Last week I received the following e-mail. It appeared to have emanated originally from some dusty fissure in the ‘humanities” division at the University of Cape Town. I use the word ‘division” advisedly. Our universities are gradually becoming wholly commercial in intent, their function to hand out degrees to recipients eager to get qualifications for jobs. Learning for the simple love of learning is definitely old hat, probably colonially inspired as well.
If the e-mail is anything to go by, a primary function of UCT’s ‘humanities” is to grace the most obeisant grovellings of political correctness with some sort of scholarly warrantee. It is headed: ‘Second call for papers for special issue of Social Dynamics, June/July 2007.” Read on at your peril.
‘Working title: Institutional transformation in education. This issue looks to address questions such as, but not limited to, the following:
‘Why is transformation so difficult to achieve in educational institutions? What are the ideological and practical stumbling blocks?
‘Investigations into the nature of liberalism, specific institutional cultures and histories, the workings of privilege, the problems/limitations of specific vocabularies, would be apposite here.
‘What are the perceptions in different interest groups of the meaning, implications, or working of institutional transformation? What are the realities? Are there discrepancies? Can they be explained?
‘What, if anything, can be learned from comparative studies across different institutions within the same context (South Africa), and within different contexts (in other countries)?
‘How do discourses of ‘race’ operate in discussions about transformation? What submerged ideas are operating and should they be surfaced? Why? How?
‘What role does gender play in transformation debates in South African and other institutions? What role should gender play? Given that race and gender always work together, are the complexities of this confluence receiving adequate attention?
‘How do we factor in other, more ‘marginal’ issues, like sexuality and disability?
‘What changes need to occur in the different sectors of the institution in order to effect transformation? Teaching practices, institutional culture and representivity are all crucial issues. Are there case studies of how each has been managed in relation to the others?
‘How should we be factoring class into issues of transformation and access?
‘Any other relevant or related topics will be considered. Please circulate this e-mail.”
I am circulating this e-mail — and to a much wider array of readers than those intended — for no other reason than an overwhelming sense of patriotic generosity: to reveal to more than a few dozen campus-corralled souls how sombre are the processes of academic self-immolation when they are allowed to run unchecked. What intellectual purpose, what possible ends might be realised by such cringing, such condescending bunkum?
No criticism or analysis of such material can show it up for what it is. Its vacuity is self-revealing. It begins by asking: ‘Why is transformation so difficult to achieve in educational institutions and so on.” It then goes on to answer its own question with a few squirts of sterile jargon, the fatuous dogma of the socio-politically anointed.
The cast of ‘thinking” behind the above sortie is further revealed in another discharge from the humanities fissure. An article in a recent issue of the university’s Monday Paper reflected on the proposition: ‘Just how relevant is Shakespeare in the world of young South Africans?”
Getting rid of dreary old Will apparently ranks high among priorities at UCT. A line in the article reads: ‘Not too long ago, Shakespeare (not by his own doing, it must be said) did good service in aid of, first, a colonial and then an apartheid educational system that wanted to entrench certain values as universal.”
Well, we always knew Macbeth and his mates were crouching on Verwoerd’s shoulder. In support of this, the writer refers to a published work by a Dr Natasha Distiller, using the following excerpt from her writings to add weight.
‘If we accept the conclusions of cultural materialistic and post-colonial work on the development and institutionalisation of English literature as a discipline, and of the role of Shakespeare within this history, then there is no intrinsic history [sic] why Shakespeare’s texts should be made to speak to current South African issues outside of the logic of the colonial system which entrenched Shakespeare as the paragon of English literature, and thus human expression.”
Don’t be depressed if you couldn’t dig yourself more than a quarter of the way through that. Let’s be charitable, not call it sophomoric comma-resistant maundering, merely commonplace slippage. Genesis has nothing to do with validity, Natasha. The fact that Shakespeare lived and wrote in an England busy at empire building has no bearing whatsoever on the merits of his plays and poetry. These stand on their own, immune from any historical context. By the same token, should we embrace the writings of Rabindranath Tagore as being more relevant to contemporary South Africa than Shakespeare’s are, because Tagore’s writings stemmed from his life in an India that was not doing any empire building?
Taking the lead from this absurd article — and its frothily expressed inspiration — we may as well dismiss as irrelevant the writings or thoughts of any other cultures that don’t coincide with the latest fashions in the exigencies of ‘transformation”. Babies and bathwater spring to mind.