Imagine a university where a law lecturer criticises management, and is then disciplined for ‘attempts to incite” students and lecturers against management. Imagine universities that discipline their staff for speaking to the media. Imagine universities developing electronic communications policies that ban emails that are ‘offensive to any group”.
Impossible to imagine? Well, think again. All these recent incidents suggest that academic freedom cannot be taken for granted any longer. Heightened management control of university staff is a symptom of a bigger problem where universities are run increasingly like commercial corporations, rather than collegial centres of critical engagement.
Until recently, South African universities have escaped the international trend towards fully-fledged corporatisation. Declining budgets have forced universities to depend on private funding, leading to an emphasis on income-generating postgraduate research (often at the expense of teaching).
When a university is corporatised, power becomes ‘sucked up” to the top, and is often centralised in the person of the vice-chancellor. The university becomes a brand in the commercial sense. Substantial notions of accountability to the academic project are replaced by narrow notions of accountability to administrators, leading to the marginalisation of senates. Appointed deans replace elected deans, often disempowering faculty boards.
When research is driven by private sector and donor power, research focusing on poor people or motivated by pressing social problems becomes marginalised. The corporatised university also becomes increasingly hostile to intellectual dissenters, whose work is often necessary for the generation of knowledge. The end result is a university system geared to serving social elites.
However, we should be cautious about the argument that the greatest threats to academic freedom in South Africa come from within the university, as a result of corporatisation, and not the government. This argument fails to acknowledge how the censorious actions of university managers flow logically from the globalising and centralising thrust of government policy.
In South Africa, the ministry of education’s restructuring of higher education in 2001 precipitated a peculiar variation on the international corporatised model. Termed ‘transformative managerialism” by Tembile Kulati and Teboho Moja, university managers have been strengthened to drive transformation from the top. This has been done to ensure that — in the words of the ministry’s National Plan for Higher Education — there is a ‘single-minded sense of purpose and mission by all the constituencies in higher education”.
This brand of ‘transformation” involves addressing the legacy of apartheid by creating equity of access to higher education, while responding to the pressures of globalisation to create a high skill/high wage, globally competitive service economy. These are deeply conflicting projects, and vice-chancellors are ultimately responsible for managing these conflicts.
As different sections of the university community become conscious of these conflicts, express them and then fight them out, the logic of corporatisation drives managers to act against those who bring the university brand into disrepute. However, in the affected institutions, there is a strong sense among staff that the disciplinary rules that apply to ordinary academics simply do not apply to top management.
All too often, criticism of management is conflated with criticism of the university — or worse — criticism of transformation, as though management is the university and is the embodiment of the transformation project. In an attempt to increase control, some managers are blending still unreformed apartheid-era labour regimes with new post-9/11 surveillance regimes, to produce a new post-apartheid university model: the panopticon university.
The result is a campus environment where, increasingly, students and lecturers are expected to leave the Bill of Rights at the university gate when they enter.
A case in point is the disciplinary action against Fort Hare University’s Dieter Welz, which has apartheid-era censorship written all over it. The law lecturer is being disciplined according to a 1971 conditions of service document based on the 1969 Fort Hare Act, which has since been repealed. Welz is charged with criticising and defaming management in his law lectures, at conferences, in emails, in the media and even in private conversations.
When asked why he used his administrative law lectures to criticise the university, he argued that — given its huge administrative problems — the university is an example of how not to practise administrative law. As one commentator on the case noted, he is being disciplined not for being a bad lecturer but for doing his job.
Like Welz, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) academic Fazel Khan was accused of distributing false information to the media, thereby bringing the university into disrepute. Bizarrely, in the finding of the disciplinary hearing, no consideration was given to whether Khan’s statements were reasonable and in the public interest.
Following hot on the heels of Khan’s disciplinary, UKZN sociology Professor Evan Mantzaris was suspended pending a disciplinary hearing into allegations of poor performance and misconduct. He is charged with being ‘engaged in a concerted campaign to bring adverse publicity to the University — with respect to the unbanning of Dr Ashwin Desai”, and defamation of the vice-chancellor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba.
UKZN’s and Fort Hare’s managers could do well to heed Mahmood Mamdani’s warning that they should resist the temptation to close down debate administratively. Rather, they should practise intellectual leadership instead of intellectual hegemony. If managers are aggrieved by what their employees have said, then they have recourse to various complaints mechanisms other than the disciplinary process, which should be reserved for sanctioning deeds, not words.
The disciplinaries against Mantzaris and Khan will not address the underlying grievances that led to a popular staff strike against management in February last year. Fundamentally, the strike was an attempt by staff to create conditions for free speech on campus, which many considered to be under threat. Mantzaris and Khan were key figures in the strike.
In spite of being based at another university, Jimi Adesina, professor of sociology at Rhodes, was sued for defamation after contesting a UKZN management attempt to gag staff from speaking to the media during the strike. Adesina summed up management’s vindictive and childish approach as one where it says to its critics, ‘I’m coming after you.”
To its credit, UKZN’s senate attempted to adopt a more holistic approach to the conflicts on campus, by commissioning a report to address the underlying grievances. The report found widespread dissatisfaction with autocratic governance at UKZN, precipitated by a corporate managerialist model where leadership is ‘selected, not elected” and where — in the words of one student — ‘money talks, everything else walks”. Academics stated that they suffered from a sense of ‘meaninglessness”.
The report calls for a dispute resolution mechanism other than the disciplinary process, as ‘building up dossiers of transgressions does not heal”.
Management overrode the conciliatory approach of the senate by instituting the Gautschi Commission of Enquiry. This commission was tasked with identifying the ‘destabilising forces” in the university, and led to the disciplinary action against Mantzaris. The effect has been summed up by journalist Amelia Naidoo, who noted that ‘hardly anybody is prepared to speak to newspapers on the record or openly challenge management for fear of being singled out and punished, or losing a job”.
The academic freedom climate is also hostile for students. The Socialist Student Movement at UKZN has complained that students are unable to picket or hand out pamphlets unless they are ‘recognised” by the students’ representative council.
This problem is not confined to UKZN; similar archaic rules exist on other campuses. It is untenable that student organisations have fewer rights on campus than in ordinary society.
The season of disciplinaries has arrived at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), which has charged a staff member, Moses Teo, with the apartheid-era offence of ‘immorality” for allegedly distributing an email containing sexually explicit photographs to some of his friends.
Not all academic free speech problems can be blamed on unreformed subsidiary legislation, though. TUT and UKZN have used a recently developed model law to draft policies on electronic communications. In terms of these policies, users are forbidden from distributing ‘illegal content”, which is defined as emails that are ‘pornographic, oppressive, racist, sexist, defamatory against any user or third party, offensive to any group, a violation of a user’s or a third party’s privacy, identity or personality —” This provision is breathtaking in its unconstitutionality, and will make teaching and research of controversial topics impossible.
Clearly, there is a need to audit all the subsidiary legislation impacting on academic freedom, such as conditions of service documents and rules governing student activity on campus, as much of it may prove to be unconstitutional. Universities also need to consider instituting a freedom of expression code.
However, the most effective bulwark against erosions of academic freedom is social relevance and engagement. The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility states that ‘the intellectual community has the responsibility to — participate in the struggle of the popular forces for their rights and emancipation”. If this happens, then attacks on the university’s freedom — whether from without by the state or within by managers — cannot possibly succeed because they will meet community resistance. The disciplinary university must become the university without walls.
As silence stretches slowly like a skin over our public institutions, we could do well to heed Adesina’s warning during his defamation trial, that ‘— a threat to academic freedom may not be extreme, but if people don’t raise their voices because they think it doesn’t concern me, 20 years down the line it will consume everybody”.
Jane Duncan is director of the Freedom of Expression Institute