Something rare happened this week. A small group of university principals, scholars and administrators gathered in a room to ponder the future of universities.
The occasion was the recent publication of Rebels and Rage by the vice-chancellor of Wits University, Prof Adam Habib. The intense deliberation about the book, and what it signals about our future, was rare because senior university thinkers could apply their minds to a vexed subject without the disruption and grandstanding that has come to mark such events.
These days in our universities when you wish to discuss a book on a subject such as the politics of universities you arrange for extra security because there will be some students (if they are that) to bare their breasts or block the speaker’s view with placards or shout obscenities. A scholarly event gives you a platform for spectacle, an audience you would not otherwise have.
Adam Habib writes the way he speaks, in swashbuckling style, but there are some important insights from this book. Lis Lange from UCT made the crucial point that the SA university has become a place for resolving the social problems that emanate from a failed development state. Corrupt and unable to meet the basic needs of its citizens, the campus square becomes the battleground for meeting social demands.
You can’t feed your citizens? The universities launch hunger programmes. You cannot take care of the health needs of your people? The university is pressed to provide everything from mental health services to HIV-testing to pregnancy counselling. You cannot stimulate growth in the economy and give people jobs? The university must now insource workers.
For many on the outside the university is not a place for high-level teaching and advanced research; it is a concentrated resource that must be skimmed to serve the basic needs of campus people. University leaders are left to scramble to keep the lid on things, so to speak, and prevent these prized institutions from becoming part of the collapse of the state.
Habib raised something disturbing that lies at the root of the 2015-2016 protests: the factionalisation of student protests. Now that the dust has settled, also literally, it is becoming clear that what often lay behind the havoc on campuses were student organisations acting on behalf of their principals outside the university.
If you do not sing from the same hymn book on ‘decolonisation’, for example, you will come under attack.
The campus became a fierce battle among rival political party groups. And how do you gain attention? By acting more outrageously than your competitor. In the process, the genuine struggles of many students were hijacked by student leaders who saw campus politics as a direct route to parliamentary jobs. A full audit of how many erstwhile student leaders now earn fat parliamentary salaries would make for interesting discussion.
I used the opportunity to warn about underlying changes in campus cultures that over time impact on the very nature and purposes of universities. To begin with, there is the problem of the normalisation of violence; last week students set fire to lecture halls on a Durban campus and few noticed because it has become so routine. The outrage is gone. Then there is the intolerance of dissent. If you do not sing from the same hymn book on “decolonisation”, for example, you will come under attack. What requires debate has become a mark of political loyalty.
Here is the first irony: the very activists demanding a plurality of knowledge (a key element of one strand of decolonisation) on campus are the ones forcing their preferred knowledge down your throat. Here is the second irony: as Habib rightly observes, it is the progressive academics on our campuses — those who risked prison sentences in the anti-apartheid struggle — who consciously decide not to offer comradely criticisms because, as one told me, “that would be career suicide”.
Then there is the terrible spectre of tribalism. On one of our campuses open arguments were recently made against appointing a dean of humanities because the person is Tanzanian as opposed to an authentic black South African, whatever that means; such chauvinism makes the stomach turn. Make no mistake, when these kinds of reprehensible things happen on university campuses then universities become nothing more than technical training institutes that spew out automatons for the labour market, bereft of criticality, independent thought and a sense of decency.
A university hobbled by its role as a quasi-welfare organisation, on the one hand, and under threat by small mobs from speaking its collective and disparate mind without fear of intimidation and harassment, will slowly become another casualty of what should have been a glorious moment in a proud struggle history.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.