I went to a funeral today.  No: please don't stop reading.

Jill Halpern arrived at the University of Sheffield from Bristol as a postdoctoral research assistant in the late 1950s to work in George Porter's research team in Chemistry - indeed her name appears in the citation for the Nobel Prize that Porter won.  Here  she met David Grigg, a lecturer in Geography who had recently arrived from Cambridge.  They married; she gave up her career; they raised three children; David rose to become professor and a leading authority on world food production and consumption.  He died in 2004: she died last week at the age of 74. A simple and (apart from the Nobel Prize work) a relatively 'ordinary' academic life story for a woman of her period.

But what was thought-provoking about today's funeral was the massive representation from a whole range of departments from across the university.  There were chemists, of course, but I counted friends of Jill (and David, her late husband) from Mechanical Engineering, French, Psychology, Germanic Studies, Law, the Library, Mathematics, Education, Molecular Biology and a whole range of other disciplines.

I doubt that any funeral of an ex-University employee in 20 years time will have such a broad representation from across the institution.  When Jill started work at Sheffield it was a university of a couple of thousand students and fewer than 200 academic staff.  There were few female lecturers, and it was the custom for new male lecturers, on arrival, to take a tutorship or assistant wardenship in a Hall of Residence.  It was thus a university staff world where almost everybody knew almost everyone else, and where disciplinary affiliations played a much less significant role as a personal identifier than they do today.  Inter-disciplinary conversations in senior common rooms were the norm, and close friendships were formed across the university.

Today we talk much about the need for inter-disciplinary research.  But I suspect that the truth is that the majority of academics, certainly those who are relatively young in their career, know few other academic staff outside their own department - and then only those who have a direct connection with their own research field.  The growth in size of the institution has led us all to retreat into our own disciplinary worlds, and much of that wider community feeling of earlier times has been lost. I suspect that is also reflected in the perceptions of who we all work (or worked) for: for many of the septuagenarians at Jill's funeral today their answer to the question of where they had worked would be 'The University of Sheffield': whilst for many younger staff today their answer to a similar question would be 'I work in the Department of X at the University of Sheffield' with the disciplinary affiliation rather than the university taking precedence.  Those who work across the disciplines today, and who work primarily for the University, are very often colleagues from the professional services.