The senior members of the English staff at Kent were not unsympathetic to Leavisian principles. The most senior among them (a well-known Shakespearian) could be irritated when I joined with the close friend I mentioned to propose the inclusion or exclusion of texts from certain courses, or expressed scepticism about a degree in film studies he was anxious to establish. When I turned up for a committee one day and someone pointed out that it was not my name but my friend's which was on the list of appointed members, he muttered grumpily under his breath, ‘Same thing’. After his return from Australia, and before a premature and tragic death, Morris Shapira could also be a thorn in his flesh. But he was fundamentally fair-minded and, in the moments when he objected to the three of us, it was less because we had all been to Downing than that we were all from Cambridge. A Birmingham graduate, he resented the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge in the English system and rightly felt that those universities too often exerted an authority they did not deserve, and had not earned.

Kent was a new university (so that I have never worked permanently in any other kind), and the atmosphere in its early days was egalitarian, friendly and optimistic. The chief innovation of the Humanities Faculty was that students in their first four terms all had to take a majority of courses which were interdisciplinary. Under titles such as ‘Contemporary Society and its Background’, ‘Science and Religion’ or ‘Colonialism and the Emergent Nations’, English would find itself combined with History, one of the foreign languages, Philosophy, Theology or even (in a daring ‘cross-Faculty’ move) Sociology. Leavis had always recognised the importance of what he came to refer to as disciplines ‘allied’ to his own, and felt that the study of English literature naturally led out towards other areas of interest. But in his scheme, which was consistent with his belief in his subject as the core of any humane education, the preliminary to engagement with these other disciplines was concentration for two years on English itself. Kent turned this model on its head for reasons which had a lot to do with early specialisation in the schools.