The loss of Catto
From James P. Carley Sir: In his piece ‘A don who embodies the idea of a university’ (10 June) Alan Duncan did a brilliant job of evoking Jeremy Catto, a man whose career is living proof that the Research Assessment Exercise is not a suitable indicator of the worth of college tutors (at least in the Humanities). As he willingly has given of his time to generations of undergraduates, so too does he ‘waste’ valuable research hours helping postgraduates bring their projects to fruition and into print.
His own offerings are inevitably articles, but what he has written about the religion of Henry V, say — slight in quantity but deep in quality — will be read for generations after most of the hefty tomes which weigh so deeply in the opinion of those who assess have been consigned to the dustbins of history. Those rooms at Oriel, cluttered with books, CDs, bottles of ‘whisk’ and a roaring gas fire even in summer, are what will first come into our mind’s eye when we think of Jeremy, but it is the articles to which we’ll return again and again. His loss to the intellectual life at Oxford will be a profound one.
James P. Carley
University of Oxford
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