ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, and indeed right up until my retirement in 1986, my scholarly life as a teacher, writer, editor, and supervisor of research was increasingly interrupted by the calls of college administration. Following on four years as chairman of the Centre of African Studies, in which my main preoccupation had been the establishment of new master's degrees, I was appointed in 1971 as the senior tutor at SOAS, which gave me the oversight to the whole of the teaching programme of the school. The appointment came at a significant moment. Hitherto, student numbers had been limited by the size of our accommodation to around seven hundred. Now, with a large extension of our building nearly completed, it was possible to think in terms of raising our total numbers, in the course of ten or fifteen years, to as many as two thousand. Such a transition would involve a radical change in the composition of the student body. Hitherto, all but three hundred of our students had been postgraduates whose numbers could not be expected to increase significantly beyond their existing level of around four hundred. It was clear, therefore, that our projected expansion would have to be built mainly around our undergraduate programme, and the recruits would have to come mainly from British schools. As things stood, all we could offer them was a long list of single-subject degrees, half of them with the Asian and African dimensions of the main arts and social science subjects and the other half in Asian and African languages, of which only a handful of British school leavers would even be aware. The fundamental problem here was that, although half our staff members were language specialists, they could make little direct contribution to our expansion. The additional teaching would fall mainly on the rest, who would need to share the load as equally as possible. In these circumstances it seemed plain that we would need to take a long step in the direction of the American system of modular degrees in which students choose their courses from two or more compatible disciplines. My early activities as senior tutor were spent in discovering how far along this path my colleagues were prepared to go.
