College Record 2014

Michael Brock
(1920–2014)
Sociologists bifurcate humankind into ‘locals’ and ‘cosmopolitans’. These categories
are, for them, ‘latent’, not ‘manifest’: that is, they are rarely even acknowledged, let
alone institutionalized. As employees, ‘locals’ are seen as loyal, ready for humdrum
tasks, sociable, popular with colleagues, and unself-advertising, but relatively
amateur; promotion for them comes with seniority. ‘Cosmopolitans’, by contrast,
orient themselves towards nation-wide professional structures, and (in universities)
prepare for a career-move elsewhere by publishing energetically; so promotion
for them comes with ‘merit’. In 1983, when Warden of Nuffield College, Brock
described himself as ‘someone who has lived through the great change ... from
someone who’s institutionally based ... – a tutor, and so on – to someone who’s
professionally based, and there’s no question that my career spans that great divide’.
The Oxford Magazine rarely publishes obituaries nowadays, but it singled him out
from the many who continuously depart to join what Brock used reassuringly to
describe as ‘the great majority’ (born on 9 March 1920, he died on 30 April) because
his career illustrates how greatly Oxford changed during his long life, and helps to
refine the sociologists’ important categories.
R.K. Merton says that whereas ‘locals’ relish local newspapers, ‘cosmopolitans’
prefer the national press. Brock in his early career did not neglect the (local)
Oxford Magazine, and served on its committee. By then, admissions questions
were supplanting syllabus reform and examination results among the Magazine’s
preoccupations, and in 1962-6 he wrote five articles for it, four of them on
admissions. Yet Brock was simultaneously a ‘cosmopolitan’, acting as the Guardian’s
counterpart to Peter Bayley in the Times by using a national newspaper to alert
outsiders to significant events within an Oxford University which saw its concerns
as transcending the merely local. Brock wanted Oxford’s admissions system and
its Norrington table of examination results more widely understood. As tutor in
history and politics from 1950 to 1966 at Corpus, where he held all the major
college offices, he became expert on Oxford admissions, and honed his expertise
through his close and fruitful relationship with President W.F.R. Hardie, who
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