Maurice Kogan

A model meritocrat equipped to thrive on Whitehall intrigues
Maurice Kogan, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 76, was an internationally renowned scholar of public policy, and of higher education in particular. He was also founding professor of government and social administration at Brunel University, and creator and director of its centre for the evaluation of public policy.

He became known to a wider public as co-author, with his nephew David Kogan, of The Battle for the Labour Party (1982), a well-researched account of the coup which enabled Ken Livingstone to seize the leadership of the London Labour party in 1981.

But for more than four decades, Maurice's name was most associated with educational research of a style and substance which made it of value to both practitioners and theorists. The prolific and subtle author of more than 40 books, the theme he returned to regularly was the complexity of governing "knowledge" to allow universities and other public institutions, and the practice of individuals within them, to reflect the institutions' core values as well as the structures of power.

Maurice was the meritocrat of the 1944 Education Act personified. Not just clever but hugely widely read, a man of extraordinary energy and intellectual passion, he had a streak of intellectual bravado and a taste for fun which never left him. His father was a Russian Jew who fought for Britain in the first world war, his mother came from Poland. With his twin brother Philip - future founder-publisher of Kogan Page - the youngest of a family of five brothers and a sister, all of whom his mother said, proudly, were scholarship children, meaning they went to grammar school, Maurice excelled at Stratford grammar.

An exhibition to Cambridge University followed, where he read history at Christ's College under the demanding but convivial aegis of Sir John Plumb. Maurice emerged in 1953 with two significant prizes: a first-class honours degree in history and first pla ce in the countrywide recruitment examinations for the administrative class of the civil service.

He chose the civil service, starting in the ministry of education, preferring, he said, the hands-on intrigues of Whitehall to the archival intrigues of medieval popes. Within a few years he found himself working under Derek Morrell, an innovative and charismatic civil servant of the type who flourished in the 1960s. Maurice looked set to become a top flight civil servant and institutional reformer in this mould. But the Plowden inquiry on primary education, set up in 1963, changed his life. He was appointed the committee's secretary. At the same time, his civil service bosses decided he was needed for the prime minister's office. Lady Plowden, a determined chair, refused to let him go. The appointment gave him the chance to introduce the strategy of evidence-based research which was the hallmark of his later work, and of decades of official reports, until a more ideological government style took over. Maurice was convinced he had missed his chance to get to the top of Whitehall.

Responsive to the intellectual fever of the 1960s around higher education expansion - marked by the Robbins report and the creation of new universities - and thinking of all the research contacts he had made in the US on a Harkness fellowship in 1960-61, he left the civil service in 1969 to become one of the founding professors at Brunel, the new university in Uxbridge.

He went there with the renowned economist, John Vaizey, determined to make the former college of advanced technology as much part of "a new map of knowledge" as lush green-field universities like Sussex, Essex and Lancaster, then much in the news.

Maurice's civil service reputation brought a cachet to Brunel. As professor of government and social administration, he made public administration important as an intellectual issue. An emblematic book, The Politics of Education (1971), consisted of his conversations with the two outstanding ministers of the period from right and left - Edward Boyle and Anthony Crosland - and getting them to reflect on what a minister of education could and should do, and what they themselves had done. He was also winning pioneering evaluation contracts for public administration, with the Ministry of Health and the Home Office. It was a fertile period.

The Brunel department had attracted some outstanding talents in its early years, though academics remember it as no haven for the faint-hearted. Maurice's expectations were extremely high. He rejoiced when fellow academics met these standards, felt it was disastrous if they did not and was deeply resentful of what he saw as the unthinking scorn for the new and non-lush universities of Oxbridge types who were running university policy. I now almost (but not quite) regret having contributed to this when, writing an article for New Society in the 1970s, I naturally reported the graffiti outside his department which proclaimed "Umbridge not Uxbridge".

Maurice regularly veered between optimism about the power of good ideas when allied with energetic people and his pessimism about realpolitik. Comprehensive schooling was a case in point. He and his Swedish wife, Ulla, a social worker, were part of that middle-class minority to send their sons to the local comprehensive school, in their case the then struggling former secondary modern, Islington Green, in north London. Maurice, vice-chair of the govening body, believed it could be turned round with the right people. They appointed an outstanding head, Margaret Maden. But middle-class support did not follow.

Maurice, as the brilliant analyst, was a member of countless British and international commissions over almost four decades; called on by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for its national evaluation studies, editor of the OECD's higher education and management journal, and, in the academic year 1989-90, an excellent acting vice-chancellor of Brunel. He also founded a dining group on education policy reform, whose purpose was to keep up the spirits of leftish educationists during the bleak 1990s. The sine qua non was that meetings be held in a good restaurant in Islington close to the terraced house that he and his wife had bought back in the 1960s, and which, like their Suffolk cottage, also bought decades before this became fashionable, were places for excellent parties. You could count on at least one American, Scandinavian, German, French or Spanish academic being present. These were the happy places where the books got written, often with his two main British collaborators over the years, Tony Becher and Mary Henkel. But despite some of his friends' best efforts, Maurice remained Eurosceptic to the end, while making a real international contribution to his subject.

His last victory was to defy the diagnosis that cancer would have him dead within five months. He lived a remarkable 26 months more, able to boast that he was in the top 5% here too. Those months also gave many of those whose lives were changed by knowing him the chance to pay their tribute. A festschrift published in 2005 is appropriately called Governing Knowledge. Ulla and his sons, Tom and Peter, survive him.

· Maurice Kogan, scholar and author, born April 10 1930; died January 6 2007

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