With the HIV/Aids pandemic on the increase, the university’s dismissal of the head of its Population Research Unit has raised questions about where its priorities lie
David Macfarlane
Try to make sense of this scenario. A liberal university is situated at the heart of one of South Africa’s highest HIV infection rate regions.
One of its most eminent academics heads its Population Research Unit (PRU), which is conducting ground-breaking research into the spread of the HIV/Aids pandemic in the area. This research will make specific recommendations that, if implemented, will slow the spread of HIV/Aids in the region.
So the university summarily dismisses the head of the PRU on a disciplinary technicality, declares that it now doesn’t have the expertise to keep the unit operating, and shuts it down. Makes sense?
Rhodes University in Grahamstown vehemently says yes. Sacked PRU director Dr Robert Shell vehemently says no.
South Africa and an increasingly incredulous international academic community looks on dismayed as another liberal university appears to have botched what should have been a low-key internal disciplinary matter and is now a national and international scandal.
Following the University of Natal’s controversial dismissal last year of Professor Caroline White, the Rhodes/Shell affair raises similar concerns: centrally, what happens to intellectual debate and dissent (“academic freedom”, in other words) as universities adopt increasingly authoritarian managerial styles aimed at achieving lean and mean academic machines run on corporate principles?
But the Rhodes/Shell ramifications go further. When a university is willing to stall and even smash its own research into a pandemic that could threaten its own survival by decimating its student enrolments, where do its priorities lie?
A senior lecturer in history and the director of the PRU at Rhodes’s East London campus, Shell was dismissed in February this year “for repeatedly making malicious and unfounded allegations against the university and various people within and outside the institution”, says Rhodes vice-chancellor David Woods.
These allegations derive from April 1999, when Shell co-authored a report commissioned by Rhodes’s East London campus on retrenchment and appointment practices there.
Two years of escalating and increasingly intransigent conflict have followed, in which every apparent fact has been subjected to claim and counter-claim, allegation and counter-allegation.
Even the origins of the 1999 report are in dispute. Woods casts doubt on its status by saying it “purports to be a report of an authorised sub-committee of the Board of Studies of the Rhodes University East London Campus”; Shell counters smartly by producing chapter and verse from Board of Studies minutes of a meeting held on “Thursday 6 August 1998 at 14h00 in Seminar 1; Paragraph 98.04.09”.
At any rate, the report suggests that irregularity and even nepotism governed the appointments of certain white staff and this at a time when certain black staff were retrenched. In the new South Africa, with all universities frantically pledging their allegiance to principles of racial non-discrimination, this report is bad PR. Woods appoints two heavyweight Rhodes professors to “investigate” the report.
No, to “whitewash” it, says Shell.
The investigation finds evidence to support some of the report’s charges and disputes others. In October 1999, six months after the original report, following what Shell calls “exhaustive and expensive negotiations”, a deal is struck. Shell will publicly apologise for aspects of the report; Rhodes will support Shell in repairing damaged relations between himself and the East London campus. Relief all round.
It’s short-lived. Shell discovers that he is being professionally and personally maligned, via phone calls, letters and e-mails, apparently from inveterate enemies at East London who continue to smart at his multiple charges of serious maladministration there. And the stakes rise exponentially overnight when murky allegations against Shell are made to the National Research Foundation (NRF) which funds the PRU, then carrying out the ground-breaking study of the extent of HIV/Aids in Grahamstown.
The NRF grant to the unit is the most prestigious of its awards one of only 17 of its kind countrywide, and held in perpetuity subject to a successful international peer evaluation every fourth year. But it is now 2000, the unit’s fourth year of funding and at this critical period for the unit’s future its director, Shell, is under renewed attack.
And he begins to suspect that his alarming research on the spread of HIV/Aids in Grahamstown is now being targeted as well. Does the university want wide publicity for research that could well deter students from enrolling there, he wonders. Nearly two-thirds of students come from outside the Eastern Cape: will they be scared off by his research findings?
The gloves are now thoroughly off; Shell gets legal representation; lawsuits are threatened; so is dismissal. From now on the university was “out to get me”, says Shell.
“At no time was the university ‘out to get’ Dr Shell and wherever possible assisted him in his academic endeavours,” counters Woods. “Rhodes was eager for the Population Research Unit to be a success.” He says that it is “quite untrue” that Rhodes wanted to suppress Shell’s research. Also, “at no stage [had] the university tried to previously dismiss Dr Shell. There is no evidence or record of Rhodes making formal allegations against Dr Shell at any previous time.”
Not so, says Shell, at least one incident every month demonstrated the university’s determination to oust him. For example, the university initiated disciplinary action against him for allegedly missing an orientation lecture at the start of the 2000 academic year. The action floundered when bemused students who’d attended the lecture apprised Rhodes of Shell’s presence.
But, says Shell, Rhodes’s serial obstructions to the successful functioning of the PRU, and so of the Grahamstown HIV/Aids study, continued. In particular, he says, Rhodes administration made disbursements from NRF funds as difficult as possible leading, for example, to Shell’s research assistants, interns and students going unpaid from October last year.
Shell engaged repeatedly with Rhodes on what he saw as its obstructive treatment of the PRU. And then, while on sabbatical at Princeton University late last year, he repeated his main complaints in an e-mail to the NRF.
Rhodes University pounced. It instituted disciplinary procedures against Shell. “It is particularly important to note,” says Woods, “that Dr Shell repeated [in the NRF e-mail] the allegations [about nepotism] that he had previously retracted and for which he had unreservedly apologised … The argument that the e-mail was confidential does not affect the issue. Publication to one person alone is enough to constitute publication in the legal sense.”
Rhodes suspended Shell in December, and summarily dismissed him on February 9 this year; Shell has served notice of his intention to appeal.
“It is beyond my comprehension that Rhodes would dismiss a scholar of [Shell’s] energy, reputation and passion, especially in the midst of a gathering catastrophe [HIV/Aids] on which he is an expert and a prophetic voice,” says distinguished historian Professor Richard Elphick of Wesleyan University in the United States.
“[T]he penalty appears grossly disproportionate to [Shell’s] alleged misdeeds,” Elphick suggests, in only one of multiple expressions of support for Shell, and bewilderment at his fate, from academics around South Africa and the globe.
The PRU has been closed. The futures of Shell’s former research students are uncertain, as is the fate of the Grahamstown HIV/Aids study.
Meanwhile, HIV infection rates rise … and rise.