There’s no doubting that higher education can be a perilous way of spending free time. You can end up learning things that your parents never forgive you for, taking substances that addle your brain and result in flashbacks well into your fifties and, inevitably, dubiously named offspring.
However, there’s another kind of damage; one that takes place in the sanctuary of the seminar. Grace, an acquaintance of mine, used to recount tales of being lectured by the erstwhile South African, one JM Coetzee. Last year Coetzee made the profound announcement: “I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, as come to Australia.” This should tell you something.
Grace used to rabbit on about the honours seminars once presented by our home-grown bard. Apparently the former South African used to open the session with a line from a poem or a sentence and then would ask for an explanation, explication or some such. The class, clamouring to be clever, would volley forth a spew of answers only to be greeted by a disapproving silence. The initial gush of potential answers, and the intelligence thereof, would soon taper off into a murmur and then a very uncomfortable hush. And there the poor students would sit and squirm.
And seeing that the classes were two hours long, and that JM (to his friends) had inordinate time on his hands, the classes could drag on into bleak infinity. The long-term damage to Grace has been as severe as it has been irreversible.
I tell this tale only because it seems to me to reflect on higher education leadership in this and, no doubt, countless other countries around the world. Australia included.
By some perverse twist of fate, JM Coetzee typifies the very qualities that we seek from our leadership. The luminous academic who churns out a vast array of monographs, novels, articles, incisive commen- taries, does so because he/she is left alone. Awaking into the dark before dawn and plundering thoughts and concepts and words in the privacy of a room, this kind of entity thrives precisely because it is left alone. Anti-social, private, even openly hostile to social contact — or, at least, deeply inept — these are the people who produce the best kind of thinking. Whether it be the study of the genome project or descriptions of sad sex in an animal abattoir, our best thinkers are, by and large, social anomalies. And what do we do with them?
Coetzee aside, the university tends to reward them first by foisting them on callow students and unsuspecting post-graduates. It is only in the rarest of cases that the star academic translates into a riveting lecturer. Their very reclusiveness, the quality that makes them excel, is inimical to the social domain of the lecture theatre. And if that’s not bad enough, academic brilliance is historically sufficient to propel the already awkward professor from the failed theatrical performance of the lecture into positions of leadership. According to the dictum primus inter pares, first among peers, academic success translates into the ability to lead and inspire others. Lead and inspire others!
Higher education in South Africa stands at a precarious point in its history. According to government, business and civil society it is perceived as too important to ignore and too precious to be left to its own devices.
I think what we need in these special times is a leadership that comprises failed academics simply because they are inspiring teachers. More than ever, what is needed today is edgy leadership. At the highest level we need vice-chancellors who are prepared to take chances, to speak out about stupidity in government and elsewhere and above all to engage with the community in which they find themselves. Higher education needs to be given less head and more heart.