Malegapuru Makgoba is quite right when he says that universities have tended to lag behind since 1994 “instead of actually driving societal transformation” (“An African vision for mergers”, May 2).
As a result, he says, “fear, rather than a rational embrace of opportunity, came to dominate the response of the sector”. He is also right when he suggests that “one of our partners in higher education is the national government” and that we have been “fixated” in the past with traditional notions of institutional autonomy. But, and I am sure Professor Makgoba will agree, the autonomy of the individual researcher to formulate, implement and disseminate their research remains crucial to the academic project. This individual autonomy has not always existed in South African universities and we need to be constantly on our guard against manipulation by powerful interest groups. Let me illustrate.
In 1959 the Pneumoconiosis Research Unit (PRU) at the University of the Witwatersrand established the link between asbestos and cancer. The results of this “discovery” — the disease is called mesothelioma — were published in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine in 1961. Sadly this crucial scientific advance was suppressed by the asbestos industry and the researchers were silenced so effectively that it is only now that the several thousand people who have become ill as a result of exposure to asbestos dust and fibres in South Africa are winning compensation.
The story of South Africa’s asbestos miners and their legal battles with the mining companies has been told in Jock McCulloch’s recently published book, Asbestos Blues. Equally dramatic is McCulloch’s account of how mining capital “captured” the PRU after it discovered mesothelioma. It is an account the unit’s successor took to heart when he was appointed director of the National Centre of Occupational Health; if social research on health and safety in the mining industry is to be true to its mission then researchers have to be independent of powerful interest groups.
The autonomy of the researcher is something we prize at the Sociology of Work Unit. In the 1980s there were certain elements in the mining industry who were uncomfortable with our research findings on the pending HIV/Aids epidemic and tried to censor the research. Our commitment is to a reflexive and critical social research, not one that subordinates itself to powerful interest groups. We reject an instrumental approach to knowledge.
The impact of our research, and how it is used, is a subject that has always concerned our unit. We are centrally concerned with academic research and publication in peer review publications. But for us there have always been three other goals: to disseminate our findings through teaching, to contribute to solving some of South Africa’s problems through engaging critically with a range of interested parties around policy issues, and to produce a new generation of social researchers through our mentoring programme.
To balance these multiple goals has always been a rewarding, if difficult, task. A question I have been asking myself lately is whether the restructuring of the higher education system has assisted us in reaching these goals. At one level restructuring has introduced a welcome sense of the need to be accountable for your performance. Many managers and academics now do a full day’s work and the protected worlds we inherited from apartheid are slowly being eroded.
However, on another level, restructuring is producing what Richard Sennett calls “chameleon values”. Here educational values are jettisoned as swiftly as a change of clothing, and long-term commitments dissolve into short-term financial gain. Lucrative opportunities for consultancy work in the post -apartheid state and business have, to use the words of Sennett again, led to “the erosion of those qualities of character, like loyalty, commitment, purpose and resolution, which are long term in nature” (The Corrosion of Character).
There is a danger that in our eagerness to “change our clothing” we forget the “core business” of the higher education system, which is to build the capacity of our students and produce knowledge. It takes decades to build an effective research entity or teaching department and decay can happen very quickly. My advice to policy makers and “knowledge managers” in our higher education institutions is to take the long view. It is important that we begin to “benchmark” ourselves against the best in the world but, if we are to achieve this goal, then we need to bring capacity development to the foreground and provide incentives for those who do.
This is not as simple as it sounds. To concentrate on the long-term goal of capacity building may cut across the need for individual scholars to build their own research profile. This tension between short- and long-term goals or individual and collective goals has been exacerbated by the introduction of the National Research Foundation’s system of individual rating for the social sciences in 2002. While there are positive benefits to such a system, especially the opportunity of self-assessment and peer feedback, there is a danger that researchers become narrowly preoccupied with the singular goal of attempting to publish in what are seen as the leading international journals. Unless carefully managed, this could lead to a neglect of the other three goals we have identified.
Importantly, it could also lead to a decline in local journals as scholars target an “international” audience. It is vital that we globalise our research. But the challenge we face is a multiple one; unless our research is embedded in the “local” we will be forever chasing an elusive “global” agenda.
Eddie Webster is a professor of sociology and director of the Sociology of Work Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand