‘Never fight the crocodile in the water” was a piece of struggle graffiti that appeared near the University of Cape Town’s Middle Campus in apartheid’s dying days.
The immediate jibe was against the fading figure of apartheid’s ‘groot krokodil”, PW Botha, but the deeper intent surely was to warn against the tide of negotiationspeak then filling the political air. There is a sense in which these seven words have been prophetic.
Critiques of the triumph of neoliberal economics in South Africa are now so commonplace that they barely raise an eyebrow. But the link between what free-market ideology has wrought and the corporatisation that has cowed the local academy remains surprisingly unexplored.
Why has there been such a muted response to the mantra of rationalisation, reporting and reorganising — the staple diet of ministerial decree and university managers — in the years since anti-apartheid graffiti was washed off the walls of our cities?
Why have South Africans been silent when academics as far apart as California, Austria and Greece are venting over the erosion of their academic space?
In part those Chinese masks — governance, transparency and accountability — have hidden the corrosive intent of university reform.
Mindlessly borrowed from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these words and the social practice they command have shrouded what British writer Will Hutton once described as a ‘new authoritarianism”.
This particular version of authority, however, does not measure progress in the name of Western Christianity — as PW Botha was wont to do — but defines it in terms of efficiency.
The unhappy result is that education is directed at the cult of productivity — which, ironically, has not produced sufficient new jobs but instead has made South Africa the most unequal society on the planet.
If South Africa’s universities declared intellectual war on the ‘stupification” (F van Zyl Slabbert’s famous word) of PW Botha and his policies, the great unanswered question on this side of history’s divide is this: why have the same institutions been so silent as the public spheres both inside and outside the universities have closed?
One reason is surely fear: for much of the past 20 years the central conversation in every university meeting — both informal and formal — has been the ongoing emergency around funding. Make no mistake about this, the budget is important — the very survival of institutions, let alone the importance of individual livelihoods, rests on the ‘remaining viable” argument.
But this continues at a terrible price for it closes out the possibility that forms of knowledge can exist outside of the frame presented by money. This explains a second reason for this silence — compliance has mattered more than contestation.
The euphoria that accompanied the ending of apartheid drew South Africans together in a moment of great hope. Much of this turned on the fact that the one analytical optic, South Africanism, which had so long eluded the country’s academics, was finally open.
Through this aperture academics, and their disciplines, were drawn close to the ominous idea — relevance — which has hovered over universities for centuries. To be relevant in the challenges of the new South Africa was to fill — and with great haste, too — the myriad gaps that apartheid had left.
If not a trap, this was certainly a slippery slope because very quickly the argument took on an economic form — the universities had to show a return on the public’s investment. Then, as the public school system failed — and failed again, and again, and again — the universities were called upon to solve (and with diminishing resources, too) the problem of youth unemployment.
The irony of this truly came home when — about five years ago — funding dried up to train the very social workers who could help the country both understand and manage the sociological bomb ticking among our youth.
It was only the determined intervention of Zola Skweyiya, then at the end of his decade-long term as social development minister, that prevented the shambles over social work turning into catastrophe. Others in Thabo Mbeki’s government were less sympathetic.
Unabashedly, Trevor Manuel collected several honorary doctorates while he choked — at the behest of officials with degrees from the best institutions in the world — the universities of funding. And the then president was reported to have told the country’s incredulous vice-chancellors that South Africa’s universities were no match for Dar es Salaam and his own alma mater, Sussex.
This both explained and is explained by the third reason, a lack of leadership in the sector. With exceptions one could count on one hand, university leadership has acquiesced these 20 years past.
In a quite remarkable way, South African universities have followed the global drift towards replacing — in both nomenclature and fact — the traditional academic leadership of the vice-chancellor with the bottomline-directed leadership of the ‘chief executive officer”. And, often where the former title has been retained, a second tier of leadership, which commands the highly technical language of contemporary higher education, has been appointed.
Theirs is a closed world in which outsiders — particularly close outsiders — are the targets of scorn and derision: as a result, few moments are more disturbing for academics than to hear themselves infantilised by managers and bureaucrats.
The result is plain: most conversations between the government and the universities are conducted between those who regard academics as infants and misfits who have failed to produce.
Is it any wonder, then, that there has been a steady erosion in professional standing of the academy and that much damage has been exacted upon great national institutions — several of which are older than the state we call South Africa?
‘Never fight the crocodile in the water”: the phrase has been much on my own mind since I was asked to join the planning committee for next week’s Ministerial Summit on Higher Education.
Can we really halt — if not reverse — what has happened to South Africa’s universities these 20-odd years past? Will it help to talk to those who have systematically devalued what we have stood for? And who believe that education is, like soap, a commodity?
We shall not know for certain, of course. But what we do know is that this summit is a first — and for that we need to prick up our ears. If these two days are going to change the conversation, and I hope they do, then we need a cacophony of academic voices.
After all, as the Malagasy proverb so pointedly puts it: ‘If you cross in a crowd, the crocodile won’t eat you.”
Peter Vale is Nelson Mandela professor of politics at Rhodes University and visiting professor in the humanities at the University of Johannesburg. Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-Apartheid Society, his most recent book (edited with Heather Jacklin), is published by UKZN Press