As the tributes on this website make clear, Geoff was a lovely man and easy to love: good, generous, selfless, reliable, compassionate, full of love of life and people and wine and song. Not only did he have all those traits; everyone who knew him recognised them. But there was another side as well.
Two recollections might illustrate. I recall a seminar Geoff and I were at, where the rather eminent chairman didnât shut up, and so took up most of the conversational space. I thought it a bit ridiculous but to Geoff it was not just a bore and a menace to discussion. The chair had behaved inexcusably, and Geoff couldnât forgive or forget it. Another eminence (and friend) once asked Geoff whether, as director of the Research School, he would let his political preferences influence his academic appointments. Geoff was not just personally offended, as anyone might be, but scandalised that someone, also an academic, could think that way. His judgment at times had an austerity and a steeliness that could take your breath away. And so, I was from time to time surprised, and a little awed, by the way that some petty everyday academic unseemliness of a commonplace sort shocked Geoff, for it violated his ideal of the way the vocation must be served. His combination of geniality and generosity with the capacity for stern judgment led me to suspect he might be a rare and special kind of person.Â
When I first became an academic, I met Neil MacCormick, Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and of Nations, at the University of Edinburgh. He was a marvellous member of the academy and a marvellous person. As I came to know him, I realised that these were not just two separate parts of his make-up, as liking to think and liking to drink might be, but fused. He was a marvellous academic-person. I thought this combination so over-sized in him, so extraordinary, that I decided he belonged to a very special category, which I have allowed myself to recognise, select and anoint â the academic saint. Over the years, I have recognised a few more, but only a few. They will never reach double figures.
Itâs hard to say what a person needs to earn this rare distinction. Since we are talking about the life of the mind, intellectual brilliance is necessary but it is nowhere near sufficient. Similarly goodness, generosity, selflessness, reliability, compassion, love of life and people and wine and song, combined with a fundamental seriousness, are also helpful. But though they may make a person saintly, which is rare enough, an academic saint is rarer still. For such a personâs saintly qualities donât remain just theirs; they infuse the practice of their vocation (for it is never just a job), and the lives of all those who practise it with them.
Fortunately, you donât need to be a saint to recognise one, just to be blessed with the good fortune to meet one. Any reader of these tributes to Geoff will be struck, not only by the warmth, love and admiration that radiates out of them all, but also by the fact that they are all about the same extraordinary qualities of one very special man, which pervaded all the ways he lived, loved, thought and worked.
Geoff was the second academic saint I anointed. It happened soon after we met, just under 40 years ago. Iâve never seen reason to revisit the selection.