A New Role for the 'British Ass'?
By JOHN MADDOX
IF the first tang of autumn is a remincitr to swallows to take themselves off, it is also a Sign to those of us who stay behind that the annual meeting of the British Association is about to begin. And indeed, with a sense of cosy predestination, sandwiched as always be- tween the Edinburgh Festival and the TUC, this gargantuan circus of science is once more pitch- ing its tents in a university town—Cambridge this time.- The gathering is likely to be as miscellaneous as the 300 papers to be read. There will be grey- beards and stripling scientists; schoolteachers and some of their pupils as well; pundits and People without any qualifications in science as such, but with a boundless enthusiasm for all kinds of causes and a tendency to late-Edward- ian vegetarianism. From Wednesday to Wednes- day the teashops and the bookshops in Cam- bridge will be unusually crowded. People will go tramping off on expeditions to monuments, abbeys, fens, outcrops and a host of other places where homespun out-of-doors field-work can be combined with a ride in a charabanc. And in the evenings there will be receptions (more or less splendid according to the hospitality of the town), dinners (some in black tie) and half a dozen opportunities for the academic manage- ment to put on its academic robes. The opening ceremony is pretty to look at.
For old hands, and for all these reasons, the annual meeting always provokes a gust of affection. Even when speakers exceed their allotted time, and a gathering has to be brought abruptly to a halt by a chairman's warning that lunch is due, or when the slide projector does not work, or the slides themselves are illegible, or the speaker inaudible, or the physical distance between one meeting and the next too great to be covered comfortably in the time allowed for coffee, one cannot fail to be impressed with the vitality which surmounts all these obstacles to easy twentieth-century communication, in part unavoidable in a gathering of 3,000 people.
And for all its lack of gloss, of course, the annual meeting of the association is splendidly redolent of sound Victorian virtue. In a way, it is a kind of cultural coelacanth. Even the fact that the annual meeting always runs from Wed- nesday to Wednesday is said to have been arranged to suit the convenience of all those broadminded parsons who would travel to the annual meeting by coach, and could engage in a full week of intellectual fisticuffs while only Missing one sermon. And certainly nobody can forget that the association served well to keep scientists on their toes at a time when the Royal Society had- slumped temporarily into snobbish indifference. If one is fondly inclined, one can always hope that the dullest lecture will spring to life with some modern equivalent of the time when Huxley and Wilberforce fought over barwin at Oxford more than a century ago. But that is a lot to ask fOr.
For one thing, the British Association is not the learned society it used to be. In mainstream science, rapid communications and competition have put an end to that, so that at the annual meeting, the physicisti, chemists and biologists mostly concern themselves with reviews of recent progress which are invaluable for special- ists not busy on research, but which only rarely serve to electrify a wider public. There are, it is true, exceptions to this rule. In the last few Years the sociologists seem to have found that the annual meeting can be a valuable forum for quite vigorous debate. The educationists can usually be relied upon for something of a public disagreement. But for the most part the annual meeting is a didactic occasion.
So what, then, is the British Association for? The first thing to be said is that the annual meeting is the tip of an increasingly large and valuable iceberg. In the last decade the asso- ciation has done wonders in using its tiny re- sources to provide throughout the year a scientific lecture service for schools, and con- ferences for young people at which the pattern of the annual meeting is translated into a less formal and often a most exciting style. These good works, in a field in which good works are most necessary, would by themselves retain for the association an honourable place in the Establishment, and be a fitting monument to all the Victorian gentlemen who put it there.
Yet the annual meeting for adults remains the association's principal claim on public atten- tion. And what is that for, and what should it be like? Even the loyal membership has not always been satisfied, and so it is pleasing that this Cambridge meeting promises to be one of the best for many years.
The programme is tighter. The speakers seem to have been well cast. In a good many of the sec- tions—and there are fifteen altogether, with two sub-splinters -- there is a robust thread running through the week of discussion. And then there is a whole day when everybody (apart from a few zoologists and psychologists) will be asked to abandon his sectional pursuits to attend a symposium on the world's need of fuel and power to be addressed by Lords Hinton and Robens, among others. Coupled with the steady improve- ment of the organisation, and the increasing. hard-headedness of the participants, 1965 prom- ises to be a vintage year.
Yet the annual meeting still needs some kind of banner beneath which to unite itself. And as irony will have it, there is a splendid banner simply waiting to be picked up. For, sooner or later, there will have to be some organisation that can bring to public attention the controver- sial issues with which science is now frequently entangled. There is, for example, a need for some public means by which scientists' appraisal of government's policies can be made public—the financing of research in universities, or the future of the aircraft industry. The annual meeting of the British Association could become a power- ful forum for this kind of public discussion. And sometimes one could expect that the laymen would be able to bring the scientists to book, for the association is unique among societies con- cerned with science in that an influential part of its membership is not committed to narrowly scientific causes. In other words, if the asso- ciation were to concern itself more vigorously with public affairs, it would have the great advantage that it could not easily become a tedious pressure group.
Asking for all this, and better lantern slides as well, is asking for a lot. But is it outrageous? The British Association began, 127 annual meetings ago, with a dazzling conviction of its capacity to survive public controversy. Gentility may have cramped it in the last few decades, but it could yet become, and quickly, a focus for intelligent public discussion of the place of science, and of scientists, in public affairs. We are much in need of an institution to do just that.
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