Ages ago as a graduate student doing an advanced course on primate socioecology, I had the opportunity to closely observe the behaviour of lowland gorillas at the National Zoo in Washington DC. Armed with a checklist of behavioural sequences, I spent many wintry afternoons watching intergroup dynamics and contestations of dominance among these great apes.
Much about their postures and performances resonate with the current behaviour of academics in the closing months of the merger between the Universities of Durban-Westville and Natal. From their territorial perches atop lush green hills within eyeshot of each other, the silverbacks of both campuses are beating their chests through a volley of statements, visions, scenarios and draft plans aimed at impressing one another and sending clear signals that their interests will be vigorously defended. In some of their e-mailed ‘facilitatory discussion guidelines”, or whatever turgid terms are strung together on that particular day, you can almost hear the teeth gnashing and the chest-hairs bristling through the computer.
Our leaders are as busy as any threatened species contesting rank and foraging for support. Mostly they have relied upon evolution’s most successful strategy for achieving docility and group cohesion among us primates — that is, mutual grooming and resource sharing. But when these techniques fail to achieve the desired social bonding, sharp and ugly canines are quickly flashed so as to warn a wayward member of the prospect of a lonely life roaming the bush with few resources to attract mates and maintain allies.
And controlling resources is what it’s all about. Many of our silverback academics have half-a-million-rand-a-year feeding strategies to protect. Others, a younger bunch of the newly silvered, see the merger as an opportunity, at last, to push aside the old guard and form their own faithful troop (known in human terms as an empire).
Contestations of power are also contestations of perception. What some perceive as progressive transformation, others view as progressive destruction. Old divisions of race and class have been revived with gusto and spewed about to remind us all that academic excellence and similar concerns are far from being consensual points of departure.
There is a palpable sense that there is much to be gained and much to be lost with the merger, but the problem is that nobody seems to have the slightest clue as to what those things might be. Among ordinary academics there is a strong feeling that our time-consuming deliberations are futile because other committees of ranked silverbacks have long ago mapped the post-merger terrain. Rumours abound of ‘war-rooms” where strategising and scenario-planning go on deep into the night. Suspicion and intrigue are the order of the day.
Still, we feel compelled to call and attend meetings, endless meetings. In some academic circles in this province, as in others, it is customary practice to attend meetings as a way to avoid real work. But at this historic juncture, attending meetings has become a necessary evil. Otherwise you run the risk of finding your discipline appearing in someone’s scenario as part of what looks to you like an academic configuration from hell. You might also find that your offices have been lost to some ‘unit” that is able to pay a handsome rent for space in United States dollars. Pay rent? Yes. Snooze and you lose.
While we never actually reach consensus or draw conclusions at these meetings, they are important in and of themselves because it is here that we learn to be conversant in the new merger-speak. This emerging merger lexicon is a solid example of academics doing what they are known to do best — making simple things sound complicated.
Take the concept of ‘cognate disciplines” for example. Most academics know what this refers to, and most want to see ‘cognate disciplines” together in a new merged institution. But just to add interest and sound more weighty and academic, we’ve created some great metaphrastics for talking about essentially the same thing. We can choose to use the terms ‘fraternal fields” or ‘kindred collaboratives”, or add an element of choice and speak about ‘elective affinities” and ‘conjoint efforts”. The silverbacks are male after all, so we can’t expect to hear about ‘sister syllabi” or some such. My all-time favourite is ‘cogent collectives”; we can’t get more transformatory than that, now can we?
These meetings are places to air apprehensions about ‘hegemonic sibling subjects”, grapple with notions like ‘multi-site delivery” and ‘capacitating the research function”, and discern the differences between disciplinary autonomy and disciplinary integrity and disciplinary independence and disciplinary self-determination…
We expend much vigour and vim not only on conceptualising new terminology, but also on defining, undefining and redefining old terminology whose meaning we once thought we knew. Who among us today would dare to profess any certainty about the meaning of ‘social science”? No way.
We have likewise lost our grip on the definitions of humanities, science and what was known as human science. Let us not even mention terms like faculty, school, college, department, programme, stream, strand or theme. One bright fellow has put together the beginnings of a glossary just so we have a common understanding of what we are talking about. To avoid use of any and all of these terms, we’ve come to rely on the amorphous word ‘entity”. What defines a director or a head or a coordinator is not at all clear. We have yet to understand what constitutes a dean; is it academic or administrative leadership that he/she provides or should provide?
Nonetheless, the confusion and lack of consensus is useful in the current merger frolic. Otherwise, people might make the oddest of assumptions such as nursing actually being a health science or gender studies representing a universal form of human language.
If our merger experience is teaching us anything, it is not to take words or our understanding of other colleagues’ disciplines for granted. Perhaps we have all become tired and cynical with constant restructuring over the past several years, much of which has uncomfortably confirmed the practical wisdom of those old ways of organising tertiary education.
With no common meanings to guide us and a rich tradition of resorting to struggle language as a cover for academic and administrative incompetence, it’s not unimaginable that one day we may find ourselves debating whether a lecturer is someone who necessarily needs to set foot in a lecture theatre.
These are interesting times to be at universities in South Africa. What might sound like precious babble to outsiders is, for the human animals concerned, serious earthly business about subsistence, power, territory and position. In the end we will have developed a whole new tertiary education language and the intimidatory chest-beating and high-pitched vocalisations from the hilltops should have calmed down.
We can only hope that the forest doesn’t get thrashed in the fray, but remains an environment capable of sustaining some form of human academic life, however defined, but clearly recognisable as such.
Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala is professor and head of anthropology at the University of Natal.