How that Tool-Kit course began
When I first wanted to get involved with British universities I asked a friend how to do it. She said it was easy: all I had to do was get a masters, and then a doctorate, and then teach in provincial universities for a few years, publishing everything I could, and then teach in better universities, still publishing, though a bit more carefully, until finally, if I was very lucky, I could end up in Oxford or Cambridge: exhausted perhaps, and really old, but able to lord it over everyone else in the British academic system.
I thought she was joking, but wasn’t quite sure, and in any event I was feeling pretty old already – getting close to 30 – and was convinced I couldn’t wait that long. Instead I wrote an essay book, for a publishing house that had a close link with one Oxford college. (It’s long out of print, but that's the one that had the ‘Socialism and Bacteria’ essay, anthologized e.g. in The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey.) Its publication got me a single high table dinner, at St. Antony's Oxford, and I still remember that evening. I wasn't going to demean myself by appearing desperate, but if oh by chance I did happen to meet an academic who might be able to find me an attachment, even unpaid, I'd focus on bringing up that book and other topics I might be able to help out with.
That was the plan, but the reality was different. At that dinner although one or two of the diners matched the usual academic stereotype - fussy and forbidding - everyone else was... just incredibly open, friendly, interesting. All my plans for conniving advancement disappeared and I found myself simply chatting away, much like at any lunch or dinner with friends. After a few more visits there were invitations to join the college – first in an unpaid position, though later through the history faculty that changed – and I remember feeling: I don't know exactly what's going to happen here, but a door in a forbidding wall has creaked open...and inside there's this sunny, waiting meadow.
At the time I didn't know enough to realize that I'd landed at one of the few colleges whose fellows had a tradition of being open towards the wider world. As the years of teaching went on I came to recognize the flaws at the university – it has the same mix of fallible humans as any institution, and free port + lifetime tenure does little to diminish that – but for one young man, wondering what his future could be, those first nights – when everything seemed possible – were heaven.
In the next year I created the course ‘An Intellectual Tool-Kit’, which was designed to get across the essence of a range of social science and other fields for new postgraduates. (Here’s a long background letter on getting started; also a later video talking about that.) To my satisfaction undergraduates started streaming in too, but since I speak fairly quickly I thought it was unfair to ask them to scramble along taking notes. Also, I remembered from my own student days how note-taking often meant barely listening: you end up so busy scribbling that any ‘thought’ ends up being done afterwards.
To avoid that I decided to prepare 10 or 20 page summaries of each lecture, which I'd pass out the week after a given talk. I had greatly appreciated when a teacher I'd had in Chicago had done that (his notes were published as ‘General Relativity, from A to B’, by Robert Geroch). In the back of my mind I also had the model of Richard Feynman, whose notes on his freshman lectures at Caltech became a lasting introduction not just to physics, but to his distinctive approach to inquiry as well.
I loved giving the talks, 11 AM every Thursday in the rambling Examination Schools building on the High Street, and especially getting to know the students. Often we’d go for walks afterwards, sandwiches from local shops in hand. The shy students would begin to speak; the more outgoing ones – with just a little bit of encouragement - ease back to let the others join in. My best course of action was to keep quiet and listen: these were seriously bright kids.
One thoughtful 21 year old only let slip near the end that he was a chess player: this was the noted grandmaster and now philosopher Jonathan Rowson. Another fellow, immensely taller than me - and I'd thought I was pretty tall already - was deeply concerned with the issues of false consciousness and how states came to insist on superior knowledge (touched on in the Freud and some of the history lectures): this was Florian who-mentioned-he-had-a-very-long-last-name. Only when he received the Academy Award for his film 'The Lives of Others' did I finally learn that indeed, ‘Henckel von Donnersmarck’ was part - there's more - of the long last name this gentle giant Florian had spared us.
I never did put the lecture notes together into a book - other projects took over - but rummaging in an old cardboard box, re-encountering the friendly energy on their pages, all those walks and conversations started coming back. Here's a sample of those notes, from one of the history weeks.
Nor was the work entirely wasted, for along I trust with helping my students, it also helped me, in both science fields, and in business. Writing a biography of a bright woman in the Enlightenment later was a lot easier having already had a glimpse of the background world she inhabited; similarly, very much, for the underlying ideas in ‘The Art of Fairness'. The finding of useful tools permeates that book, as well as the 2020 FT series on practical management tools.
There were informal spin-offs too. When I was asked by a British paper to prepare a series of mini introductions to a range of fields, having the course under my belt made it easy: here's an 800-worder on linguistics.