Ken Hughes
Crossfire
I have known the anthropologist Caroline White for almost two decades. I can understand the attitude expressed toward White by Brenda Gourley (“The University of Natal has nothing to hide”, March 9 to 15). As I said to a friend the other day “95% of the time I love Caroline, and the remaining 5% of the time she irritates the hell out of me”. Why do I love White? Well, it is important to realise that she always throws herself into everything with total passion. (There are no shades of grey with Dr Caroline White!) And if she is often too vehement, there is a flip side to her confrontational style: in her quest for justice White is absolutely fearless. So, if she has on a few occasions attacked purely imaginary injustices and sometimes, as on the right of Connor Cruise O’Brien to speak at the University of Cape Town, been completely wrong, this is altogether outshone by the fact that she has been the first and sometimes the only person to speak out against a real and palpable injustice.
One example will suffice: in the aftermath of the Connor Cruise O’Brien affair I was faced with an angry mob of students, who wanted to lynch me, after a German student had urged them to “confront the fascist Hughes”. It is to White’s eternal credit that she alone was ready to stand with me, talking to, and calming down, a vast and seething horde.
It was Voltaire who famously said: “Sir, I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it,” a position which I, as a liberal, would share with White. Professor Gourley unfortunately is something else and where she locates herself with regard to the terrifying mob of the intolerant is not clear. What is clear is that she is very confused on the subject of academic freedom and her denial that academic freedom has been violated in White’s case cuts no ice.
Confusion about academic freedom is unfortunately all too common nowadays, but if one had to put it in one word that word would be “tenure”. Tenure alone safeguards the two principal values of academic freedom: maintaining the integrity of scientific research, and the democratic ideal of the community of scholars. We give academics tenure because we want them to be fearless in attacking inherited error, and we also want them to be fearless in criticising their colleagues. Consequently the question to be asked in the White case is simply whether or not she has been fired. She has? Then academic freedom has been violated. But, you ask, there must surely be dismissable offences that are consistent with academic freedom? The answer is yes. For example, common crimes that can be tried in court, and a few other, specifically academic crimes: plagiarism, fraudulent manipulation of data and unethical experiments on humans.
Did White assault anyone? Did she fake her fieldwork? No. The best Natal could come up with is that she managed to rile some of her colleagues and students and sent out e-mails bringing the university into disrepute by complaining about her year-long suspension. White’s e-mails must have reached a few hundred people. It is Professor Gourley and her committees that delivered the knockout blow by abolishing her tenure and so dragged Natal’s name through the mud.
And what are the overall consequences? Firstly, at Natal anthropology as a discipline is virtually dead. Secondly, there is a distinct chill in the air when it comes to academic debate. If so feisty a fighter is felled, who is going to stick their neck out? Thirdly, there is a loss to Natal’s and the country’s reputation. Are brilliant foreign scholars likely to want to come here if we can’t offer them even minimum guarantees of freedom of speech? Fourthly, liberal democracy is a weakly rooted plant in the new South Africa. If it doesn’t find a home in our universities, where else can we expect it to flourish? The threat to academic freedom came in the past from the state: today it comes from within. This is not something one can blame on the government.
Finally, we have lost the presence of a distinguished academic, who while she was here continually (if sometimes annoyingly) challenged us and whose only fault (if it is a fault) is a fierce passion for justice.
Dr Ken Hughes is senior lecturer in the mathematics department at UCT