2014 I became a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Surrey. It was an act of great generosity on the part of Rachel and her colleagues. I had returned to the institution that had first sparked my interest in the discipline and to a department with an enhanced and well-deserved reputation for scholarly excellence.
I was allocated the share of a room in the department, cohabiting with ex-LSE sociologist Martin Bulmer in a room occupied until recently by Keith McDonald, now in his 80s, who taught Annette and I industrial sociology as undergrads. Martin kindly rook me to lunch on my initial exploratory visit. I promised to repay his kindness, but in the event this never happened. Why not? I think there was a combination of factors that meant I was never to integrate with the department qua community. I probably harboured an unrealistic notion that I might, for example, devise and teach an undergraduate course. But on reflection why would my new colleagues be accepting of this kind of intrusion into their worlds? I made several trips to Guildford initially, although I often ended up writing in a town I knew well from undergrad days, or in a campus café, rather than visiting the department. I asked for a parking permit but was told ‘no’, these were like gold dust. I was asked to give the occasional talk and seminar, invitations I gladly accepted. I also contributed a couple of departmental blogs and spread the word about department personnel, achievements and activities on social media (which I still do). But with time scarcer than I had anticipated, plus a growing desire to write, and limited stamina, I found myself reluctant to ‘hang around’ the department. It was in this sense entirely my fault that I remained essentially an outsider. Hanging around would have been a vital prerequisite for integration. The Surrey campus was never to become my equivalent of the Oxford campus of Emory University, and the responsibility was mine.
My precarious tenure, accompanied by sporadic guilt, lasted several years, spanning three department chairs, Rachel Brooks, Jon Garland and Andy King, all of whom, excellent scholars and chairs, were generous and undemanding. I hoped during this period that my list of publications would accrue to and benefit the department, but I was never to discover if this was the case. It was only in writing this briefest of sketches that I finally decided that it was inappropriate for me to continue as a visiting professor given my hands-off approach. In the midst of writing this sketch I emailed the trio of departmental chairs with whom I had enjoyed direct contact to tell them that I was resigning as visiting professor of sociology in their department.