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President's welcome |
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Association of University
Professors of French
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AUPHF: a 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 The first version of the Constitution
appears with the minutes of the Meetings of March 1946 at 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 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
Chairs and Presidents of AUPHF 1946: Prof F. C. Green |
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