The crucial, invigorating idea about higher education is continuity. No matter how much the outward appendages of the university change, nothing changes. Above the allure of an esoteric discipline, one idea reigns supreme. The sense that one belongs to an age-old community of bickerers is the joy of academe. Not just bickering, but vitriolic (as-if-one’s-life-depends-on-it) squabbling adds the additional adrenalin rush that can make of a low-paid lecturer a demigod in the dank backrooms and conference halls, long deserted by students who have fled to the real world. The university was, in Bill Reading’s delightful phrase, “a community of dissensus”, bound together in disagreement, but a resilient community none the less.
From the Western incarnation of the university it was always so. It was the thrill of argument that divided (and kept together) the flimsy garments of Plato’s academe. Passionate disagreement about the number of angels that could or could not dance on the head of a pin drove the early monastic incarnations of the university to distraction, no doubt. In Berkeley or Paris in 1968 the idea of a radical view of the world was paramount.
More pertinently, at Fort Hare, the University of the Western Cape or even Wits during the 1980s, there was a sense of purpose, an idea in their refutation of the reigning reign. What mattered while students and lecturers were being beaten by the police or detained or threatened was an idea of freedom. The issues might have changed over the years, but the principle of analysis and argument provided a crucial underÂpinning. This, in turn, allowed for a self-emptying, for the greater good. It enlivened students and lecturers alike and gave them a cohering idea around which to gravitate.
And yet, to look at our universities today, we look less than convincing. Like SAA staff who know that retrenchments are coming, but who still continue to wave in the incoming flights and plunder the luggage, more from cynicism than from greed.
South African higher education has lost the plot because it has lost its conviction, what Lyotard called the “grand narrative” that gives shape to one’s daily endeavours. The arts, which used to be the bastion of cohering ideas, have, over the years, deconstructed themselves into jelly; the sciences are retreating into ever-greater specialisations and commerce into rabid self-interest.
That leaves the student as the last hope for higher education to recall its founding idea, an idea that lies at the heart of the institution. But if one looks at our students or, more precisely, our student leadership in the guise of the student representative council or the South African Union of Students, there are very few signs of hope. Apart from the annual jamboree of protests over fees and exclusions (no doubt to keep the failing SRC members available for re-election), the students’s notorious parties and their constant misquotation of Marx, there are only competing factions — jostling for reputation and position in the ANC Youth League.
Perhaps most dangerous of all is that this fragmentation has worked its way up through the university structures and is being replicated at the level of leadership. Managerialism competes with collegiality and there is a growing divide and resentment between vice-chancellors and academics within the same institution.
Even between institutions there are grumblings of dissatisfaction about the way that one institutional type is perceived as being preferentially treated by the department of education or the department of science and technology.
At all these levels we are drifting towards a cul-de-sac of dissensus, without the crucial balancing of a sense of community: within the student cohort, within disciplines, within faculties, within the university and within the sector.
If the 3Â 900 delegates at the ANC conference in December emerge with the bright idea that all higher education institutions should be nationalised in order to better respond to the developmental agenda, then we will see a return to a cohering idea. But is there no way to return higher education to its argumentative best without external punitive measures?
What is desperately needed in higher education is a Zen slap, a collision of unconnected ideas that will allow the sector to see itself anew and in a bigger context.
The idea of building a new South-South megaversity, which could allow easy access to academics and students from South Africa, Brazil and India. Of universities collaborating with municipalities to devise a local five year plan for the community. Of Open Days for business. Of leadership exchanges into Uganda, Kenya, Somalia. This list is endless. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate.