John Higgins, The Mail &
Academic debates can often be confusing for the general
reader, and this is the case with some the arguments around academic freedom
taken up in Suren Pillay’s recent Mail & Guardian article: “Decolonising
the humanities” (Getting Ahead, April 5).
I say confusing because a number of people have asked me
what exactly is in dispute between the two of us, when we both appear to
respect and support Edward W Said’s work, including his work on academic
freedom.
It’s a good question, and this article attempts to explain
just what it is in our current context that so often distorts thinking on
questions of and around academic freedom, acting like some black hole in
intellectual life, which, invisible in itself, distorts the space around it.
Just why is Pillay’s article torn between his evident desire
to stand alongside Said in his robust defence of academic freedom, but at the
same time so eager to denigrate anyone like myself who seeks to remind us of
Said’s arguments in South Africa?
What is it that generates the need to characterise any
concern with the integrity of the institutional fabric of academic life — in
the strikingly aggressive and pejorative way that Pillay does — as “pushing the
panic button of academic freedom”?
For the intellectual historian, this aggression comes as no
surprise. The whole complex history of academic freedom is testimony to the
ways in which it is always an inconvenient ideal, one that it is easier and
more comfortable to support in theory than it is to observe in actual practice.
Although societies generally know at some level that they
benefit from free and open-ended enquiry, at the same time they often fear it.
The fear is that the capacity for reflective thought and criticism developed by
university education might be turned against state interests and ideologies.
This was the case with Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on
historians and sociologists in Great Britain. This is — as the Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) has emphasised time
and time again — a deep-seated problem in Africa.
As the lead editorial of a recent special issue of the
Journal of Higher Education in Africa devoted to questions of academic freedom
puts it, centralising policy initiatives and the bureaucratic mode of operation
they impose “eventually erode the notions of academic freedom and institutional
autonomy” and “systematicsurveillance, intimidation and partisan appointment of
officials tend to turn self-censorship, submission, conformity and consent into
rules of survival”.
Is South Africa an exception to such pressures on academic
freedom and autonomy?
Pillay seeks to persuade us that we should not even raise
the question. If it is raised, he urges us, it should be written off in advance
as an example of “pushing the panic button of academic freedom”.
Nonetheless, in a reflective, democratic and participatory
society of the kind we are trying to build in South Africa, all citizens have
the right, and perhaps even the duty, to ask such questions, whatever
discomfort these may arouse.
So, let’s ask the question Pillay wishes to prohibit.
Are there any grounds for concern regarding issues of
academic freedom and the substance of institutional autonomy in South Africa
today?
The Council on Higher Education — the statutory body charged
with monitoring and evaluating the higher education system as a whole, and
advising the minister of higher education accordingly — certainly thought so
when it published its deeply considered report on academic freedom in 2008.
Here the council concluded that it was essential to
recognise “government’s right to and responsibility to lead system-level
change”, but it was equally essential to reject the view that “government has
the only authoritative grasp of what is required of higher education”.
Given the inevitable tensions, the council advised the need
for a “constant alertness to the implications of policy and implementation for
academic freedom, institutional autonomy and accountability” and suggested that
the council needed to play a central role in monitoring “potential violations”.
Wise and considered words, these.
Has the policy and implementation landscape perhaps changed
since then in such a way that a “constant alertness” to academic freedom issues
should fall away and be dismissed with the contempt Pillay insists such
alertness deserves?
Recent experience and legislation suggests that this is far
from being the case. Since 2008, the council has itself suffered a massive loss
of credibility with regard to its own monitoring role through its withdrawal,
in December 2010, of its audit report on the University of KwaZulu-Natal
(UKZN), under pressure from its vice-chancellor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba.
At the centre of the contested report was, tellingly, the
question of academic freedom. According to the account offered by Martin Hall,
the chairperson of the audit committee, the report suggested that “one of
UKZN’s greatest transformative challenges is to rise above the ingrained,
destructive tendencies that are stifling debate and to create a new culture of
participative and democratic debate that supports academic freedom in its
broader sense”.
It urged that, “rather than taking disciplinary action
against staff complaining of violations of academic freedom, UKZN’s council and
executive management should take a conciliatory approach”.
Instead, the report itself was suppressed.
More recently still, the promulgation of the Higher
Education and Training Laws Amendment Act of 2012 raises a number of issues
that Pillay’s argument would similarly prefer us to ignore.
Ihron Rensburg, vice-chancellor at the University of
Johannesburg, has written that the new legislation “undermines the careful
balance struck between university autonomy and public accountability crafted by
the Constitution and the initial Higher Education Act”. The new Act not only
gives “one individual enormous power over the higher education system” but, he
warns, “also confuses the ‘public’ with the ‘state’ ”.
Similarly, that the Act was developed without following the
routine processes of consultation with stakeholders and interested parties
established since 1994 as a safeguard for academic freedoms is cause for
concern. Neither the statutory Council on Higher Education, which exists
precisely to advise the minister on higher education matters, nor Higher
Education South Africa, which represents all 23 vice-chancellors at South
African universities, were consulted prior to its promulgation.
A particularly sensitive point for Pillay is the
government’s “charter for the humanities” initiative and he is clear that this
— as “one very important project to undo our inheritance” — is not open to
interrogation. But given the fact of the recent gazetting of the charter’s
central proposal for the foundation of a national institute for the humanities,
isn’t this precisely what we should be discussing?
For no clarity currently exists — despite repeated requests
for elaboration — as to how the proposed institute will interact with current
provision for research and teaching in the humanities in faculties and
departments across the country.
Already the danger is clear enough that a centralised body
of the kind proposed appears to be able to sidestep the complex but transparent
regulatory structures governing the disbursement of public money available for
teaching and research in the humanities.
Many people are concerned that the proposed institute may
all too easily be open to charges of establishing an unregulated system of
centralised patronage of just the kind feared by Codesria as one that
encourages and enforces an academic culture of submission, conformity and
self-censorship.
Is this what the charter initiative amounts to? It’s not
encouraging that, to date, there have been no answers to any of the detailed
queries and questions raised in response to the charter’s call for public
comment in 2012.
In 2013, it is positively discouraging to be told that we
shouldn’t raise such questions anyway, because doing so means running the risk
of being “held in more and more suspicion by our political elite”.
But without asking questions of this prohibited kind it is
impossible to get any answers, or to gain the clarity necessary for reasonable
evaluation, assessment and discussion.
Without this kind of discussion, we may well stand in danger
of recolonising the South African humanities from within in precisely the ways
that Said warned us against.
