The role of academics and judges is not to exercise power but to be watchdogs of it, said Judge Edwin Cameron at the opening of the Unisa academic year in Pretoria on Wednesday.
”Those who do not exercise power but stand in critical oversight to it must do so with humility,” said Cameron, who was addressing academics, diplomats and students.
Comparing the functions of academics and judges, Cameron said neither judges nor academics exercise power.
”It is true that judges issue orders that can have immense societal effect. Yet they themselves cannot and do not see to their implementation. For this they are dependent — as the recent history of two of our close neighbours, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, tragically shows — on voluntary submission to law by those who exercise governmental power.
”If the executive does not willingly submit itself to the law and its processes, the judiciary is powerless,” he said.
He said that by contrast, where executive submission is present, as in South Africa, the rule of law prevails, and permits genuine human flourishing.
Judges, he said, though notionally powerless, are thus ultimately essential to effective state power.
”The paradox is that the judicial authority springs in part from the very fact that judges do not themselves make the law or enforce it. In a healthy polity, judges’ very removal from governmental power and the political processes that inform it lends authority and influence [legitimacy] to their rulings and decisions,” he said.
Turning to academics, Cameron said that similarly it is precisely the distance from the exercise of power that vests academic insights pronouncements with credibility.
It is the abstraction from power that confers power, he said.
”There is a paradox in this apparent powerlessness. Though judges and academics do not employ the overt mechanisms of political power, they nevertheless have high authority in society and exert very significant influence,” he said.
Cameron said judges, like academics, have a commitment beyond incidental service.
”In our daily work we are thus united in a particular vocational relation to truth-seeking,” he said.
Unisa’s principal, Barney Pityana, had earlier berated leading academics at the institution for not searching for the truth, when he complained that research output at the university is ”staggeringly low”.
”There are senior academics who have not published in over five years,” he said, but noted that the institution is building a research base that he believes will improve its record.
To help solve the problem, Pityana said he hopes Unisa will this year implement its long-running performance project for academic staff whereby achievement will be recognised and rewarded.
”Of particular concern is the struggle to retain academic staff in many of the strategic and rare fields,” he said.
He said differentiated remuneration packages will be proposed in fields where the university is competing unfairly with the private sector and in some instances with government service.
But Pityana said while it is essential that transformation continues at Unisa, it is also important to ”address and reverse the prevailing trend towards mediocrity and give excellence once again a pride of place”. — Sapa