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From: Innocent Chukwuma <chukwuma@cleen.org>
Date: November 6, 2013, 11:06:24 AM CST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [FOIcoalition] Debate on Academic Freedom in South Africa
Reply-To: <FOIcoalition@yahoogroups.com>
This is an edited extract from novelist and academic JM Coetzee's
foreword to University of Cape Town fellow Professor John Higgins's
new book, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa, published
this month by Wits University Press
Dear John,
Thank you for letting me see your essays on academic freedom in South
Africa. The general question you address - "Is a university still a
university when it loses its academic autonomy?" - seems to me of the
utmost importance to the future of higher education in South Africa.
Hardly less important is the junior cousin of that question, namely:
"Is a university without a proper faculty of humanities (or faculty of
humanities and social sciences) still a university?"
As you point out, the policy on academic autonomy followed by the ANC
government is troublingly close to the policy followed by the old
National Party government: universities may retain their autonomy as
long as the terms of their autonomy can be defined by the state.
The National Party had a conception of the state, and the role played
by education within the state, to which such tenets of British liberal
faith as academic freedom were simply alien. The indifference of the
ANC to academic freedom has less of a philosophical basis, and may
simply come out of a defensive reluctance to sanction sites of power
over which it has no control.
But South African universities are by no means in a unique position.
All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty
to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere
managers of national economies, universities have been coming under
pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young
people with the skills required by a modern economy.
You argue - cogently - that allowing the transient needs of the
economy to define the goals of higher education is a misguided and
shortsighted policy: indispensable to a democratic society - indeed,
to a vigorous national economy - is a critically literate citizenry
competent to explore and interrogate the assumptions behind the
paradigms of national and economic life reigning at any given moment.
Without the ability to reflect on ourselves, you argue, we run a
perennial risk of relaxing into complacent stasis. And only the
neglected humanities can provide a training in such critical literacy.
I hope that your book will be high on the reading list of those
politicians busy reshaping higher education in the light of national
priorities, as well as of those university administrators to whom the
traditional humanities have become alien ground. I hope that, having
read and digested what you have to say, those politicians and
administrators will undergo a change of heart. But alas, I do not
believe that your hopes and mine have much chance of being realised.
There are two main reasons for my pessimism. The first is that you
somewhat underestimate, in my opinion, the ideological force driving
the assault on the independence of universities in the (broadly
conceived) West. This assault commenced in the 1980s as a reaction to
what universities were doing in the 1960s and 1970s, namely,
encouraging masses of young people in the view that there was
something badly wrong with the way the world was being run and
supplying them with the intellectual fodder for a critique of Western
civilisation as a whole.
The campaign to rid the academy of what was variously diagnosed as a
leftist or anarchist or anti-rational or anti-civilisational malaise
has continued without let-up for decades, and has succeeded to such an
extent that to conceive of universities any more as seedbeds of
agitation and dissent would be laughable.
The response of the political class to the university's claim to a
special status in relation to the polity has been crude but effectual:
if the university, which, when the chips are down, is simply one among
many players competing for public funds, really believes in the lofty
ideals it proclaims, then it must show it is prepared to starve for
its beliefs. I know of no case in which a university has taken up the
challenge.
The fact is that the record of universities, over the past 30 years,
in defending themselves against pressure from the state has not been a
proud one. Resistance was weak and ill organised; routed, the
professors beat a retreat to their dugouts, from where they have done
little besides launching the intermittent satirical barb against the
managerial newspeak they are perforce having to acquire.
This leads me to the second reason why I fail to share your optimistic
faith that the tide may yet be turned. A certain phase in the history
of the university, a phase taking its inspiration from the German
Romantic revival of humanism, is now, I believe, pretty much at its
end. It has come to an end not just because the neoliberal enemies of
the university have succeeded in their aims, but because there are too
few people left who really believe in the humanities and in the
university built on humanistic grounds, with philosophical, historical
and philological studies as its pillars.
You argue that only the faculties of humanities are equipped to teach
students the critical literacy that allows a culture to continually
renew itself. But I envisage a telling question will be asked of you:
even if we grant that critical literacy is as important as you claim,
do students really need to know about Hesiod and Petrarch, about
Francis Bacon and Jean-Paul Sartre, about the Boxer Rebellion and the
Thirty Years War, to attain a sufficient competence in such literacy?
Can you not simply design a pair of one-semester courses - courses in
which all undergraduates, no matter what their career track, will be
required to enrol - one course to be entitled "Reading and Writing",
in which students will be trained to dissect arguments and write good
expository prose; and the other to be entitled "Great Ideas", in which
they will be briefed on the main currents of world thought from
Ancient Egypt to the present? A pair of courses like that will not
require an entire faculty of humanities behind them, merely a school
of critical literacy staffed with bright young instructors.
Basic courses in cultural literacy are not a new idea. They have been
mounted at countless American universities under the rubric of
"Freshman Composition". These universities have been responding to
precisely the same pressure that the humanities in South Africa now
feel.
There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education
will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition
of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus
of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me
hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical
literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the
skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?
I could not be more strongly on your side in your defence of the
humanities and of the university as the home of free enquiry. I
respect your basic approach, which, as I see it, is to mount a
strategic defence of academic freedom, the kind of defence that stands
a chance of swaying the relevant decision-makers, as opposed to a
quixotic defence that can be easily brushed aside.
But in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will
have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good
in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue
unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in
ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the
individual and good for society.
In institutions of higher learning in Poland, in the bad old days, if
on ideological grounds you were not permitted to teach real
philosophy, you let it be known that you would be running a philosophy
seminar in your living room, outside office hours, outside the
institution. In that way the study of philosophy was kept alive. It
may be something along the same lines will be needed to keep
humanistic studies alive in a world in which universities have
redefined themselves out of existence.
Best regards
John Coetzee
--
____________________
In African democracies there is freedom of speech but what may not be
guaranteed is freedom after the speech - anonymous.
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