Lessons from Oxford

My second-floor window at Wadham College, Oxford, has a view. Outside the courtyard I see a beautifully manicured lawn, which I am told dates back to 1809. 

The 17th century architecture exposes each geometrically arranged Oxford stone. Beige in colour, it has a language that speaks to you as though it were human. It is simply stunning and we can learn many lessons from here.

I take a walk on Parks Road towards Catte Street. Here there are hundreds of people walking with their heads up, admiring medieval architecture and art, most of which dates back to the12th century. Some of the people are being taken around by tour guides in what they refer to as tour walks. Others are on open buses being taken around an area the size of Parklands. 

I decide to hop on the open buses, ostensibly to cover the tour in an hour. On the bus they emphasize buildings you must see. They are masterpieces of art, and art is where the story begins. It could probably take you several days to see everything in detail and learn the story behind it.

With a population of 150,200, Oxford is ranked the 52nd largest city in the United Kingdom. It greatly contributes to the British economy of which more than 18 per cent comes from tourism. More than 10 million tourists come to Oxford and more than 5 million are foreigners, contributing about £1 billion, equivalent to one and half times Kenya’s earnings from tourism. 

The per capita income in Oxford is £30,800, compared with the national average of £20,300 in 2013 figures. The city is sold as an educational hub, attracting several blue-chip companies for joint research partnerships.

LOW STUDENT-FACULTY RATIO

Imagine the revenue and number of tourists we can get if we marketed Mombasa Old Town and its mixture of 19th century architecture of Arab, Asian, Portuguese and British settlers. This would create jobs for the youth, who will in turn protect their sources of income and reject extremism that now characterizes Mombasa.

There are 39 colleges, each with its own charter, that make up Oxford University. The student population in each college ranges from 150 to 950. At Wadham there are 150 graduate students and 450 undergraduates. With more than 4,000 full-time faculty and about 22,177 full-time students, the university has a ratio that hovers below four students per faculty, in comparison with other universities in the UK, where the ratio is about 12 students per faculty.

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This is still way better than what we have in Africa, where the average oscillates between 50 and 100 students per faculty in an attempt to standardize mass education. Most undergraduates here are taught by tutorial fellows, giving very close attention to the student.

The warden here noted my curiosity and gave me a brief run-down and a summarized brochure of Wadham College, Oxford. It states that Wadham College was founded by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham in the reign of King James I. Nicholas Wadham was a member of the ancient Somerset family and died in 1609, leaving his fortune to endow a college at Oxford. The hard work of translating intentions into reality fell on his widow, Dorothy, a formidable lady of 75. 

WOMEN DENIED DEGREES

She fought all the claims of Nicholas’s relations, lobbied at court, negotiated the purchase of a site, drew up the college plans, and appointed the first Warden, Fellows and Scholars, and the college cook, to such effect that the college was ready for opening within four years of Nicholas’s death. 

She added considerably to the endowment from her own resources, and kept tight control of its affairs until her death in 1618. Although she never visited Oxford from her home in Devon to see the results of her generosity and business acumen, Dorothy Wadham and her husband Nicolas are honoured as the co-founders of the college.

Dorothy did all this when women were not allowed to join Oxford, and those who did much later could only be given a congratulatory pat on the back with no degree certificate. Although the first women’s colleges were founded in the nineteenth century, women did not become full members of the university until 1920, when they were given the right to take degrees. 

Change is a process. But in our country today, few acknowledge that. We want short-term cures, but that can potentially take us into the drains. We can identify with the history of the women’s struggle and chart a more civilized approach to our national challenges. We may not be the beneficiaries of the change process we initiate today, but generations down the road will recognize our contribution. It is for this reason that I postulate that there are lessons we learn from unlikely experiences.

In 1609 Dorothy Wadham was thinking about endowment, yet several centuries down the road we watch poverty in our midst even when we are capable of endowing education for the poor. Many poor students drop out of school because they cannot afford to pay less than $500 in fees a year. 

My experience with many public schools has been sobering. We raise funds when they are needed yet there are sustainable measures to alleviate such problems and ensure an education to our poor children. At the same time, our rich are dying uselessly in opulence, which does not sustain their names beyond the appreciation notices in newspapers. 

If, for example, a rich person endows public education to a tune of $1 million, this can cover fees for as many as 500 children per year for eternity and their name will be remembered as much. The Oxford endowment fund is in excess of £5 billion, most of it from the rich who decided to endow the university. The endowment is enough to bail out Greece.

A BIT MORE TRUST

In the month of August, we have a fundraiser for creating an endowment (perhaps the first in a Kenyan public school) for Kenya High School, a public girl's school located in the Kileleshwa section of Nairobi. This initiative needs those who benefited from the school, that is, women who studied there and men who married the school's graduates, as well as people of goodwill. 

The new education policy now brings in more than 300 girls from rural Kenya who cannot afford to pay fees. My friend Mugo Kibati has a similar initiative at Alliance High School, a boy's school in Kikuyu. Part of this effort is to change our mindset. We must begin to plan for such eventualities then scale up to other schools especially in rural Kenya, and ensure sustained assistance to the poor.

The second lesson that arises from the Oxford story is that of trust. For endowment programmes to succeed, we need trusted fund managers. Either the regulations are not adequate or we simply have crooks in our financial sector, but we need a bit more trust in order to sustainably develop our country. If you happen to have read the news, there is this loss on Treasury Bills that experienced fund managers cannot explain. Our future depends on our collective trust. Kenyans in general have no trust in systems yet trust is the pillar for future economic development.

The third lesson and one that I think is more important is maintenance. When it comes to maintenance, we are simply not up to the task. Just last week there was an article on our failure to maintain Thika Road, which is just two years old. 

A while ago, a contractor was appointed to maintain the highway, but it is obvious that there is no maintenance. In my view, the contractor should be arrested for desertion of duty and be a lesson to all. 

We must translate the word maintenance to all vernacular languages and encourage it from nursery school to university. We must start maintaining our culture through preservation of cultural symbols of history and traditions and meanings. A great deal of our communication is non-verbal, but this is increasingly getting blurred as we do not maintain our culture as we should.

Last and perhaps one that you may not agree with me is the disappearing of the 19th century architecture of Nairobi city. Most of the beautiful British colonial architecture with character in Upper Hill is all gone. Kileleshwa (the majority of the high-end housing here was made out of mud and dressed with cement), which should have been a lesson for low-income housing, is virtually gone. And now the beautiful Indian architecture with flat roofs in and around Parklands is under intense pressure. 

What makes Nairobi city a tourist location is the architectural beauty of Kipande House, Standard Bank Kenyatta Avenue, the former Governor’s office on Kenyatta Avenue/Uhuru Highway, the National Archives building, the former Grindlays Bank building along Kenyatta Avenue, and similar structures.

Preserving what is left of British colonial architecture, especially the orphaned railways houses along Ojijo Road, is of great importance. It is precisely what makes Oxford beautiful.

As Confucius said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Dr Ndemo is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Nairobi's Business School, Lower Kabete Campus. He is a former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication. Twitter:@bantigito