As we are now in the 40th year since the publication of the Venture of Islam, there are important and timely questions about the continued pedagogical relevance, usefulness and deployment of Hodgson in the classroom. How and why do we assign Hodgson and how do students assimilate his theories and approaches? Do students find relevance in his work and how do they incorporate his theories into their own? How are instructors using Hodgson's text to support their teaching? Notwithstanding the near universal fear and loathing of Venture of Islam among students at all levels, how do students and teachers really come to terms with Hodgson? Are Hodgson's intentions behind the Venture of Islam being upheld in the classroom? This paper will examine the answers that students and teachers give to these questions. Furthermore, it will consider some of the current approaches to using Hodgson in the classroom with an eye to understanding how the introduction of Hodgson to both graduate and undergraduate students impacts their continued interaction with his work. Through a combination of extensive interviews, surveys and research into Hodgson's own pedagogical approaches, it will attempt to present the state of Hodgson's Venture of Islam in the teaching of Islamicate studies in colleges and universities around the world.

Making substantial use of Marshall Hodgson’s papers at the University of Chicago, this paper contextualizes the historian's pedagogical views in the vociferous debates about American education that took place at the University of Chicago during the course of his career. Hodgson was explicitly the inheritor of hybrid beliefs about education promulgated by the ideological adversaries John Dewey and Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins, the fifth president of the University of Chicago and one of the renowned administrators of his day, was a firm proponent of the classical liberal education. Hutchins piloted a “Great Books” program modeled after John Erskine’s course at Columbia and instituted a structure for the University that is largely in place today. Hutchins was staunchly opposed to the contemporary fad of utilitarian and scientific education popularised by John Dewey and William James, and the terms of debate about American education in the 1930s would come to be characterized by the sparring of Hutchins and Dewey. The acknowledged lion of the progressive educational movement of the early twentieth century, Dewey’s major influence was Charles Darwin, and his beliefs about education were built upon the idea that the scientific method was “the sole authentic mode of revelation.” Dewey was influenced by the collectivism observed during a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and criticized the classical education as “an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum.” It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Hutchins-Dewey debate broadly on the public consciousness of the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly at the University of Chicago, which Hutchins was treating as a large-scale laboratory at the time when Hodgson began his doctorate. Hodgson was subsequently hired as a Chicago faculty member during the so-called “Kimpton counter-revolution” that more or less forced Hutchins’s resignation in 1951. Hodgson’s archive shows that his pronounced and particular views about education were shaped by the debates of the 1940s, and that he himself was involved in enacting the evolving policies of the subsequent decades. This paper will describe the way in which Hodgson’s educational principles were expressed in word and deed as a sort of hybrid inheritance of the debate that had riven the University of Chicago particularly, and American education generally, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Marshall Hodgson’s intellectual heritage is commonly traced to two major sources: the Orientalist tradition of Louis Massignon, Hamilton A.R. Gibb, and Gustave von Grunebaum; and his immediate milieu at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, including again, von Grunebaum, John U. Nef the economic historian and Robert Redfield the anthropologist – the last two also were among the founders of the Committee on Social Thought. However, Hodgson’s debt to cross-disciplinary scholars such as Mircea Eliade, and especially Karl Jaspers, is less noted but crucially important in grasping the ultimate goals of Hodgson’s ideas of history as a profession, a discipline, and an ontological category. Hodgson developed Jaspers’ concept of kerygma in “The Historian as Theologian,” a 1967 lecture delivered to his university colleagues. This paper excavates Hodgson’s deployment of the kerygmatic principle as both a historical agent and a guiding force of the historian’s work, and culminates in the colocation of the historian's and the theologian’s task and purpose. Reconsidering Hodgson’s work in light of the insights put forth in “The Historian as Theologian” opens The Venture of Islam to new interpretations and understandings.