Much has been written recently on the threats to academic freedom on our university campuses. Most of this has been concerned with alleged erosions to what is essentially freedom of expression and criticism involving academic staff. More often than not in these discussions academic freedom is seen to reside mainly in free and open discourse.
It can also be seen as the free exchange of ideas against a backdrop of mature collegiality that recognises personal responsibility and informal professional codes of behaviour. Without such self-erected professional controls, free discourse could easily descend ultimately into a Hobbesian war of all against all, where ideas and their authors are not given the respect that is their due and where intellectual exchanges become ”nasty, brutish and short”.
Apart from commonly discussed inimical institutional climates that are seen to discourage or impede through fear and other means, the free and unhindered propagation of new ideas and open responsible criticism, there are other potentially serious threats to academic freedom worthy of mention. Although they have largely escaped the attention of analysts and media reports, these apocalyptic horsemen take the forms of: massification in student access to institutions of higher learning; managerialism in running such institutions; and what I call the ”immiseration” of academic discretionary time for thought. The latter, largely emanating from the combined effects of these former processes, is worthy of our concern if we are serious in our quest to counteract recent declines in academic freedom.
In the first instance the massification of student access to higher education has been a worldwide phenomenon. This is particularly important in South Africa where large portions of the population were excluded during the apartheid era from rightful participation in higher educational institutions.
But this expansion in student numbers has not been achieved without certain apparently intractable costs. The most prominent of these is the more thinly spread human and physical resources that this has resulted in.
For example, in recent years in certain faculties in some universities, staff-to-student ratios have approached unacceptably high levels. In some cases these have approached a level of one staff member for about 60 students (where, by comparison, the United Kingdom’s national average is about one staff member to 18 students) and class sizes are so large in some cases that the capacity of existing ÂÂlecturing venues is found to be ÂÂseriously wanting.
Second, the massification process has significantly contributed to the emergence of managerialism at universities as a response to dealing with increasing student numbers and constraints on resources. By managerialism I mean, as Wikipedia states: ”— the belief that organisations have more similarities than differences, and thus the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and theory”.
In other words, the twin main effects of larger student numbers and constrained resources have led to the upsurge of managerialism — in essence running universities on corporate lines without paying heed to dissimilarities between the two types of organisation. The soul of this difference could be seen to reside in the concept and, until recently at least, the reality of ”collegiality”, a uniquely distinct brother/sisterhood feature of academic life that has been eroded by trying to run universities like any other kind of business in which such professional interconnectedness has no place or utility.
The call of managerial efficiency has taken precedence and has all but destroyed the fragile infrastructure that made universities distinctive. Job descriptions, performance appraisals, managerial procedures and processes have sprung up and flooded the campuses where none were required before. As a general rule, these corporatist manifestations have had a severely debilitating effect on academic morale.
Caught in a pincer movement between the two relentless forces of massification and managerialsm, academic freedom has wilted. The need, on the one hand, to attend to matters of financial and managerial efficiency, while on the other being confronted with the requirement of accommodating increasing student numbers, more teaching, marking and administration, while having fewer resources to fall back on and less time to achieve particular objectives, means that academics are being managerially monitored and controlled as never before.
The outcome on the academic role generated by these forces has been its ”immiseration”. By this I mean the erosion of academics’ discretionary time to think, conceptualise and postulate new ideas and theoretical structures because of managerial imperatives.
In Marx’s use of the term the immiseration process sprang essentially from the recognition that discretionary income is what drives freedom of choice in the market place and erosions in this lead to impoverishment, misery and the requirement to work harder and longer hours simply to make ends meet. Although not of central concern to our argument, this kind of immiseration certainly has a resonance with academics today. After all, the minister of education has gone so far as to acknowledge that academic salaries are ”disgraceful” without, unfortunately, doing much about them. The idea being proffered here is of an ”immiseration” of academics’ discretionary time for freedom to think that clearly has pervasive effects on academic morale and freedom. Without having an acceptable amount of discretionary time that allows academics to pursue their ideas without unnecessary incursions, there can be no academic freedom, whether this be freedom to think or freedom to think critically.
Professor David Coldwell is head of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Management. He writes in a personal capacity