Obituary: Stuart Warren

Note: the following text is taken from a draft of a programmed text on magnetism. It may be that readers find the obituaries by Churchill College and the Cambridge Chemistry Department are also of interest.

Stuart Warren died in March 2020 while I was writing this book. I never met him, but he had a huge positive impact on me and I want to share it.

Dr Warren began lecturing organic chemistry on the Natural Sciences course at Cambridge in the 1960s. Organic chemistry is hard in some very particular ways, and it is obvious from the obituaries written by his students that he understood exactly what learners struggle with and how they could reach a point of independence with the subject. His lectures seem to have been strikingly clear, and his approach was to share ‘how it could and should be done’, making particularly sure to help students feel that they were making progress.

The 1960s were an unusually active moment for theories of education. Skinner – an American psychologist – was propagating a ‘behaviouralist’ theory of education. His work emphasised the scientific virtues of validity and reliability in learning, and modelled educational success as the very narrow and measurable performance in standardised testing. In one sense, programmed texts are a product of this model: they aim to get students to do the right thing at the point of being tested.

In Brazil, a different conception of education was being established by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). He viewed education as a political process of humans becoming free. Programmed texts can do something of this, too: solving problems independently frees the student from a narrow reliance on their teachers. Teaching someone to fish (or rationalise carbonyl reaction mechanisms) is a type of political outcome as well as a type of technical instruction.

In the UK, the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education stated the British policy ambition that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’. But student success relates closely to teaching quality. What would it mean to teach so well that more people could succeed? This would serve both national prosperity and personal development through widening social access to Universities.

Emerging from this historical context, Warren published the extraordinary Chemistry of the Carbonyl Group in 1974. In 2008, this book was how I first came across Stuart Warren. It remains – to my mind – the most astonishing textbook in HE Chemistry. While Atkins’ (1978) sequencing of topics was a strategic reimagining of a broad physical chemistry syllabus, Warren’s sequencing of ideas within the narrow topic of introductory carbonyl chemistry displayed a virtuosic tactical  expertise in its teaching of fundamental mechanistic principles. ‘How it could and should be done’ is threaded through the whole text like cotton through a cloth: that’s what the book is.

I struggle to describe the experience I had reading Chemistry of the Carbonyl Group. Every conceptual mistake I made, he predicted and corrected. Every embarrassing slip-up, he let me quietly address in private. It’s a mark of how emotional an experience it was that I can recall so vividly the ‘penny drop’ moment when I understood how the aldol condensation was actually really similar to an aluminium hydride reduction: the desk I was at, the weak spring sunlight, the colour of my pen. First year is a bruising time for any chemistry student; reading his book was the moment when I believed it could get better. 

The ‘programmed’ approach of Chemistry of the Carbonyl Group is the direct model for the book you are reading now. It is hard to convey how difficult sequencing decisions are in writing such books, but his order of ideas and problems makes it seem so obvious that this is a logical way through the topic; it comes across with a certain hard-to-describe coherence.

I never met Stuart Warren, but he made me feel like I could do organic chemistry at a time when I felt like I couldn’t. Though I have learned much from other textbooks, none of them has gifted me a feeling like that.

I don’t know what kind of a man he was, but I know that undergraduate chemists are still lucky to have Stuart Warren. To accomplish in writing something which the finest teachers struggle to accomplish in person remains an astonishing act of education. I honour him for it.