Review of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa - by Salim Vally
When former Minister Kader Asmal described the landscape of higher education in 1999 as one which was “largely dictated by the geo-political imagination of apartheid planners” many academics and students eagerly anticipated a new imagination upon which the academy would be reconfigured, one which would even inspire a continental renewal. Today, on the back of ongoing technocratic reform and the impact of corporate globalisation, changes are best described as desultory and ordinary. South Africa has not escaped the debasement of higher education, a process which recasts public space as a commodified sphere, with students as consumers and staff as sales consultants.
Seasoned academics and student activists now highlight the rapid moves to make universities into “assembly lines for production” and “lean but very mean” institutions. Decades ago, Ernest Mandel referred to the danger of Fachidiotismus or ‘Professional Cretinism’ this has now at the behest of the accountants of education given way to organised incompetence. Observers of higher education planning in South Africa over the past decade, despite numerous White Papers, Commissions and Committees should be forgiven their bewilderment. Higher education policy has failed, often on its own terms, as bureaucrats renege on the lofty ideals of numerous discussion papers and scramble to reconfigure the landscape-now suggesting a cap on student numbers, then revising this, then suggesting a “differentiated” university system.
In the interim, a “death sentence” is passed on most historically black institutions, and as the late Charlton Koen, Mlungisi Cele and Ariel Libhaber have shown, a quarter of students leave higher education annually and courses and whole departments are summarily shut down largely because they are not profitable.
Individual and social agency as well as access to institutions is defined largely through market-driven notions, fiscal parsimony, corporate values and corporate planning frameworks. There exists a rarely questioned and unspoken assumption that the market is an appropriate model for education. Faced with mass unemployment, aligning skills to the competitive global “new knowledge economy” as ASGISA attempts to do has seduced our government and has become the obsession of our national education department. Learning that addresses social responsibility, robust public participation and democratic citizenship is marginalised and ridiculed in favour of a culture of crass commercialisation and managerialism.
This book is partly an attempt to reclaim an independent critical discourse in higher education in order to examine these events. The edited collection of essays written by some of South Africa’s leading intellectuals is skilfully assembled by Richard Pithouse, a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society based at UKZN. The book is South Africa’s contribution to the continental enquiry of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) into the implications of neo-liberalism and how these shape social struggles on the continent.
Many of the essays speak to how the university in South Africa is “transformed”, in the words of a colloquium organised by UNISA’s college of human sciences recently, “from ivory tower to market place”. The corporate model, contrary to the hegemonic discourse, is neither efficient nor effective and most importantly has little to do with sound pedagogical practices. The essays in various ways, call for a defence of higher education as a public good and an autonomous sphere of critical and productive democratic citizenry as well as resistance to the imposition of commercial values to subvert the purpose and mission of our institutions.
The first essay in the book by Andrew Nash analyses the restructuring of South African universities on the basis of class re-alignment in the transition from apartheid to democracy. He argues that we should not assume that a restructured university system will be more coherent than the apartheid one it displaced. Nash also examines the research output of individuals and institutions and believes that, “In a context in which publication in a small number of prestigious journals, based mainly in Britain and the United States, is the measure of success, academics whose research responds to the concrete problems of their own social context will be effectively penalised for doing so”.
The second and third chapters grapple with issues of autonomy. Jonathan Jansen employing the taxonomy formulated by T. B. Davie-who shall teach; what should be taught; how this is done and whom should be taught- succinctly describes nine ways in which the state since 1994 has made significant inroads into institutional autonomy. This loss of autonomy, for Jansen, needs to be contextualised in the new state’s subservience to the diktats of the global economy. Jansen believes a “university ceases to exist” when “the intellectual project no longer defines its identity, infuses its curriculum, energises its scholars, and inspires its students”. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy can only be defended and secured when the intellectual project defines a university’s identity. Universities cease to exist when it “has been transformed into a commercial centre… in which every “management” meeting is consumed with balancing the budget in the light of impending subsidy cuts…the response to external intervention is one of compliance … the accumulation of larger and larger of numbers of accredited publications is pursued with relentless vigour…Just about everyone in such a place is in the business of (ac)counting”.
Roger Southall and Julian Cobbing extend Andre du Toit’s critique of the T. B. Davie formula in a chapter titled, “From Racial Liberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism” by focussing on the threats to academic freedom as internal to universities. These they believe are on the rise in a situation where the university is run like a corporation whose managers “are becoming increasingly intolerant of robust internal dissent”. Southall and Cobbing discuss the dismissal of academics Caroline White and Robert Shell and conclude like other contributors to the book that defences against authoritarianism need to be strengthened and the need to link “academic freedom to public debate concerning alternative and desirable educational and social futures”.
Neville Alexander in his essay on language policy and the democratic responsibility of the post apartheid university concedes that the academy has to be accountable not only to the collegium but also to the constituencies outside. For Alexander though, it is crucial to identify who these constituencies are and whether they can influence the university. Drawing on what Pierre Bourdieu called the “linguistic habitus” and what Ngugi wa Thiong’o described as the “decolonization of the mind”, Alexander focuses on the languages of tuition. An area which Alexander believes is essential to empower the urban rural poor toward radical social transformation- an agenda very different from what corporate globalization is imposing on universities.
Prishani Naidoo examines the failure of the student movement to secure the real autonomy of higher education “as a space beyond the market and the state for the independent production of knowledge”. Naidoo shows how neo-liberalism has “constituted the class” in part by undoing the initial collective ideals of the student movement around free education, curriculum and the student activism. This erosion depended in part on the complicity of the dominant student organization SASCO through ensnaring students into structures of corporate governance within a neo-liberal framework.
Part three of the book is devoted to student and the worker struggles at three universities. Fazel Khan’s fascinating and racy description of events at the University of Durban- Westville from 1995 to 2003 is essential reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the merged University of KwaZulu-Natal today. James Pendlebury and Lucien van der Walt analyse the deleterious effects of restructuring Wits into a “market university’ for support service workers, students from working class backgrounds and a significant section of academic and administrative staff. They show how centralisation of power and cost-centering are linked to an increase in surveillance where collegial governance is replaced by managerialism based on business models. Jonathan Grossman points to continuities with the politics and economics of the restyled World Bank in the way its thinking is translated into the specific attacks on workers at UCT. By examining the effects of and responses to Mamphela Ramphele’s rein as UCT Vice-Chancellor (later a senior manager of the World Bank) Grossman shows how UCT as an intellectual project has become poorer. The question he poses is apposite, “When the textbook Economics 101 package of retrenchment, outsourcing, and marketisation has itself become a sacred cow of the university, not just of the broader society , then what scope are academics leaving for vigorous critical social engagement?”
The final part of the book deals with post-apartheid disciplines. Mahmood Mamdani’s travails in attempting to establish African Studies at UCT has been well documented elsewhere, its inclusion in this book through assists us in questioning curriculum transformation or rather the lack of it, and more importantly as Mamdani points out, who should be making these decisions.
Peter Vale bemoans the fact that the public voice of South Africa’s international relations has been outsourced to “policy entrepreneurs”. He focuses on the South African Institute of International Affairs and the seventh edition of its Yearbook of International Affairs. The latter, a collection “which departs from serious South African scholarship in the humanities” yet no doubt provides institutional succour for numerous initiatives around the “war on terror”. In analysing the Yearbook, Vale irascibly asks, “So as this book speaks of Terror, why is there no mention of South Africa’s own ruinous experience with this idea? As this book speaks of Human Rights, why is there no mention of the 595 prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, where the idea of sovereignty has surely reached a new level of farce?,…As this book speaks of race, why have these pages not turned to Franz Fanon for understanding, if not answers?”. Vale documents how the then national director of the Institute, Greg Mills (now the founder of the Brenthurst Foundation and special advisor to the NATO-led force in Afghanistan) incredibly encouraged the South African government to join the occupation forces in Iraq for the sake of South Africa’s “national interest”.
Shireen Essof directs our attention to ways in which Gender and Women’s Studies in Africa arose through the intellectual endeavours of feminists particularly those that address the gap between the rhetoric of rights and the reality of neo-liberal economic strategies. She lists the contribution of contemporary feminist theory, enriched by experiences in the global South and alert to issues of ‘race’, class, culture, religion and sexuality. Its epistemology has built understandings of the “connections between the local and the global…the micro politics of subjectivity and everyday life and the macro politics of global governance and political economy”. Despite this vitality, Gender and Women’s Studies sites have been under-resourced and understaffed and supported in a lackluster manner for instrumental interests rather than for its intellectual contributions.
While this book does not pretend to be comprehensive, readers would clearly see gaps in the omission of developments at historically black institutions (whether tentatively merged or unmerged), the experiences of black, female and disabled staff at most universities despite formal equity moves, and the struggle for transformation in other disciplines such as the Sciences, Engineering and Architecture as well as those under siege such as the Fine Arts and Social Work. Still, it admirably fulfils the mandate of CAFA’s quest to analyse the root causes and the socio-political implications of the neo-liberal attack on public education in Africa and to build networks of solidarity between academics and students in different parts of the world.
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May 9th, 2008 at 9:44 am
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