While doing some archival research this past week, I came across some letters from Thomas Hodgkin, a British scholar who became known for his supportive engagement with West African countries at the time of independence and who wrote Nationalism in Colonial Africa in 1956 (a book that still reads quite well and manages to serve both as a primary text documented that moment and a work of scholarly analysis of that moment).
In the material I was examining, Hodgkin was serving as the Secretary of Oxford University’s Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies (now Department of Continuing Education) at the time he visited West Africa in 1947 to look into the prospects for the Delegacy to sponsor several tutors who would teach courses in history and politics in Ghana (then called the Gold Coast) and Nigeria. He was enthusiastic about the program and they went ahead with hiring two faculty to teach the courses.
He found that the places he visited, even outside of the big cities of Lagos and Accra, were alive with intellectual energy and excitement—the Delegacy were only one of many institutions—local, imperial, or otherwise—teaching courses or hosting public lecture series outside of the framework of a formal degree-granting institution. Even in smaller cities, he ran into “mutual aid” networks who were simply picking out readings or pamphlets for group discussion on their own recognizance. (Philip Zachernuk’s book Colonial Subjects traces some of the circuits of this intellectual world; there’s also a recent intriguing dissertation by Russell Wade Stevenson that focuses on the establishment of an early post-independence university in Nigeria.)
I’m often struck any time I happen across older descriptions of the nature of liberal education and the necessary character attributes of teachers in liberal education how continuous a lot of our current discourse really is, often without us knowing that. So take Hodgkin explaining, for example, what the Delegacy’s aims in West Africa as well as in the United Kingdom were:
“It should be made clear that the term ‘adult education’ is here used to describe education in ‘liberal studies’ (with special reference to History and Social Studies) through the medium of classes or study-courses for literate men and women who are normally in employment during the day–the students taking an active part in the work of the class both through their contributions to discussion and through reading and written work. The principal motive for attendance by students at such courses is to acquire knowledge and develop independence of thought and judgment, with a view to equipping themselves to play a responsible part in the life of their community.”
And then his description of the attributes that any faculty teaching for the Delegacy would have to have in West Africa:
“Any tutor who is to do worthwhile work in Nigeria (at least in the areas which I visited) must have not merely an authoritative knowledge of the subject which he teaches and the power to teach it in a way that makes sense to his students. He must also have a thorough understanding of the purpose and methods of adult education…He must be the kind of person who will quickly win the confidence of his students–both by his intellectual honesty and by his accessibility and friendliness. Without accepting all their views he must be broadly in sympathy with their aspirations.”
Hodgkin makes both of these points in response to what he agrees is completely reasonable skepticism on the part of many of the West Africans that he met about the Delegacy’s plans. He noted that many of them wondered if this was merely an attempt to soothe over the wounds caused by the deliberate failure of the British imperial state to develop education systems in its African colonies. Or if “extra-mural studies” were simply a cheap and inferior substitute for an institutionally granted degree that had real economic value to its recipient. Or if Oxford was simply going to send condescending white tutors who would know nothing about West Africa and would look down on their pupils. (Hodgkin was at particular pains to reassure his contacts that this would not be the case.)
As Hodgkin points out in his correspondence, many of these were the same fears that the Delegacy confronted in offering adult education in the United Kingdom. At the same time, everywhere they were operating, whether West Africa or Stoke-on-Trent, they were finding an existing world of middle-class and working-class people keen to read and talk together about history, politics, philosophy, art, science and literature who welcomed every new resource they could pull into their conversations—lecturers, free or cheap reading material, libraries, continuing education courses, and so on.
So while Hodgkin’s explanation of what liberal education was for and how it should be taught seem very familiar, I am struck that what seems less familiar is that wealthy and respected universities should be enthusiastically provisioning their faculty, facilities and materials to communities as part of their ongoing conversations about the world around them, and doing that pro bono to the end beneficiaries. E.g., the idea of liberal education less as an embedded part of a degree that grants a credential which is recognized as a professional qualification to do particular kinds of work and more as an ongoing enterprise that makes more sense in many ways to older people who have lived into their humanity.
I am far from the first to point out the irony that as higher education in both the U.S. and the U.K. became more accessible to more of the population—and concurrently more and more necessary as a precondition of access to any form of skilled labor—it actually killed off or at least discouraged the sort of wider middle-class interest in academic knowledge that flourished in the mid-20th Century. Much as the university became more and more spatially separate from the communities around it, it also locked up more and more of its resources, policed its boundaries, and became more inclined to regard any services it provided as transactional. Even “free” efforts at adult education increasingly had to be tied to maintaining alumni relations (and thus seeking donations) or some kind of implicit quid pro quo greasing of the town-gown relationship.
One of the consequences of this shift is that the legitimate skepticism that Hodgkin was facing (and forthrightly addressing) has blown up into a wide-ranging hostility, as the university has become an expensive but indispensable gatekeeper to many forms of higher-value labor while also being mostly absent from the rest of civic and social life. (A point that Nick Burns makes this week in the New York Times about the physical layout of most American universities.) I keep thinking about what it would mean if higher education were again more institutionally and deliberately present in public culture without any meters running, without any degrees promised, without any neoliberal explanation of what the return on investment will be.
And I think that especially about “liberal arts” as a concept, because honestly in my own life, I am far more ready to understand and appreciate the core substance of what has traditionally been part of liberal education as a man in my fifties than I was as an undergraduate in my early twenties—and I don’t think that’s a function of my professional work as an academic. Hodgkin’s description of liberal education and its character, wherever it might take hold, seems to belong in life—in workplace lunchrooms, in the bar by the train station while waiting for the train, in community meeting halls, in neighborhoods.
But of course that list intensifies a melancholy sense of the lost opportunities of a neoliberal age, because as soon as you start thinking about the actual spaces that a public culture friendly to an embedded kind of adult-oriented, non-credentialling liberal education might flourish in, you realize how many of the actual spaces which once existed to host that work have been destroyed or diminished. It’s not just the university that withdrew beyond its walls and started charging by the hour.
Wonderful reflections Tim. You are making me think about the endorphins that must flow as people engage with others in learning, engaging, and also debating issues and topics freshly presented. I understand Northwestern is doing this really well, at least in the excitement expressed by older people in engaging with ideas and works that academics might have looked at and pushed away. You are in a way our Thomas Hodgkin, exploring the possibilities beyond the routines of academic institutions. I wish I could be in more places to see what people are reading in public spaces. But, not many flights or cafe sit-downs or long transit rides these days. I’m thinking seriously about the endorphins as something like that must be present in the experiences that Hodgkin was seeing and promoting.