GORDON INKSTER, lecturer in European Languages and Cultures and editor of Inkytext died unexpectedly on Wednesday night much to the shock and sadness of his many colleagues and friends around the University and across the world. Deepest sympathies go to his wife Maggie and two daughters. Gordon came to Lancaster in 1968, after active involvement with student demonstrations in Paris, to lecture in the founding department of French Studies. His talent for well informed comment was evident from his contributions to Lancaster Comment, a fortnightly magazine which began in 1970. This was an independent student/staff initiative and started a tradition of airing outspoken views at Lancaster. Gordon went on to have a double page spread in Lancaster Comment called Ink Blots and, after the magazine folded, he launched the email Inkytext in the latter days of Vice Chancellor Harry Hanham. Through Inkytext, Gordon accurately warned about the dangers of over expansion of the campus, informed and entertained his readers. An elucidator and interpreter, Gordon was also a respected scholar and teacher. He stopped publishing Inkytext a year ago and was a generous supporter of and regular contributor to Vickytext.
A Book of Remembrance for Gordon is now in the Chaplaincy Centre Concourse area, and all are welcome to contribute their thoughts and memories, which will be passed to the family in due course. Vickytext will publish an obituary written by Professor Dick Geary from Nottingham University, who was a close friend of Gordon. The date of the funeral will be sent out as soon as it is arranged. See below for personal tributes.
TRIBUTES TO GORDON INKSTER
Gordon's tragically early death robs the university of an exceptional individual, an original 'character' in the best sense of the word. His probity, intellect and erudition, wit, and capacity for original insights, were second to none. The pleasure he took in deploying his intellect made him the most stimulating of colleagues, and he inspired our affection for his integrity and the loyalty of his friendship. The department has lost a most creative and inspirational teacher, but Gordon's greatest satisfaction would be to know that several thousand students have been changed for the better through their contact with him. With his unique gifts of sceptical realism and visionary idealism, Gordon belonged more to the academic community as a whole than to any department, but colleagues in European Languages & Cultures count themselves truly fortunate to have had him among them.
Professor David Whitton
Dean of Arts and Humanities
Well before I arrived back in Lancaster in September 1995 I had been aware of Gordon's fearless, highly intelligent, accurate, sometimes ironic, yet always humane commentary upon life in a university whose official public narrative which went from triumphalism to near despair in a matter of weeks. In my last university, Inkytext and its author would have been obliterated, but here at Lancaster Gordon's commentary played a vital role in the expression of justified anger and much grief at Lancaster - and in holding us together as an institution inadequately served by its then leadership.
I hardly knew Gordon Inkster personally other than through his narrative of current events, and to nod to on the Spine. Yet in his death I feel I have lost a true colleague, a friend, a man who knew the personal price of dissent and paid it in full.
I very much hope that we at Lancaster may initiate and name some project worthy of his memory. Gordon Inkster knew the value of public truth, and gave himself unstintingly to its assertion and defence. We have suffered a great loss.
In much sadness,
Richard Roberts,
Religious Studies.
Gordon Inkster pursued and for many of us came to embody the notion that the academic freedoms claimed by members of university communities extend far beyond the right and obligation to speak and write freely about one's own discipline. The public profession of higher learning is also the university's business, and because it is in some respects literally a "business," involving matters of finance and planning, of income and expenditure, of the deployment and withdrawal of resources, it followed to Gordon that these matters, too, must be open to inquiry, reasonable debate, and defensible conclusion. If the university is to be an open community with respect to the pursuit of knowledge, or truth, it must also be an open community with respect to the material and institutional resources which make that pursuit possible. To an extent, it is arguable that Gordon became obsessed with this linkage. Insofar as he did, we can blame ourselves for it, because his "obsession" arose fundamentally from the failure of too many of us to see "administration" or "campus politics" as anything more than distractions from our "real" work. That fatal ironies inhered in taking such a position was Gordon's literary tutorial for the rest of us, and in due course the ironies came, or went, for instance in the shape of Classics and Archaeology, Russian and Soviet Studies, and Chemistry. Latterly we found that bricks and mortar, and mortgages, were academic matters of the highest importance, another irony forecast for us by our very own Inkster. In this sense, Inkster's mere tutorials had a prophetic quality about them.
It was not that Gordon thought that such administrative decisions, for instance to build this or to close that, should never be taken. He was no Luddite (though he developed a certain sympathy for them). Rather his concern was that we should get it as right as we could. And while he had serious intellectual doubts about 'getting it right,' he constantly argued and consistently demonstrated that freedom of research and debate was just as important to the arcana of university administration as it was to, let us say, low temperature physics or 19th-century French literature.
As to Inkster's academic tutorials, I spoke on 15th July (in Cartmel Bar) with a former student of his, who sang his praises as a teacher of French literature and culture. I had heard her testimony before, from generations of Lancaster students, but it was nice to hear it again. When I saw Gordon himself, on the 16th and 17th, I meant to pass that tidbit on to him. But then, Gordon knew he was a cake that needed no icing. Now, anyway, I have to hope that he did.
Paulette, who joins me in offering our deepest condolences to Maggie and the family, to Gordon's friends and associates, said it well enough this morning. "Gordon was one of the good guys." Rest in Peace.
Robert M. Bliss
Dean, Pierre Laclede Honors College
University of Missouri-St. Louis
GORDON INKSTER: OBITUARY - Dick Geary
GORDON INKSTER was one of Lancaster's great characters and a much loved man.
Gordon knew everyone and everyone knew him: from British Foreign Ministers,
Vice Chancellors and academics of international renown to the residents of the
Hala estate and the locals of Lancaster pubs, where he excelled in the local
Quiz League for many years. Gordon had no time for pretensions of status,
offered friendship to people from all walks of life and will be sorely missed
by many, not only in the University community. His friends at Lancaster
University included people of the most differing politics and personalities,
some of whom spoke only to Gordon and not to one another. His untimely death,
at home in Lancaster late on 18th July 2001, occasioned primarily by the
asthma, which had ironically plagued his life since he gave up smoking in the
1980s, marks the end of an era.
Gordon Alexander Inkster was born in Leith on 21st January 1944; and his Scottish roots remained hugely important to him, as he performed on Burns Night for generations of Lancaster students and colleagues. Yet his was no narrow or exclusive nationalism. Gordon was a true cosmopolitan, embracing the most varied peoples, places and cultures. Late in his too short life, for example, he began to learn Mandarin Chinese. In 1956 Gordon became a star pupil at the Royal High School in Edinburgh, a school of star pupils, and was awarded the Grierson Bursary in Modern Languages to study at Edinburgh University from 1962. Four years later he received an MA with First Class Honours in French and Russian; and only recently his continued ability to speak Russian fluently amazed many of his colleagues, who knew only too well of his effortless mastery of the French language but had not hitherto encountered his other linguistic talents. Gordon's first extensive encounter with France came in 1964/65 as an English Language Assistant at the Lycée Jules Ferry in Cannes. (The choice of place can scarcely have been an accident.) From 1966 onwards his knowledge and love of France were enhanced by research on late nineteenth-century French art, artists and art criticism in Paris. His enthusiasm for the subject never dimmed; and he continued to give wonderfully entertaining lectures on The Nude in French Painting ('a dirty job, but someone's got to do it') until his last days in Lancaster. Whilst in Paris Gordon also participated in the student upheavals of 1968 and assembled a remarkable collection of the posters, fly-sheets and pamphlets from those days of hope. That collection can now be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
In 1968 Gordon was appointed to the Department of French Studies at Lancaster and began a career of inestimable value to his students and colleagues. He was an inspired and inspiring teacher, whose lectures on Proust were unmissable. He sustained the French 'year-abroad scheme', often a poisoned chalice, over many years and in a variety of arcane ways; whilst the pastoral care he lavished on his students was unrivalled - and not only in the French Department; for Gordon also came to play a major role in the life of County College over the years. No student problem, real or imagined, was ever too much for him to address. Characteristically, in fact, Gordon devoted far more time to the problems of others than he did to himself.
Apart from his teaching duties in French, Gordon displayed a healthy interest in all aspects of university life. (Such was common in those optimistic times, when we thought we could make a better future.) This led him to contribute a regular item (Inkblots) to the staff-student magazine (Lancaster Comment), which, for all that it was a gossip column, already displayed an amazing talent to sniff out information and embarrass the university authorities. These talents Gordon subsequently brought to Inkytext, an internet journal, in which he invested increasingly large amounts of time and energy, often working into the early hours. Inkytext was testimony to Gordon's weakness for gossip. But he characteristically turned this weakness to valuable public use. For Inkytext was not only the route, whereby many Lancaster academics found out was going on in Lancaster (in terms of food and wine, and personalities, as well as university politics). It also became the conscience of the University. Gordon's journalism was based not only on meticulous research (he was mortified, if he ever got a fact wrong) but also on a commitment to those ideals of honesty and integrity, which are the keystones of a true university. Though he sometimes - and somewhat irritatingly - managed to persuade himself that Inkytext was the New York Times, his writing did reflect the same values of integrity and commitment to principle as that best of English-language newspapers. And in defence of principle Gordon would speak out to or against anyone, the powerful as well as the weak. He rejoiced in being a thorn in the side of secrecy. Gordon was devoid of envy (except when it came to one's ability to acquire first-growth clarets), jealousy or malice. In fact he rejoiced in the achievements of others, of his friends (for example, Michael Osborne, now Vice Chancellor of Latrobe University) and especially of his family. Gordon married Maggie Bristow, a former student of French at Lancaster, on 3rd August 1974. This long-suffering spouse, who somehow managed to cope with both his nocturnal trysts with the computer and his usual insouciance as far as his personal appearance was concerned, bore him two daughters, Catherine (born 27th November 1978) and Clare (13th May 1980), who now continue the academic achievements of the family at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham respectively. Gordon was not only devoted to his family, however, but was also a good and loyal friend to countless individuals, irrespective of origin or social class. He visited them when well or when ill in hospital, often travelling great distances to do so (and often getting lost), reading up on their illnesses in encyclopaedic detail and identifying with their pains. He showed and inspired affection. His concern for others was never more evident than when (with Francesca - Ralph's wife) he cared for his close friend Ralph Gibson during his last, cancer-ridden days and when he meticulously and lovingly organised Ralph's funeral in the same Chaplaincy Centre, where he too was to be buried almost six years later.
Gordon was a polymath. He could and would discuss anything (wine, theology, postmodern arrogance or Celtic traditions) in his measured, rational - infuriatingly rational - way deep into the night. Moreover he was way ahead of his colleagues in the Humanities in one particular respect: he was a technophiliac, addicted to computers and the revolution in communications. At a time when most of us in the Humanities were still using quill pens, Gordon became a computer wizz-kid (entirely self-taught). He made PCs do the most extraordinary things, some useful, others less so. Whether his skills were always put to the best use is a matter of debate. For example, if in 1985 one had gone to Lancaster University's website, clicked on Modern Languages, then on German Studies and then on the name Professor R J Geary (despite the fact that Dick Geary had departed Lancaster in 1989), one would have discovered - thanks to Gordon - Dick's wedding photos!
Gordon Inkster was an extremely intelligent and wonderfully witty man, with a penchant for gloomy predictions, which made Cassandra appear optimistic. He could also be obstinate and infuriating. He often told medical doctors what they ought to know about medicine and lawyers what they ought to know about the law. But he never did this - or anything else - for personal advantage. Indeed the pity is that he didn't take greater care of himself, despite the care, concerns and entreaties of his friends and especially of his family. Gordon was there for others; and life will be the poorer without him.
Dick Geary