Gary Buck
President of language testing specialists Lidget
Green Inc., Dr Gary Buck, passed 4 A levels at
Bradford College to gain a place at Oxford in 1979.
“I was brought up during the 1960’s, when any
cool young man would drop out of school, become
a hippy, travel to India, and all that. Which I
did. But then in my thirties, I decided to go to
university, and I needed A levels. I was a mature
world traveller, well-read in literature, oriental
philosophy, and broadly knowledgeable in a
number of other fields, so Politics, Economics and
General Studies at Bradford College didn’t seem
likely to offer much of interest. How wrong I was!
The teaching staff were outstanding. We
studied how power functions in our society, how
economic benefits are distributed within society,
and what mechanisms society uses to bolster
and justify that. We read the competing ideas of
academics, commentators, and political writers,
and I was led to examine all my ideas about our
society, and how it works, as I realized that just
about everything I had been taught about it was
wrong. The sophisticated ideas I encountered
have stayed with me for the rest of my life, but
they are not the most important thing I gotfrom
Bradford College.
Since then I have gone on to complete a PhD,
studied at prestigious universities, worked for
internationally-recognized research institutions
and published fairly widely in the academic
literature, and the foundation for all that is the
fact that the teachers at Bradford College made
me think. Teaching people to think is the essence
of education, and Bradford College did an
outstanding job, for which I will always be grateful.
I have enjoyed a successful career in ESL,
originally as an English professor in a Japanese
college, but more importantly, as an assessment
expert. My dissertation won a fairly prestigious
international award, I have a book on the
topic, and I have published in a number of
academic journals. I am currently running a large
international English language testing program
at the University of Michigan, and I have worked
as a researcher at ETS, the premier testing
organization in the US. I have my own testing
company, Lidget Green (Gary’s family ran a fish
and chip shop at Lidget Green in Bradford!), which
is on the cutting edge of bringing high-stakes
assessments over the internet.”
Photograph by Pacia Platzek