Ruskin archive: dust-up

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/28/ruskin-archive-oxford-headington

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Ruskin College in Oxford, for 100 years the illustrious alma mater of diverse labour movement talents from Noah Ablett to John Prescott, on Saturday opened its new site at Headington: purpose-built and accessible to those with interrupted educations and disabilities, it sees itself as the embodiment of social mobility. But the move has provoked a tumultuous row about the way it has handled its own past. It is not only leaving a century of memories behind, it has also shredded part of its archive. Most contentiously, it has disposed of many old student records. Nothing more than institutional flotsam and jetsam, perhaps, and in breach of data protection laws too. But only the future knows where the gold dust lies.

A cloud of archival dust now obscures the facts. But it seems beyond dispute that many paper records containing personal information have been destroyed while other, older ones, have been partly digitised. Space is limited on the new site. Some collections have been sent to other archives. Many of the college's pamphlets and posters, the memorabilia of a radical past, have been preserved in London, at the Bishopsgate Institute. A painting of Bernard Shaw, by the Fabian artist Bertha Newcombe, has been returned to the Labour party. Critics of the principal, Prof Audrey Mullender, wonder why the college didn't hold on to this link with its earliest days, and accuse her of damaging the soul of an institution whose history is woven through 20th-century radicalism. They wonder why no use was made of a supposed escape clause from the rules that allows records to be kept for historical and statistical research. But its application to the records of the living is shrouded in uncertainty. Prof Mullender's legal advice was that holding on to the records was in breach of the law.

What's not in doubt is that the destruction threatens to leave future historians half-blind. Everyone recognises that the old audit trail of diaries and letters is almost gone. The humdrum detail of lives lived today will be gleaned only obliquely. The little people, whose history Ruskin academics such as Raphael Samuel made a part of the national story, risk being blotted out. Yet these scraps of history, the registration and graduation records that appear so ephemeral, the notes of the work they had been doing, the union that sponsored them, and the lives they later lived, are the sinews and tissue that anchor subject in time and place.

Clarification is now urgently sought. It could be that hundreds of colleges and universities and scores of other institutions are technically breaking the law on record-keeping. If they are, and the destruction of records becomes an inescapable obligation, then the legitimate desire to secure personal privacy against the gaze of the prurient threatens to leave the future a sadly unfurnished place.