Peter Vale
This is not the kind of writing for which academics have been prepared. And yet, there are times when silence is simply impossible; when even the stoic finds it difficult to be thoughtful, reflective, considered. This is such an occasion and, quite frankly, as a professional I can no longer be silent about the decision taken to fragment the Jan Smuts House Library of International Relations.
It is not that I dont recognise that the times have cultured an ideology which measures achievement only by the width of the bottom line; or that I dont see that specialist libraries are devilishly expensive and, quite frankly, very elitist. Or that I have failed to grasp that the information revolution of the late-20th century is primarily electronic.
No, its just that what has happened has been done with so little real understanding, so little debate, so little of the vision thing.
Consider this line of reasoning. This is a time when the word globalisation is on every political and business lip; this is a country, isolated from the world for 30 years, which miraculously knows that it has something to offer the next century. And yet the only focused information on a globalising world and South Africas place in it, is to be scattered around the Wits campus.
Doubtless these reasons will be considered too emotional for those who have taken this step, so lets weigh their decision against some alternative options. Suggestions that costs of running the library should be recovered by charging users a minimal membership fee have as far as we can tell been disregarded. Hints that, perhaps, assistance for the library may be forthcoming from the foundation or the donor community have, we must now presume, been ignored. Efforts at developing a strategy to market the library and its services to the military, departments of state and other universities each woefully in need of expertise in this field have been discouraged.
This prompts these questions. Did those who took the decision know that in the 1980s the two Bothas, PW and Pik, effectively destroyed the only comparable library in the Department of Foreign Affairs because they believed they needed a conference centre? Did they ask themselves why almost every department of state and every province has appointed a separate sector which deals with international relations? Did they check student enrollments in courses which touch on international politics?
So here is a rub: the skilled professionals who have run and built the Jan Smuts library have published more books bibliographies and the like, to be sure than any other corpus of international relations scholarship in the countrys history. But there is more than simply double standards here.
Without the Jan Smuts House Library, the capacity to attract the best minds in the field to this country will flounder. Here the point is prosaic: the gilded lily which the new South Africa presents to international scholarship is on the wane. Experience suggests that leading academic figures in international and political affairs will only be attracted to do research in as opposed to on a country which has strong and effectively-managed library holdings.
Did those who made this decision know that the United States had given Nigeria a library of international relations as an independence gift? I visited it some years ago and saw both among that countrys scholars and on the librarys shelves some of what I fear now faces us faltering foreign policy options almost in direct proportion to the ending of journal runs.
Both my mandate and my legitimacy have been eroded by this decision: and I know that I write these words on behalf of scholars both in South Africa and beyond these borders. I fear, too, that I write them for generations of students to come.
But lets be clear about this it is not academics who switched off the light: it was those who thought that scholarship had nothing to offer in this field that have helped pull the plug on South Africas contribution to the approaching millennium.
Peter Vale is professor of Southern African studies at the University of the Western Cape