Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [172]
Again, academics spend most of their working time on the routines of teaching, research, meetings and examining. These are unadventurous and lacking in unpredictability by the standards of more highprofile living. They spend much of their leisure time in the society of other academics, a species which, however interesting as individuals, is not thrilling company en masse. Half a century ago it could be plausibly argued that an assembly of historians, such as could be seen at the annual meetings of their societies, was even less distinguishable from an assembly of insurance company executives than collections of other university teachers, but since the generation of 1968 has entered the academy, this may no longer be so.
As for students, en masse they are certainly more interesting for anyone who likes being a teacher, but mainly by virtue of their youth and all the things that go with it, such as enthusiasm, passion, hope, ignorance and immaturity, rather than because much is to be expected by facing crowds of them. Admittedly, this is not strictly true of the two institutions in which I spent most of my teaching career, Birkbeck College in the University of London and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York. Both, being somewhat anomalous parts of academia, have singular student bodies. Birkbeck, the successor of the London Mechanics’ Institution of 1825, remains an evening college, teaching those who earn their living during the day. One of the reasons why I spent my entire British career there, was the pleasure of teaching extraordinarily motivated men and women, usually older and hence more mature than the normal post-school student. They faced their teachers weekly with the acid test of the profession: how to keep a bunch of people interested in what is being said to them between eight and nine p.m., knowing that they have come to college after a full day’s work, swallowed a quick meal in the cafeteria, sat through one or two earlier lectures, and face maybe an hour’s journey home after I get through. Birkbeck was a good school, not least of learning how to communicate.
The peculiarity of the New School’s Graduate Faculty was its combination of heterodoxy and internationalism. The New School for Social Research itself had been founded after the Great War by educational and ideological and politically radical reformers rebelling against what they regarded as the tyranny of examinations. It found first-class people, of whom there was no shortage in New York City, to teach anything for which there was a demand, from classical philosophy to yoga. The Graduate Faculty had been set up in 1933 to provide for the academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, followed by those from the rest of occupied Europe. It is on record as the first academic institution to give lectures on jazz and almost certainly the first to give a seminar on structuralism (by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson), both during the Second World War. Its reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism attracted unusual students from the USA, and even more interesting and able ones from western and Latin American countries. In the 1980s it developed a relationship with the countries about to shake off their communist regimes. The Poles, Russians, Bulgarians and Chinese joined the Brazilians, Spaniards and Turks in our classes. I once counted twenty nationalities in my own. Since they knew more about their own countries and special fields than I did, I learned at least as much from them as they did from me. There was almost certainly no more varied and stimulating a body of students anywhere.
Communication is the essence both of teaching and of writing. Fortunate the author who likes both, for it rescues him or her from the desert island on which we usually sit, writing messages for unknown recipients in unknown destinations to be launched across the oceans in bottles shaped like books.