There is a article on Asa Briggs, the British historian and academic, by Neil Ascherson in the LRB, reviewing The Indefatigable Asa Briggs by Adam Sisman. (William Collins, 2025). I have read some of Briggs’ work and liked much of what he stood for. People would say his ideas are dated — but that is our loss. The following caught my eye.
To say Briggs took on too much is a laughable understatement. By the end of his life, his unfinished commitments towered over him. And yet it’s not quite right to conclude that he could never say no. His problem was wonderfully positive: he always said yes, with bursting enthusiasm for the new project.
This is what I call the Lord Acton problem. I have a bad, possibly terminal, case.
‘He was a busy, bustling figure who radiated energy and vitality, seemingly always in a hurry, and who travelled so frequently that he earned the nickname “Professor Heathrow”,’ Sisman writes.
(Many moons ago, in Newcastle, I was a medical registrar to the Professor of medicine, KGMM Alberti (“George” but Professor to me). He appeared to be always travelling, so we christened the Newcastle airport ‘Alberti’. The (false) rumour was that he wasn’t liable for UK tax given his travel commitments.).
Back to the article: Briggs was brought up in Keighley.
Keighley was a relatively progressive town to grow up in, and yet social unfairness soused it like the rain blowing down from Ilkley Moor. Briggs, in this respect resembling the late Jimmy Reid of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, saw around him capitalism’s monstrous waste of human potential. As Reid would put it, see the Ian Rankin living up that stair who will never write a novel, the Menuhin in the next tenement who will never hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only come through social revolution. For Briggs, it was through knowledge: an eruption of public education whose lava would overflow all the conventional boundaries of elitist schooling and narrowly academic universities.
As the saying goes, the revolution in physics in the first half of the C20 was led by the sons of illiterate cobblers.
Briggs was heavily involved in attempting to change UK higher ed for the better, both at Sussex, and at the Open University (OU).
As Sisman points out, when Asa left school, there were only fifty thousand university students (almost all of them men) in the whole of Britain. Today, to a substantial degree because of Briggs’s campaigns and ideas, there are more than three million in higher education.
But the three million don’t get what was once on offer to the few. There is room for plenty of blame within and outwith the academy for this. I wish it were otherwise but most British universities never thought as seriously as the OU did about the tradeoffs of scale and good teaching (and learning).