/ 29 January 2007

The business of academe

While the pages of this supplement traditionally, at this time of the year, carry attractive offerings to bright-eyed students proudly entering the academy with a sense of excitement and anticipation, academics have less reason to be optimistic. Many academics, particularly those in the so-called “struggling disciplines” of “low strategic value”, find themselves caught in an interminable restructuring mill that freezes posts, reshuffles teaching and other tasks, and increases workloads from one year to the next.

The proletarianisation of intellectual work proceeds apace, as core academic activities are outsourced to contract workers, who, like dwarves during the night, do their work invisibly, inaudibly, mostly at dismally low and irregular pay, without participation in work-related discussions, without access to the university library, an office or any other university facilities, and without the possibility of union membership and representation.

In a disturbing reinvention of the industrial age, faculties are reorganised along the lines of the hierarchies governing industrial production and consumption. Academics are being told that they are in the business of delivering knowledge products to paying clients. They are answerable to their line-managers and to the customer, who rates the service providers’ performance in customer satisfaction surveys. This is the extension of what Bill Readings, in a book published in 1996, presciently characterised as the “University of Excellence” — that is, in the words of the book’s title, The University in Ruins.

Living in the ruins of the university, there is hardly an academic around today who does not daily have to confront Readings’s question, “How can we still talk about the university?” or, as Jonathan Jansen put it not too long ago, how do we know “when a university ceases to exist as a university”?

To this by now classical question, there is an equally classical response — that by Jacques Derrida: “How not to speak, today, of the university?” We cannot not speak about the university today, as academic work cannot be dissociated from a reflection of the political and institutional conditions of that work, Derrida says. But this comes with another sense of “how not”: how one should not speak, today, of the university.

To reflect on the political and institutional conditions of academic work in South Africa, a group of intellectuals came together at the University of South Africa in October 2005 for a symposium, From Ivory Tower to Market Place: What Future for the University in South Africa?. Analyses, questions and visions — of present conditions, possible effects and alternative paths — were explored in contributions to this symposium that have now been compiled in the volume 5 series of the Journal of Higher Education in Africa.

During the anti-apartheid struggle, university transformation was associated with a politically and socially transformative agenda. It is in line with this latter goal that Neville Alexander puts forward his notion of diversity in language policy, leading to the enrichment and intellectualisation of African languages.

Transformation today, it turns out, is enmeshed in a complex web of interrelated processes that have long taken it out of the ambit of what the anti-apartheid struggle had once envisaged. It has become aligned with the commercialisation of education, with managerialism, restructuring and rationalisation, and in post-apartheid South Africa, with contradictory directives of Africanisation, employment equity and responsiveness to market demands, argues Grazia Weinberg. This development, on the other hand, is positively noted by Piyushi Kotecha.

The blueprints for “poverty reduction” through the notion of economic growth hold numerous implications for post-apartheid restructuring of higher education that Salim Vally outlines. As in the provision of other basic and social services, “cost recovery” and lowering of public cost have become prime criteria for “viability”, “sustainability” and “efficiency”. A market orientation in the “production”, “marketing” and “delivery” of “knowledge products” was upheld as recipe for the universities’ ability to “pay for themselves”.

At the same time, the academic labour market itself has been shrinking in relative terms: a marginally increasing number of permanent academic staff is matched by disproportionately increasing student numbers. Paradoxically, while empowerment policies have come to extol the objectives of skills training in line with the job market, the corporate university has become an unaffordable luxury for many students. A new stratum of financial planners has come to preside over curriculum restructuring and research “management”, displacing academic leadership as the criterion for eligibility to academic office.

The status and remuneration that come with a senior management position has displaced the traditional cultural capital — the professor as academic leader — in defining social position. In other words, the professional-managerial “class” living off the academy rather than for it has acquired social and economic dominance over the traditional cultural elite, and has attained the power to define the “transformation” agenda. This development makes itself felt particularly in the humanities, which experience “capital flight” and a decline in “market value”.

Drawing attention to the pivotal role and common ground of the humanities, specifically, John Higgins points to the fundamental social force of literacy that has become obliterated in higher education policy and restructuring, and in research funding. It forms the bedrock of social communication, contextual understanding, and critical and creative thinking. Similarly, Ulrike Kistner argues that the core relation between teaching and learning is deeply embedded as a social value in different forms and histories of societies, and is not about to go away by managerial or financial decree.

Taking stock of conditions in academia in South Africa over the past 10 years, and searching for alternatives, Peter Stewart charts the downgrading of academic roles in the process of aligning higher education with the demands of the market. He calls for a review of the core academic roles that are key to the actualisation of the strategic plans of universities.

This could be extended to research collaboration across institutional boundaries, which Adam Habib and Sean Morrow advocate. The cause of academic freedom and university autonomy should be reconsidered in the light of what has happened in the past, says Premesh Lalu. The habituation to new disciplinary power, he argues, should be resisted in the restructured university.

Grazia Weinberg and Ulrike Kistner are lecturers in the department of classics and modern European languages at Unisa. They are the editors of the special edition From Ivory Tower to Market Place: What Future for the University in South Africa?, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, to be published in May