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Mark Freeman deploys insight and empathy, as well as a sense of humour, introducing ‘University Extension’ in Chapter 1 with the quizzical title of ‘Mustard left on dinner plates’. This was the influential work of James Stuart (1843–1913), mathematician and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Stuart married a daughter of a Norwich mustard magnate, one Laura Colman, who left a substantial endowment for extra-mural studies in Cambridge, sponsorship a welcome ingredient for adult education. The mustard reference was coined by historian Maurice Bruce, son of a postman, appointed ‘James Stuart Lecturer’ in the 1930s, progressing to Director of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Sheffield; committed to working-class education, he wrote a much-reprinted history of the modern welfare state and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Stuart had been a popular lecturer from 1867, addressing audiences in Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester convened by the North of England Council for Promoting Higher Education of Women. Lecturing also to railway workers in Crewe and the Cooperative Society in Rochdale, he generated a ‘peripatetic university of professors’. He aspired to a ‘permeating influence’ of universities to reach new audiences of women and working men. Elected a Liberal MP in 1884, his project is memorialised in an inscription, preserved on the Working Men’s Institute he founded in Cambridge, that same year.
Researched in depth from extensive archival resources and oral testimony, the book title itself, the ‘Vital Message’ is drawn from an annual report of 2005, indicating the impressive breadth of subject matter and of students, rooted in regional communities, connecting with local schools: the ‘Vital Message’ of lifelong learning was seen to span generations, where ‘respect for a wider range of life experience was deepened’.
‘Continuing Education’, ‘Extra-Mural Studies’, ‘Lifelong Learning’ and ‘University Extension’ are just some of the formulations adopted to express the aspirations and aims, while ‘book boxes’, ‘bursaries’, ‘community education and outreach’ indicate some of the media and methods. ‘Summer Schools’, ‘Tutorial Classes’, and ‘Vacation Courses for Foreign Students’ reflect the expansion and diversity of specialist provision, as an international clientele began to be catered for.
The introductory chapter offers a helpful retrospective of the development of ‘university extension’ in Cambridge, Oxford and London, over its first half-century, leading to 342 tutorial classes with a total of almost 8,000 students expected to attend 24 class meetings each year and to produce written work. The Ministry of Education’s Adult Education Committee had produced a report in the aftermath of the first world war, endorsing the role of universities and voluntary organisations in non-vocational education. Through the 1920s, Nottingham, Exeter, Bristol and Newcastle had engaged with adult education, followed by Hull, Southampton, Birmingham and Leicester. In Cambridge its ‘Local Lectures Syndicate’ was replaced by a ‘Board of Extra-Mural Studies’, a Board of 21 Members including 10 from the University, five from the Workers’ Educational Association and five from the ‘Local Centres Union’ representing local education centres in their relationship with Cambridge.
Freeman’s remit was to bring the historical record up to date, and his graphic chapter headings are imaginative and thought-provoking, as the phases of continuing education at Cambridge progressed through successive decades. The 1940s and ‘50s post-war era illustrates ‘expanding frontiers’ during which other providers entered the field and extramural departments were funded nationally by the University Grants Committee; by the early 1960s grant-aided courses numbered 5,000. Following World War II the iconic 16th Century Madingley Hall was purchased by the University in 1948 becoming associated with adult education thereafter. The 1960s explores a period of expansion in Higher Education generally, instigated by the Robbins Report which envisaged the ‘education of adults’ as a continuing function of universities ‘testing the soil’, well supported by statistical data. Student numbers in Chapter 4 continue by providing a graphic picture of ‘Active Ferment’ that characterises the 1970s. This chapter leads on to an interlude of colourful images, illustrating people, students, lecturers and staff administrators. Programmes and activities are given a visual presence, also buildings and landscapes including of course the iconic Madingley Hall. Regions and local centres are usefully mapped, offering a sense of how the university extended its range of adult education to regional communities. This might be seen as progressing the pioneering mission of Henry Morris in his Village Colleges.
The 1980s are described in Chapter 5 as ‘Lifting the Soul’, drawing on the work of significant actors in the life of Madingley Hall, where the contribution to change and development by figures such as Richard Taylor and Bill Jones, Lionel Munby and Leslie James, Sarah Ormrod and Sue Oosthuizen are described. ‘Credit where it’s due’ is the title of Chapter 6, highlighting a Project Report from the mid-1990s on accreditation of courses in the ‘public programmes’. The former ‘Board of Extramural Studies’ was now a ‘Board of Continuing Education’, the common description of adult education from the 1970s onwards. This project reported on ‘Credit Frameworks and Learning Outcomes’ evaluated in the ‘Employment Department’. A radical restructuring of many university adult education departments led to further reconception with the turn of the new millennium, and the Cambridge Board became an ‘Institute of Continuing Education’ in 2001.
The Labour government had meanwhile issued a Green Paper titled ‘The Learning Age’ (1998), and in the same year, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) produced a statement entitled The Learning Curve (referring favourably to the Cambridge Board amongst other universities). Freeman adopts the phrase for his final chapter heading, taking us ‘into a new millennium’ where ‘continuing education as the responsibility of a small department seems anachronistic’ and ‘in an era of higher education politicised for the service of employment and global competitiveness, liberal education appears quaint in the curriculum of the new vocationalism’ (quoted from Bill Jones et al. eds. University continuing education 1981–2006: Twenty-five turbulent years NIACE and UALL, Leicester, 2010). The University established a Committee on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, chaired by Deputy VC and President of New Hall, Anne Lonsdale, a sinologist who worked extensively in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Throughout the whole volume Freeman provides a wealth of detail and analysis, thoroughly indexed, and extensively referenced, providing an authoritative and learned source for researchers, as well as an informative resource for the general reader. Attractive too is a collection of 34 visual sources, a meaningful addition that enhances this valuable text. His ‘Postscript’ (231–235) looks back historically, raising questions of ‘status’ in the context of the ‘Great Tradition’, reviewing how innovations in provision and their perceived purpose evolved over the period 1945–2010. Its reflective and thought-provoking tone creates a powerful climax to the book.