Condolences

Sergio was a student on the Executive MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy Programme, 2018/19.

Originally from Peru, Sergio lived in London for over 17 years. He was Economist and Course Director for Pre-Master’s Business Programmes at Ulster University, London Campus. His professional work experience was mainly in multinational American corporations, both as an entrepreneur and in academia. He also conducted research on various ways to tackle poverty, inequality and conflict. His work combined learning from various disciplines including anthropology, religion, politics, business, finance, public policy and international relations.

The  Director of the programme – Emeritus Professor Michael Cox – added:

“Sergio was an active and valued student. He had great passion for the subject-matter of international strategy and diplomacy, was a lively contributor to class debates, and delivered several memorable and always well-prepared presentations”.

Sadly though, on 23 March 2019, he tragically lost his battle with leukaemia. He will be a much-missed colleague and friend. His peers on the Executive MSc Programme have made and encourage donations in Sergio’s memory to Leukaemia.org.uk.

Our thoughts and hearts go out to Sergio’s wife, Susan, and their two sons.

Michael Coops

Michael died on 11 March aged 89, 29 years almost to the day since his most lasting achievement for the School.

Following a career at the Court Department and medical schools of the University of London, Michael was appointed in the late 1980’s to head up the LSE Estates Division and played a significant role in the School’s estate development for some ten years, either in an executive role or in major project management.

He was part of the team which negotiated the freehold of the Old Building, the contract being signed by then Director I G Patel on 21 March 1990. This, along with the acquisition of Connaught House, set in train a programme of acquiring the freeholds of the School’s buildings, and was the foundation for later estate development and acquisitions.

Michael’s work in and around the LSE estate brought him many surprises, including trying to work out how three drunks had managed to steal a 65kg penguin sculpture from the middle of the site!

Michael was unfailingly courteous and measured but had a steely side: he was always determined to pursue the best interests of LSE. Although coming here relatively late in life, Michael adopted the School in his affections, attending many SCR functions for retired staff until his late eighties.

Michael’s funeral will be held at 1pm on Friday 5 April at St Mary’s Church, Greyhound Hill, Hendon; followed by a wake at the Three Hammers pub, Hammers Lane, Mill Hill, NW7. Michael’s family welcome the chance to chat with LSE people after the service.

Adrian Hall

Professor David Held

It is with great sadness that we learnt of the passing of Professor David Held, formerly Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at LSE, and Founder and Joint Director of the Centre for Global Governance. To many in the Government Department he was a colleague, teacher, mentor and friend, but a mere departmental affiliation was never going to be enough for David and he collaborated with colleagues and students across most of the departments in the School.

I first met David when he was a young visiting lecturer at the University of York and I was an undergraduate. He had recently published his first book Introduction to Critical Theory (1980) and was an exciting and dynamic theorist of the left. This was only the first of many books but it remains the best introduction and guide to its subject and is still valuable to serious scholars. His subsequent career took him to the Open University as Professor of Politics and Sociology where he was an influential figure and where he built his reputation as theorist of democracy (with books such as Models of Democracy 1988, Political Theory and the Modern State 1989 and Prospects for Democracy 1993) and demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit which so characterised his career with the his co-founding with Anthony Giddens and John Thompson of Polity Press in 1994. Polity proved a huge success as a source of cutting edge social science books at affordable prices and as a publisher of English translations of most of the great contemporary European social and political theorists such as Bourdieu and Habermas.

Whilst Tony Giddens was Director of LSE it was no surprise that David would join him. David came to LSE in 1999, first as a visiting professor and then as the successor to Brian Barry in the newly titled Graham Wallas Chair. Two more different characters would be hard to find – Brian was a conduit for American Political Science to reshape political theory in the UK, whereas David, despite his graduate training at MIT, was deeply connected to the European Tradition of Social and Political Theory. For Barry the paradigm was John Rawls, for Held it was Jurgen Habermas. Yet in many ways they were very similar in their social democratic approach, cosmopolitanism and their commitment to the value of social science research for the public good.

At LSE David continued to be entrepreneurial, founding programmes such as the MSc in Global Politics, founding and directing the Centre for Global Governance, leading the Ralph Miliband lecture series as a major public lecture programme for leading social and political theorists, and for intellectually engaging practitioners and public intellectuals. All the while David kept up a prodigious publication schedule that shifted its focus in the ‘noughties’ towards the theorisation of Globalisation and its implications for Cosmopolitan political theory and for Global Governance in such works as Global Transformations 1999, Globalization/ Anti-Globalization 2002, Global Covenant 2004 and Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities 2010. He almost single-handedly, (he did have some close collaborators) built a subject of enquiry and a sub-discipline. In the way of all academic success stories he attracted critics but he usually managed to bring them around to his conclusions with his personal charm and engaging manner, or else he incorporated their positions into a higher synthesis which advanced his own work. David was a builder, not a demolisher and he was more concerned about informing progressive politics than being the smartest man in the room, although he often was.

His departure to Durham in 2012, where he became master of University College, was a sad loss to LSE. His career continued to flourish with the success of the journal Global Policy, which began at LSE but took off during his time at Durham. He remained in contact with many LSE scholars, but David’s stage was always Global so he was not constrained by the move. The announcement of his sudden death is a shock and cause of deep sadness to many who benefitted from his personal kindness, his intellectual stimulation and his mentorship. He added considerably to the life of LSE and will be remembered fondly by very many students, colleagues and friends.

Professor Paul Kelly

Department of Government

Martin Wright

Martin joined LSE Estates Division in 1993 and worked in the post room until 2011, when he took medical retirement due to Parkinson’s disease.

Martin was very well regarded by everyone he came into contact with – he enjoyed long debates on politics, the war and his love of music.

Martin was also a big forerunner for recycling at LSE (many years before it became fashionable)… His home was usually full of bits of timber, old shelves, and many other items found in skips around the School that he “would find a use for”.

He was a gentle gentleman who made a lot of people’s lives just that little bit better for having him in it.

His family have asked that any donations be made Parkinson’s UK in Martin’s name. – Tony Simpson

Alan Day

With great sadness, we announce the death of Alan Day on 2 December aged 94 after a long period of ill-health.

The School owes a huge debt of gratitude for his pivotal role in heading off an existential threat when the government in 1979 – almost overnight – withdrew taxpayer support for foreign students.

Alan Day was the Pro-Director (singular) in a highly successful double act with Ralf Dahrendorf.  In autumn 1979, a few weeks into his term of office, he recognised the potential loss of income for an institution 38% of whose students were from overseas, shepherded a proposal to introduce fees of £2,000 per year through School committees, and took executive action to send three colleagues (I was one, so saw the process from the inside) to the USA to recruit General Course students.

Those policies plus his wider activities as Pro-Director led to an unprecedented second term, from which he resigned in 1983 on doctor’s advice, having had surgery for renal cancer, and took early retirement the following year. He was made an Honorary Fellow in 1988.

Ralf Dahrendorf was very clear about Alan’s key role .

‘Let me say again what I said to you before: as Pro-Director you have left traces in the history of the School which will not be forgotten. These are traces of style and of commitment, but also of tangible contributions to the survival of the School’ (letter to Alan Day (26 June 1983).

Those achievements were superimposed on a distinguished career as academic, policy adviser and what today we would call a public intellectual. After a First in the Economics Tripos at Cambridge, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in 1949 by Lionel Robbins as part of rebuilding the department after the war, and promoted to Reader in 1956 and to Professor of Economics in 1964, having turned down a chair at Yale.

Thus his career spanned some of the giants of LSE economics – Lionel Robbins, Bill Phillips, Basil Yamey, Peter Bauer, Harry Johnson, Frank Hahn, Terence Gorman, Amartya Sen and Tony Atkinson. Appointed within a year of each other, Alan and Bill Phillips became close friends, sharing their wartime experiences (which Bill shared with virtually nobody else), and Alan was instrumental in introducing Bill to his future wife, and subsequently was best man at Bill and Valda’s wedding.

His many School roles included a successful and popular spell as Convener of the Economics department and membership of a wide range of School committees.

Alongside his academic work as a monetary economist, Alan had a particular gift for translating theory into policy, leading to a role advising Labour Minister Anthony Crosland and to membership of government commissions including the Layfield Committee on Local Government Finance, spells as Economic Adviser to HM Treasury and to the Civil Aviation Authority, and membership of the board of the British Airports Authority.

Connected was a gift for explaining economics to a wide readership, exemplified by his regular articles in the Observer (he had an awesome ability to draft in ink rather than pencil, and for his first draft, with hardly a change, to become the final version).

At least as important as his accomplishments was Alan the person. He was instinctively tolerant of views different from his and, alongside colleagues like Michael Wise (Professor of Geography), created an atmosphere in the Senior Common Room in which young lecturers could trade ideas with senior colleagues in a relaxed way – something that has become a hallmark of the School. As a beneficiary, I look back at those times with gratitude, and over a longer period to Alan’s role as mentor and friend. On a personal note, it was Alan who suggested that my prospective book on the welfare state should include discussion of student loans – the genesis of my work on higher education finance.

In sharp contrast to Alan’s tidy mind was a desk that typically looked as though an earthquake had struck. At a time when, as Pro-Director, he had one of the School’s only phones that allowed international direct dialling, he let me use his office to organise a US recruiting trip. My starting point was an archaeological dig to uncover some desk space.  Whether as a counterpoint to his desktop or connected with Bill Phillips’ early research with computers, Alan had a keen interest in electronics, and in the early 1980s was instrumental in introducing word processing (as it was then called) to the School. He also had a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of international flight timetables.

An inveterate smoker, he stopped when he became ill in 1983 but denied that he had given up, insisting that he was merely taking a longer-than-usual gap between cigarettes.  That illness struck early in his very happy marriage to Shirley, who nursed him through that episode and devotedly through his long last period of ill-health. In between they enjoyed 35 years of great happiness in active retirement turning a wreck of a Grade II listed building in Kent (collapsed plaster, peeling paint, curtains in rags) into a place of great beauty but simultaneously warm and welcoming.  That great project was interspersed with regular trips to London and wide-ranging travel abroad.

Nicholas Barr, 3 December 2018

The LSE Community was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Ronald Dore, former LSE Sociologist and Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance.

Professor Ronald P. Dore, CBE FBA died on 14 November 2018 in Italy, at the age of 93.

Ron Dore was an outstanding British sociologist who applied his sprightly intellect seamlessly across a broad range of topics. His distinguished career, evident from his fellowship of the British Academy, the Japan Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was marked by breadth of scholarship and a deep interest in societal reform.

Ron Dore was at ease crossing boundaries, with his infectious curiosity and sense of humour. First and foremost, he was a Japanologist, and knew an awful  lot about Japan.  He grew up in a working-class background in Poole, Dorset where his father was a locomotive driver.  His encounter with Japan was accidental: in 1942, he was selected to be one of the ‘Dulwich Boys’ aged 17 to study Japanese, one of the languages the War Office deemed critical to the war effort. He studied the language at SOAS, returning to Dulwich college for regular studies in the afternoons.  His first visit to Japan, aged 25 in 1950, launched an academic career at SOAS and University of British Columbia, when he used anthropological and sociological methods to study Education in Tokugawa Japan, City Life in 1950s Tokyo, and Land Reform in post-war Japan.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when Japan attracted attention as a traditional society that succeeded in modernization, Dore at the London School of Economics and later Sussex became a comparative industrial sociologist, who posited the ‘late development’ and ‘reverse convergence’ theses – rather than Japan catching up with the West, some features of Japan as a late developer may be worthy of emulation by the West — through his classic book British Factory – Japanese Factory. He was also, at one stage, an education specialist who, as part of an ILO mission, investigated the education systems in Japan and other developing countries; his interest in education and training led to a pathbreaking book The Diploma Disease and studies on youth unemployment and training.

Increasingly concerned about industrial decline and rising unemployment in Britain, he urged British policy makers and business leaders to ‘Take Japan Seriously’, articulating a philosophy of original virtue as a basis for better and fairer economic institutions. His policy prescriptions were wide-ranging, from incomes policy to youth training and industrial policy, to mention a few.  He was one of the pioneers of ‘varieties of capitalism’ thinking, stimulated by spells at Harvard and MIT, which he summed up in Stock Market Capitalism–Welfare Capitalism. In contrast to the Company Law Model adopted in Britain and the US, the Community Model in Japan had the added benefits of improving dynamic efficiency, and inculcating a sense of fairness.

To his increasing alarm, however, the ideological tide of Reagan-Thatcher neo-liberalism spilled out of its Anglophone strongholds, and began to sweep into Japan itself.  Championed by ‘second generation middle class’ urbanites and returnees educated in the US, Japan’s community firms started to implement shareholder-favouring reforms, and financialization started to take root.  He wrote many books in Japanese, expressing increasing frustration by this turn.  And he moved to Italy, where he felt an affinity to political economists less influenced by neo-liberalism, and to its civic communitarianism.

Along with the breadth of scholarship goes disciplinary openness that underpins his work.  Openness is not just about disdain of academic tribalism; it is more a mindset and a firm belief about the role of social sciences, which is to understand human motivation and behaviour in order to improve society. Ron Dore refused to lead a double life of some academics, of endlessly refining theories based on the pursuit of self-interest, while living social lives belieing those theories.  Most of all, he was driven by curiosity, and an appetite to dig deeper into the real world to understand human behaviour and its moral, cultural, and economic bases.

Throughout his life, Ron Dore made an extremely valuable contribution in furthering the understanding of Japan in the UK and elsewhere.  He remained fiercely energetic and engaging, and was generous in spirit. He is survived by his wife Maria and their son Julian, and two children from his first marriage, Johnny and Sally.  We extend our deepest condolences to his family.

Professor Mari Sako, University of Oxford (LSE Lecturer and Reader in Industrial Relations, 1987-97)
Professor Hugh Whittaker, University of Oxford

Marion O’Brien

It is with enormous sadness that we report the sudden death of Marion O’Brien on 21 October, who worked for the School for 33 years until 2010.

She supported academics and the Convenor of the Economics Department from 1976-84, then worked as Manager of the Centre for Labour Economics and later for Richard Layard and John Van Reenen at the Centre for Economic Performance.

Marion was a truly exceptional human being who gave everything of herself to support others.

Her wisdom, wit, warmth and selfless enthusiasm will be remembered by the many generations of academics, students, and international visitors to the School whose projects and plans she enabled and whose lives she touched in unforgettable ways.

Nigel Rogers, Centre for Economic Performance

Vic Harvey

Vic Harvey, who died on the 13 July aged 83, was a dedicated servant of the School over many years. No-one was more loyal. His period of service lasted from 1983 until his retirement in 2002. Vic performed a whole range of duties in the relation to the Director, Secretary and other leading members of LSE over that period, and was utterly dedicated to the institution. He worked with three Directors in total over the course of their tenures – IG Patel, John Ashworth and Anthony Giddens.

Among his other tasks, he was the driver of the School car and frequently met and picked up distinguished visitors from airports and railway stations. Those he ferried to and forth included Desmond Tutu, George Soros and Henry Kissinger, among many other world figures. His calm presence was extremely soothing when the passenger was fretting about his or her speech, or frazzled by travelling.

Vic frequently had to stay up well into the early hours of the morning to ferry people from School events, but did so with great willingness and calm. He was normally back on duty early the next day too. He always had the loyal support of his wife, Jackie, who would be there to greet him no matter what unearthly time of night, or even early morning, he might return from some School job or other.

He carried out a range of other tasks around the School to help out the porters and other staff. He could turn his hand to almost anything – something unsurprising given the range of his earlier career.  He had a diverse life indeed prior to joining LSE. Among other roles he was a paratrooper in Cyprus, during the period of conflict there involving British troops, and worked as an operator on large cranes. He was a commanding figure physically – tall, well-built and also very fit, at least until illness overtook him in his later years. He would often step in when a lesser mortal was struggling with a particular task that involved heavy lifting. He occasionally would be called upon to intervene if an unwanted or unwelcome intruder had got into the School, such as on occasions when there were break-ins to the offices.

Vic was totally trustworthy and reliable and always there when needed. He was a ‘presence’ around the School – known to very many people on the campus because of his visibility in the various roles he carried out. He had a quietly devilish sense of humour, ranging from gentle irony to whimsy. Never one to push himself forward, but always available when needed, Vic was an engaging, friendly and easy-to-approach individual, with absolutely no edge or attitude. He was a marvelous and dedicated servant of LSE and will be long remembered by everyone who knew him at the School.

Anthony Giddens and Christine Challis

We regret to announce the death of Dr John Lane, who passed away in Singapore earlier this year.

Dr John Lane

John gained his PhD at Stanford University, and joined the LSE Department of Economics as a lecturer in 1971. He also held visiting appointments at Wisconsin University, Yale University, the State University of New York, the University of California at San Diego, Queen’s University Canada, and the New Economic School in Moscow.

John taught mathematical economics, econometrics, and general equilibrium theory. His early research interests were in the areas of technological change, optimal growth theory and the economics of exhaustible resources. Later, he worked on health economics, particularly the economics of uncertainty as applied to medical decision making. His work was published in the International Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies and Econometrica, amongst others.

John retired from the LSE in September 2008, and relocated to Singapore, where he joined the Nanyang Technological University, teaching economic analysis, taxation and fiscal reform, labour and education policy, and applied mathematical economics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. More recently, he taught on the Global Master of Finance Degree at Singapore Management University.

He continued to be engaged in the London University external (international) programme with particular reference to South East Asia, regularly returning to London to act as an external examiner.

In response to the sad news, Professor John Sutton said: “John was a wonderful colleague, invariably cheerful, with a keen sense of humour and never without a story to tell…it was always a joy to see him on his continuing summer visits, and all his old friends in the department will greatly miss seeing him approach along the corridor with that inimitable smile of recognition.”

July 2018