So, what are colleges for? Why don’t we get more contact hours in the Arts and Humanities? As a Provost and an academic in the Arts and Humanities, students often ask me these questions. I think an answer to the first may help us to ask a better question than the second.
But to give my answer to the first question, I’ve first got to talk a bit about another thing I often hear discussed at the university, namely, space – space for teaching, research, administration, and activities – and how there never seems to be enough of it to go ‘round. From these discussions, it seems that space is a valuable commodity. On the contrary, in and of itself, space is valueless. Space only has value when it is given value, and when it is given value, it becomes a place. Reflecting on what is perhaps the most hotly contested place on the planet, the land of the Hebrew Scriptures, Walter Bruegemann writes:
‘Space’ means an arena of freedom without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. Space is characterized by a kind of neutrality or emptiness waiting to be filled by our choosing . . . But ‘place’ is a very different matter . . . It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.’ (The Land, pp. 4-5)
Places are imbued with meaning, meaning we create by structuring our lives in community, by supporting each other through all the twists and turns of life, and by being accountable to each another for the lives we lead. Yes, space is important, but only insofar as it is required for being in a place. Colleges are places, places of structure, support, and accountability, where students can lead meaning-full lives outside of their programmes of study. And that, at least in part, is what colleges are for.
The problem with having few contact hours on a programme of study is that structure, support, and accountability seem to be absent most of the time. A student’s timetable seems to be a vast stretch of space, as it were, punctuated by only a few places, where their 4-6 hours of lectures and seminars occur. While some space is helpful in a timetable, too much results in a sense of undefined freedom, which cannot fulfil the basic human need for meaning in one’s life.
While more contact hours can, in some cases, supply the requisite structure, support, and accountability needed for meaning, they may not always do so. For example, having a lecturer sit silently in a room with students for hours upon hours would count as increasing the students’ contact hours, but it would not supply the structure, support, and accountability needed for meaning.
So, instead of asking, ‘Why don’t we have more contact hours?’, I suggest we ask, ‘How can more structure, support, and accountability be put into programmes of study where there are few contact hours?’. And I think if we make progress on answering this latter question, we may make progress on helping students to have a meaning-full programme of study.
David Efird is Vanbrugh Provost, and a Philosophy lecturer at the University.