Every now and then our Minister of Education comes up with unscripted remarks that are by turns strangely provocative, out of the ball park or insightful. In one such recent comment, she mooted the idea that higher education institutions should do something concrete to highlight the fact that discrimination would not be tolerated on any campus in South Africa.
She suggested that, for example, the Bill on Human Rights should be placed at the entrance to every university as a way of enshrining the expectations that are placed on students and staff at our institutions.
Personally, I would have gone with the Dante-esque ”Abandon hope all ye who enter here” which has, at least, the merit of brevity.
On reflection, this belonged to one of her provocative salvos. The idea has value above and beyond her fresco application. It is my sense that the university is a special space and that to enter there requires a special kind of behaviour.
For the old codger, Cardinal Newman, the university is firstly a site, a distinct geographical place that is conducive to the communication of knowledge: ”A university seems to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse.”
Knowledge, according to his argument, can only be circulated if there is a gathering of like-minded individuals who, in Socratic vein, arrive at knowledge via dialogue and contestation between teacher and student.
The site also matters because it is beyond the scope of the public sphere; it is necessarily removed from normal human activity which would distract its purpose.
And lastly, this space — the university as a refuge from civil society — fosters the arrival at knowledge via a friction of minds (and, no doubt, bodies) rubbing up against each other in order to negotiate and produce new knowledge and correct what is already known.
So the question that Minister Pandor raises touches not so much on ”what is the university” but rather ”where is the university”. To cross that precarious and expensive threshold is to enter into a liminal space where a certain rite of passage occurs.
For those students in residences, it is a home from home, but importantly, a space that metaphorically allows the student to be weaned off the nuclear family in order to take his or her place within the larger social fraternity and sorority.
The university signals an important break with the school system and marks a hiatus between the family and social reality, between the past and the future, the secure and the unknown.
Obviously, this assertion must be tempered by the array of different student circumstances — living with parents, engaged in part-time study or distance — but the idea of the alma mater endures.
In this space also, the academic is privileged to occupy a place that allows him or her to act as an overseer while students engage with the collective history of thought. Moreover, the tenured academic has the economic privilege to occupy a place in society while belonging outside of its corporative nomenclature.
Thus, for both students and staff, the university is a different space that is, at once, both in society and removed from it.
The racist incidents that have taken place this year are shocking not only because of what happened, but because of the violence that has been committed within a space that is special — one might almost say sacrosanct. Thus, the institution, that is the university, endures while changing. Students in 1968 are radically different (and intrinsically the same) from students in 2008. Whether it be Baby Boomers or Generation Z, whether it be hippies or Facebook, free love or the insularity of the iPod generation, the song remains the same.
And this space endures because it is about both learning and unlearning. Old habits, prejudices and assumptions about the world are broken down in the friction of argument and cohabitation.
Put idealistically, what goes on within the special space of the university is that students and staff are confronted with the logical coherence of the other (belief systems, theories, culture) to such an extent that the ”I” tends to blur and mix with the other.
It doesn’t necessarily make us them, but it makes us someone else. In the face of xenophobia and growing ethnic division, the university is pretty much all that is left in creating tomorrow’s healthy citizenry.
”That it should come to this,” as Hamlet would have said.