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Mick Moran: an academic lifeMick Moran was born in Smethwick, Birmingham, but spent most of his boyhood on Scattery Island and the nearby coastal town of Kilrush in Clare, on the rural West coast of Ireland. He was raised in rural poverty and, on his family’s arrival back in Smethwick in 1959, was enrolled straight in a secondary modern school.Mick was against sentimentalizing the past and always insisted “there never was a golden age”. But his own life shows what a child of migrants could achieve, in that brief period from the early 1950s to the late 1970s when many of the problems of high-income capitalist societies seemed amenable to economic management and social intervention. His academic life is partly the story of what publicly-funded education did for a bright Irish Brummie boy and what he then contributed to the public realm in so many ways. The schooling was not privileged: he chose to learn French, German and Spanish in later life partly because no foreign languages were taught at his school. But a full maintenance grant allowed him to go to Lancaster University, in its first cohort of students in 1964; and then he went on a research council scholarship to do postgraduate work at Essex, another new University, which was at the leading edge of political studies in the UK. His first job was as a lecturer at Manchester Polytechnic in 1970. In 1979 he moved to the University of Manchester’s Government Department, on condition he accepted demotion from the grade of Senior Lecturer. He ended his career there as W.J.M. Mackenzie Professor of Government and had stints in the 1990s as Head of the Government Department and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. He was a longstanding editor of the journals Political Studies and Government and Opposition and in 2004 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. The activities of teaching and writing were for Mick fundamentally about explaining and understanding the world for others, not about furthering his own career by claiming grant “inputs” and research “outputs”. He wrote two textbooks on UK politics which went through more than 10 editions over 25 years. He was never above teaching first year introductory politics and never lost a performer’s love of teaching. In later years he swapped first year politics courses for adult education, in Glossop Guild classes on the financial crisis and Donald Trump. He made his reputation within political science in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of sole-authored monographs on industrial relations, financial services, health care and the regulatory state. They had an understated, analytic quality, command of the sources and reluctance to engage in fashionable theorising, all combined with a certain inscrutability so that the political views of the author were never clear. His final monograph, The End of British Politics? (2017) had a timely message about the break up of the UK. The changing subject matter of the monographs indicated a certain restless curiosity—also manifest in 2011 when he retired from the Government Department to take up a part-time chair at Alliance Manchester Business School. Where in early 2018 he was busy preparing a new MBA course for delivery through a digital platform. Remarkably, the political scientist who had done almost everything solo then had a radical, collaborative, interdisciplinary third age at the Business School. As an active Catholic layman, Mick’s views on the Church hierarchy had always been negative, but he had retained a certain residual respect for other governing elites. The 2008 financial crisis was an epiphany because it convinced him that the officer class in business and politics did not know what it was doing. He went on to write four challenging books with the team from the Centre for Research on Socio Cultural Change, including a 2011 study of the great financial crisis, After the Great Complacence, which uniquely combines economic and political analysis. He was a driving force in developing foundational thinking and the last and most radical of his co-authored books, Foundational Economy, is forthcoming in September 2018. Appropriately, it is about the citizens’ right to collective goods and services, whose provision in 1960s Britain gave Mick his start in academic life. Michael John Moran, born 13 April 1946; died 3 April 2018. ................
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