David Macfarlane
Rhodes University has delivered a further blow to hopes of dealing with the HIV/Aids pandemic in its region by slapping a high court injunction on dismissed academic Dr Robert Shell to return computer equipment, without which Shell’s research will cease.
“Any outcome that has the effect of closing down [Shell’s] research and silencing him will be tragically destructive,” says Ann O’Leary, a scientist in the division of HIV/Aids prevention at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States.
Shell’s work as head of Rhodes’s Population Research Unit on the spread of HIV/Aids in the Grahamstown area was in its fourth year when the university dismissed him on a disciplinary charge in February and shut down the unit. His appeal against his dismissal failed last month. Academics in South Africa and abroad continue to express astonishment and anger at this outcome.
O’Leary was one of four CDC scientists who visited the Eastern Cape in January and investigated Shell’s research. She says his work “begins with analyses of surveillance data in the Eastern Cape, which yield epidemiologic information and mathematical modelling of the [HIV/Aids] epidemic into the future.”
He then describes the many factors fuelling the epidemic, and “goes beyond that to making sound policy recommendations which, if implemented, could greatly slow the spread of the disease”, she says.
Impressed by Shell’s work, the CDC scientists submitted a proposal to the US’s National Institutes of Health to do a school-based intervention project, focusing on sexual abstinence, condom use, rape and gender relations in the Eastern Cape’s Mdantsane area “the rape capital of South Africa, if not the world”, says Shell.
This project is now under way, with the backing of the National Institutes of Health, the CDC and the University of Pennsylvania, which has retained Shell as a consultant to the project.
Shell had been the recipient of a prestigious National Research Foundation (NRF) grant that funded Shell’s research assistants at Rhodes and the equipment that Rhodes has demanded he return.
Following his dismissal, Shell offered to purchase the computers or, failing that, requested a further 18 months’ use of the equipment to wind up the study. On both counts, “Rhodes turned me down flat,” he says.
“This is sadistic and inhuman,” charges Shell. “Rhodes is making me pay at every step.” He says Rhodes’s entirely unnecessary use of expensive legal representation for his disciplinary and appeal hearings in turn landed him with legal costs he can ill-afford. “It is unprecedented to use advocates in a disciplinary hearing,” he says.
Rhodes has twice declined to tell the Mail & Guardian how much it spent on legal and other fees in order to get rid of Shell.
Rhodes is refusing to pay monies it owes Shell in salary until he returns the NRF-funded computers and other equipment.
Shell is now in dire financial straits, and hopes to establish a fund that will enable him to complete the Grahamstown HIV/Aids study.