/ 24 September 2010

Quiet please, academics advancing

Quiet Please

In a field at the edge of the Stellenbosch campus, a torch may have been lit for this country, and perhaps the continent.

In a building that draws inspiration from the surrounding Jonkershoek mountains, academics from all over the world are invited to fulfil their true calling — to read, to think, to write and to talk.

The name on the gate on busy Marais Street says Stias — Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. In some quarters, this will ring an alarm, rather than a bell of recognition, because Stias doesn’t have strong brand recognition … well, not yet!

So let’s be clear about something. Although “advanced” study doesn’t readily seem to fit the training guide for university leadership, the idea has been cunningly used to silence dissidence. Urban campus legend has it that a northern university based in South Africa established a similar institute as a dumping ground for difficult and disgruntled professors.

But Stias ambitiously reaches towards the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton or, more modestly, towards Berlin’s Wissenschafts-kolleg, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study or the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

This serious intent can be read off the building that fronts on Marais Street and in the way it operates. Money for the building was donated by a Swedish foundation and the structure itself is called eponymously by the donor’s name, Wallenberg.

It houses two separate, but inter-linked, professional functions. The first is a conference centre that, for almost each of the nearly 30 days I’ve been here (weekends included), has been packed with conferees deliberating on almost everything from astronomy to zoology — and other things besides. In 2009 almost 18 000 people used these facilities — that’s 1 460 a month, or about 70 a day on average. This, the public face of intellectual life, generates (on the latest available figures) sufficient resources to keep the other — more bookish — enterprise on its financial feet.

‘Exploring the life of their minds’
To reach this inner world you are required to leave the busy conference talk and teatime banter through a glass door and arrive in the kind of silence that encourages deep reading, calls forth systematic thought, and begets sustained writing.

In this quiet place scholars are exploring the life of their own (and other) minds — to deliberately twist the title of Hannah Arendt’s posthumous book.

The Stias research programme is built around resident fellowships: either individually or on the basis of a group proposal, academics are invited to become Stias Fellows. Once here, they’re left alone, or in their groups, to work as academics are wont — quietly following an idea or a footnote until one (or both) are exhausted.

This exploration reaches into the heart of Stellenbosch University as Stias Fellows interact with colleagues from the campus and they draw from the flame that flickers on Marais Street.

Those who have enjoyed resident fellowships include this country’s best minds — Neville Alexander, Johann Lutjeharms, Njabulo Ndebele, Charles van Onselen, to name just four; and international luminaries such as Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and 1999 Nobel Laureates Gerard ‘t Hooft (Physics 1999) and the South African-born Sydney Brenner (Physiology or Medicine 2002).

So far there are 130 Stias Fellows whose stake in the institute’s success doesn’t end when they leave its monastic silence. As alumni they serve on the Stias governance structures by electing to the management board of this section 21 company one of their own.

The listing of the fellows is an interesting mix of the sciences — the hard and the human: in Stias they occupy adjacent offices without the divisive pressures that, in the grind of the everyday academy, pit one stream of CP Snow’s increasingly threadbare analytical divide against the other.

Indeed, at Stias all divides are crossed in a routine that reaches back to the earliest understandings of how it is that we know — confirmation.

Table talk
Daily, Stias fellows are required to take lunch together. It is certainly so that the fare is delicious and, unsurprisingly, its culinary reputation has travelled some distance beyond Stias — providing a gag for Stellenbosch literati: the name Stias stands for Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Salads.

But what counts is the lunchtime talk. Often this is fast repartee; sometimes, a no-hold-barred analysis of the day’s news; periodically, an intellectual breakthrough is tested; but chiefly ideas from different disciplines are merged, mingled and mixed. So, Stias is an enclave for research; an incubator of ideas; a place to hold cross-disciplinary conversations.

If these advantages are obvious to most in academic life, what is not perhaps too clear is the spirit of Stias. To discover this, look beyond the field to a Cape Victorian farmhouse on the Mostertsdrift property, which was first registered in 1693. With the Wallenberg Research Centre, the farmhouse and its outbuildings (which host the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and the National Institute for Theoretical Physics) are a kind of micro-campus devoted to free inquiry.

The emphasis here must fall on the adjective “free” — not in the hostile way it is understood in banking talk but in the understanding that only free talk can deliver the rationality sought by Enlightenment values.

And this spirit, curiously, is where Stias offers not only the academy, but also this entire continent a hope that is still to be stated. Periodically, called to Stias fellowship are the opposite of academic types — those practitioners of EM Forster’s famous image of telegrams and anger.

They are called to the silence of Stias to reflect, and perhaps write, on their own experience of how the busy world of practice is distilled, as Keynes so famously told, from the scribbles of academics. History suggests that in crossing between the theoretical and the practical, great breakthroughs in human affairs can occur — if, and this is crucial, free space to think and talk is provided.

South Africa knows this, of course. Twenty-one years ago this very month, the late Frederik van Zyl Slabbert enjoyed a visiting fellowship at All Soul’s College, Oxford — a place of “advanced studies” before the brand name was invented.

In the months that followed, the cosseted atmosphere of All Souls witnessed some of the most memorable conversations on the path to the new South Africa as the redoubtable Slabbert networked with both the governing National Party and the exiled ANC.

On a continent, and in a country, crying out for both ideas and practical ways out of the technology and management speak that has all but killed the spirit of free exchange, dare we hope that Stias might one day be called upon to play a similar role?

Peter Vale is faculty professor of the humanities-designate at the University of Johannesburg and a fellow of Stias