Physical and Virtual Academic Communities

as Demonstrated by the Examples of

Richard Masagbor, University of Cambridge and Toyin Falola

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
 Abstract

Reflecting on leadership in the development of knowledge across contrastive

but correlative contexts

In the process of updating my CV, I was struck by similarities between the

contexts of the first items on the book chapter publications list of the CV and
the latest entries.
The first references are to the chapters I contributed to The Way of Prose
Fiction,1997, edited by Richard Masagbor.
The latest entries come from my contributions to two books published in
2018, The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy and Victor Ekpuk:
Connecting Lines Across Space and Time, the first edited by Adeshina Afolayan
and Toyin Falola and the second by Falola.
Richard Masagbor, University of Cambridge and the Physical Academic
Community
I will never forget the excitement of that first book project and the sensitive
and wise manner in which Masagbor facilitated the improvement of the
chapters I contributed. It was so fulfilling seeing the book published. It was
like giving birth to a child.
That was my most striking experience of leadership in facilitating the creation
of knowledge, as different from the imparting of knowledge, the two central
goals of a university, and my most significant encounter with the concept of
an academic community, in the years I was associated with a Nigerian
university, Masagbor at that time being my senior colleague at the Department
of English and Literature, University of Benin, the one Nigerian university I
have been associated with.
Having eventually journeyed as a student through the Universities of Kent and
SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and later
living in Cambridge and taking part, as far as I was able to as a non-member of
the university, in the academic life of the University of Cambridge between
2015 and 2016, I am better able to place in context the significance of that
experience with Masagbor at the University of Benin
It was through my encounter with Cambridge, that, for the first time, I grasped
the concept of the university as an academic community, the nucleus of which
is the kind of initiative Masagbor led with that 1997 research and publishing
effort.
I came to appreciate an academic community as not centrally a context where
people earn a living by gaining points for academic publications, but an
interrelational environment where persons come together in devotion to the
process of assisting each other learn and develop new knowledge.
I had never before encountered the level of open, group based academic
activity outside the classroom that I experienced at Cambridge. Workshops,
conferences, seminars, talks are in such abundance across departments,
faculties and research centres, and open to the public, often at no cost, that
one has to be selective in participating in this all year round activity.
I have had to conclude that this density of knowledge sharing is a central
reason why Cambridge is one of the world's greatest universities.
Not being a member of the university, I did not have access to their
collaborative publication projects of the kind represented by the Masagbor
initiative at the University of Benin, but I was able to participate in other
processes of knowledge development through knowledge sharing that
magnificently complement the more structured experiences of schooling and
graduate level research, facilitating the constant updating of a researcher's
knowledge base and skills framework.
The Masagbor University of Benin and Cambridge University examples are
demonstrations of the academic community as a physically constituted entity.
Toyin Falola and the Virtual Academic Community
There does exist, however, another kind of academic community, the virtual,
transnational academic network, represented by my experience with Toyin
Falola, who is an academic at the University of Texas.
Without having to meet Falola, and purely through online communication, I
have taken part in two book projects of his and am working towards a third.
Along with his vibrant work in academic leadership at his university, such as
the annual conference on Africa he is central to convening there, Falola has
positioned himself as a nexus of networks on Africa centred scholarship,
generating book projects by himself or in collaboration with others on various
disciplines spanning the visual and verbal arts and other zones of the
humanities, along with the social sciences.
At the SOAS library in 2004, I kept coming across the name “Toyin Falola” in
books in various sections of the library. Who is this person, I asked my then
teacher at SOAS, Akin Oyetade, in wonder, and he responded in the same spirit
of acknowledgement of encountering a unique phenomenon.
Falola has, if I recall correctly, eleven book publications to his credit for 2017
alone, the distance between the 2004 encounter with aspects of his oeuvre
and the present assessable in terms of more than a hundreds books, sole
authored, collaboratively authored and edited texts. He does not list his
numerous articles on his website, only books. The articles are in the CV.
Complementary Outcomes from Contrastive Contexts
There is nothing as wonderful as contributing to developing other people,
even as one develops oneself in collaboration with others.
The Masagbor 1997 book was published by an enterprising member of the
University of Benin staff, Kunle Mamudu, who, along with his university job,
had set up Headmark Publishers, the staff of which publishing house, at that
time, did not seem to be more than his secretary and himself.

Palgrave, the publisher of the first of my 2018 publications in a Falola book

project is one of the world's most notable academic publishers. Like the Falola
edited Ekpuk book, published by Pan-African University Press, the Palgrave
book is thick and handsomely bound, with the Ekpuk monograph’s binding
being particularly luminous with a striking Ekpuk artwork on the cover, the
Ekpuk book itself being both a work of art and a book about art, both the
philosophy book and the Ekpuk text enhancing significantly the sheer
aesthetic force and cognitive scope of any library.
The 1997 Masagbor edited book, rich in essays by scholars dedicated to
illuminating their subjects, demonstrates, in contrast, in its printing and
binding, that it is the work of the limited publishing technology then available
to the publisher more than twenty years ago in a non-industrialized nation
and working with what may be called a basic budget.
Along with being profoundly inspired by Falola's strategy of uncompromising
excellence, using the best resources in his academic projects, significantly
working with the leading global publishers who deliver cutting edge
publishing services, I am very proud of my copy of the Masagbor book on
account of the vision it actualizes, the vision of people, scholars and publisher,
working together to create something beautiful and enduring in difficult
conditions, articulating the fundamental vision of the university as a
collaborative community of knowledge creation, and doing so in contexts
where even the basics of living cannot be taken for granted and within often
debilitating institutional politics.
Among Falola's consistent co-editors and other academic collaborators are
scholars in Nigerian universities, people for whom I expect Falola has
facilitated the development of their own creativity in gaining a place in the
more visible mappings of Africa focused scholarship on the global stage.
The Falola virtual academic community example and the Masagbor and
Cambridge physical academic community examples are central templates for
global scholarship and particularly for scholarship in Africa.
The Imperative of Scholarly Book Publishing
Nothing can replace the culture of the book, particularly the scholarly book, in
whatever form it is produced, digital or print. The organization of knowledge
into a carefully interrelated collection of texts unified by a theme focused
enough to thread through those texts in a way that enables a close correlation
between them is critical to the structuring through which the human mind
develops, stores, assimilates and applies knowledge.
May we march forward into a constant rain of scholarly books from Africa,
equal in value to the continent's awesome resources.