What a pleasure it is to introduce this Festschrift!
Emeritus Professor Paul Hager has generated substantial and sustained contributions to adult and vocational education over at least 20 fruitful years, mainly while on the staff of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). In this special issue, however, contributions come from the universities of London, Melbourne and Sydney, and from UTS itself, and from past and present colleagues, some on staff, and some graduated doctoral students. After these, Paul has written a Response to the various contributions that make up this issue, and I draw it to your attention, both for its generosity of spirit and for the way it maps the broad sweep of research Paul has undertaken, which continues as I write.
But Paul's natural demeanour is marked by humility as much as by his formidable intellect. Let me state that what Paul does not refer to in his Response is his excellent grounding in academic studies: for example, he has two Bachelor degrees with Honours (Science, Arts), and went on to complete a PhD on Bertrand Russell's philosophy, at the University of Sydney, supervised by David Armstrong (author of the influential A materialist theory of the mind, 1968). That PhD was published in 1994 by Kluwer as Continuity and change in the development of Russell's philosophy, and it won the 1996 Bertrand Russell Society Book Award in the USA.
Over the years, that intense and deep engagement with what is commonly called Anglo-American analytic philosophy has served Paul and our educational research activities in Australia and elsewhere superbly well. At philosophy and adult and vocational education conferences, in workshops, and (because Paul is exceptionally fine company, socially) around the coffee urns and over dinners at these events, many of us have come to appreciate his many virtues. He listens, he takes the trouble to understand opinions and arguments, and he sets a course for debate from which he will not be easily deterred. And yet, in my view, there are never resultant victims, nor enemies. In the often adversarial world of academic philosophy, this is no mean achievement.
Over the years, Paul and his wife, Maureen, have been exceptionally hospitable to many of us, in their Sydney home and when we have met them on their travels elsewhere. They have wide cultural interests, such as Chinese opera. I recall Paul telling me that when he and Maureen attended a performance of an opera in a major Chinese city, members of the public came up to them during the interval to thank them for attending what must have been (to our ears, but not to the Hagers') an auditory-challenging few hours.
These are just some of the ‘bricks in the wall'. In what follows, you will read with pleasure how some of Paul's colleagues have engaged with his work. That they have done so, willingly, and with depth and rigour, shows in the best way how we can honour both the man and his formidable academic and professional achievements. But be careful: this distinction, between the person and the work, looks like another ‘perennial dichotomy', of which Paul Hager (thoroughly post-Cartesian), in his Response, is particularly wary.
I commend this Festschrift to you.
Melbourne Graduate School of Education