My former colleague JR (Dick) Sargent, who has died aged 96, was the founding professor and chair of the economics department at Warwick University when it launched in 1965. Following a period of unrest, he was instrumental in reshaping the university to make it more democratic. The changes that were made reverberated through other universities.
Within a few years of Warwick’s launch many staff and students felt the university’s structure was insufficiently democratic and excessively oriented towards the business community. These views were influenced by les événements, the wave of student and worker unrest that swept across Europe in 1968. They were articulated by a staff member, the labour historian EP Thompson, in his book Warwick University Ltd (1970).
