AUPHF: Partial history

The Association of University Professors of French, as it was then known, was founded in 1946, at the same time as or just after the foundation of the Society for French Studies. Most instrumental in the initiative was Professor A. Carey Taylor, cited as the ‘véritable père’ of the Association’ in a minute of the Annual Conference of 1976, shortly after his death in 1975. For many years AUPF’s Annual Conference was held during the SFS Conference, generally at an Oxford or Cambridge College.

The first version of the Constitution appears with the minutes of the Meetings of March 1946 at Somerville College, Oxford. Those present are listed as: ‘Professors Arnold, Arnoult, Boase, Briggs, and Clapton, Miss Dickinson, Professors Ewart, Girdlestone, Hunt, Mansell Jones, and Lawton, Dr Patterson, Professors Reid, Roe, Stewart, Heywood Thomas, Vinaver, Mary Williams, and Woledge, and Mr. Wood. Mr. Fletcher was representing Professor Eggli.’ A second version of the Constitution is dated 1949 and the third, of 1974, gives the Association’s name as ‘Association of University Professors of French and Heads of French Departments’, including in its constituency holders of both established and personal personal chairs and non-professorial Heads of French Departments, but for some reason excluding non-professorial Heads of French sections within Modern Languages Departments.

In a further amendment of the constitution in 1984 the last item notes: ‘the full title of the Association shall be the Association of University Professors of French and of Heads/Chairmen of University Departments of French in the U.K. and Ireland, but it shall continue to be known more commonly by the short title AUPF’. The present acronym of AUPHF first appears in the most recently amended constitution, that of 1997.

Emeritus Prof Colin Smethurst, to whom I am indebted for a file of papers covering the period 1976 to 1983, recalls a major change in the early 1980s when ‘things started to get political’. In the minutes of the Annual Conference 1981, held at the Institut français, the then Chairman, Francis Higman, notes the pressures currently bearing on French Departments to take a more utilitarian, vocational and practical attitude to French Studies. These he summarized from a recent letter to the THES (21.3.80) which advocated the study of French language ‘linked to marketable disciplines like economics and industrial management; which asserted that ‘the primary aim of language learning should be utility’; and which suggested that ‘carefully selected options in literature and allied disciplines’ should be allowed to survive as a demonstration that ‘an important, though perhaps secondary, purpose, lies behind its studies, namely a cultural one’. Such views, the Chairman suggested, would not be dispelled by simply ignoring them; they were widely and vocally propounded, and our response needed to be closely reasoned.

In 1982 the NCML (an ancestor of the current UCML) submitted to the Nuffield Foundation a proposal for ‘an Inquiry into needs and resources in modern languages in secondary and tertiary education’. Later that year, a questionnaire was sent round to the Subject Associations in the other modern languages to investigate threats to staff numbers, student numbers, lecteur posts and specialisms following the UGC’s letter to universities of July 1981, signalling the first round of cuts to Higher Education. Among other points in the report we read (in terms that are surely still as apt): ‘The emergence of the category School as some kind of bran tub in which things can jostle haphazardly seems to indicate that no thorough exploration of combining individual languages satisfactorily is being done. French is still clearly being given a mothering role but the evidence is not clear yet as to how subjects will inter-relate, if at all’.

This survey is entitled a partial history because the gaps may be as eloquent as the details provided. I await with interest information on the ‘missing years’ which I have not yet traced, and further names to complete the list of past Chairs and Presidents of the Association that follows.

Naomi Segal, November 2000

The University of Reading

Chairs and Presidents of AUPHF

1946: Prof F. C. Green
194? - 9: Prof Vinaver
1949: Prof Ewert
[…]
1974: Prof Alan Steele
[…]
1977: Prof F. W. Leakey
1978: Prof J. C. Ireson
1979: Prof R. J. North
1980: Prof Francis Higman
1981: Prof Margaret McGowan
1982: Prof Haydn Mason
1983: Prof Malcolm Bowie
1984: Prof Keith McWatters
1985-88: Prof David Williams
1988-91: Prof Michael Kelly
1991-93: Prof Jennifer Birkett
1994-97: Prof Jill Forbes
1997-98: Prof David Walker
1998-2002: Prof Naomi Segal
2002-04: Prof Tim Unwin
2004-07: Prof John Gaffney
2007-10: Prof Lucille Cairns
2010-13: Prof Mary Bryden