Let me start with a few observations from the rich sociographic field in which I work. The sense of wonder that sustains the desire to know turns into amazement at how a university can function on the basis of systematic intellectual sacrifice.
The flames of this creative destruction are fanned by numerous directives on how many students I must rake in to make my courses viable; who is racially and nationally to be considered appointable in academic positions and who is not; how many additional percent postgraduate students I have to recruit this year; to what pre-determined quota I should adjust the pass rates; how many publications of what kinds and what percentages of kinds I should aim to churn out this year, and in what kinds of journals; and what kinds of contortions I have to perform at the mandatory annual institutional fun week.
Among the events fitting the bill of the key performance areas (KPAs) that serve as criteria for quarterly performance assessments, I try to select the more academic ones. Those officially endorsed and prodigiously resourced come with announcements of refreshments and are ritually framed by opening and closing ceremonials, laudatios, praise poetry, choral renditions and standing ovations that, taken together, pose no greater challenge than that of repressing an uncontrollably encroaching cringing sensation in those seeking the more distant pleasures of critical inquiry and debate.
This is ‘the African university in the service of humanity”, sectionalised into tribes in the Latin subtitle pro gentibus sapientia under the neotraditional ‘authentic fake” coat of arms prominently displayed as part of the ‘brand”, the launch and promotion of which decisionmakers considered worth R17-million.
Unisa prides itself on having over-fulfilled the racial national quota in some faculties’ academic appointments, on vigorously pursuing the Africanisation of curricula and on giving prominence to African leadership. In this blend combining employment equity and black empowerment, notions of ‘transformation”, ‘equity” and ‘redress” have acquired a plethora of meanings, interpretations and performative styles.
So malleable have they proved in servicing particular interests or interest groups that they have now come under the critical spotlight even from within the ruling party itself. Statements to the effect of the self-enrichment of a small stratum of entrepreneurs benefiting parasitically from brokering tenders and contracts, procurement and licensing deals in the state and public sectors have become more vociferous.
Talk of ‘the 1996 class project” captures this growing divide, with new class formation and upward mobility, independently and often devoid of corresponding professional skills development. Noting the inequitable benefits and beneficiaries of a politicised equity policy, a number of recent studies conclude with recommendations for the ‘transformation of transformation”.
But the fault lines that are opening up within the BEE project as a whole in the state, public and financial sectors have hardly been registered in public pronouncements pertaining to academic institutions.
Why is it that BEE-inspired employment equity (EE) and affirmative action continue to be proclaimed as prime goals of ‘university transformation”, despite the challenges to BEE in other domains of the public, business and financial sectors?
University ‘transformation” monitors tend to cast their findings in binary oppositional terms. They talk in terms of ‘transformation versus restoration”, ‘substantive transformation versus lip service to transformation”, ’embrace of transformation versus resistance to transformation”, with neat correlations between these pairs of opposites.
‘Institutional culture” is blamed for continuing racialising or masculinist power. Non-compliance with quota regulations and other aspects of ‘transformation” agendas tends to be attributed to ‘resistance to transformation”, ruling out or discrediting any critical debate in advance.
Exclusionist, racist and conservative residues are strongly embedded, so the argument goes, in ‘institutional culture” — a catch phrase denoting a thicket of values, gatekeepers and networks that are alluded to but not further analysed. In this form ‘institutional culture” cannot tell us very much.
It can be shown to be circular, presupposing the underlying ‘whiteness” that is pronounced as the quintessential conclusion. It is alternatively posed, often in the same breath, as the key to, or as the main obstacle in the way of, successful transformation of higher education in South Africa.
Underlying this contradiction are the ambiguities entailed in the very notion of transformation itself. For with EE came the rise of managerialism in South African higher education, which spelled organisational change and restructuring.
A shift ensued from an ideal of academic self-rule to top-down decision-making, with an increasing salary gap between senior management and senior academics (from a ratio of 2:1 during the late 1980s to a ratio of 4.5:1 in the late 1990s) and a vast and rapid increase in the number of senior managerial positions. This is consistent with a high
mobility rate within the public sector, fostering ‘a culture of moving onwards and upwards”.
With pressure to score on the KPAs of performance assessments promising bonuses and more lucrative career paths, this promoted an attitude of facing upward, rather than downward accountability. These developments occurred in the context of changes in the composition of cultural capital and new class formation (here deployed in a Bourdieuian sense).
In academic institutions they were bolstered by procedures facilitating fast-tracking. Such fast-tracking, and even the retrospectively instituted ‘mentoring” operations, are bound to come into conflict with traditional notions of mastery of a discipline associated with cultural legitimacy.
The two strands that constitute the ambiguous nature of transformation come together to facilitate or shore up the emergence of a new class fraction while simultaneously ideologically masking it. A class-based ideological project piggy-backs on a broadly socially emancipatory one, premised on the recognition of historical disadvantage. This convergence produces powerful ideological and political effects, for whose representation the university offers an ideal platform.
An EE-based appointment and promotion policy, bolstered by quota regulations and aligned with the ‘Africanisation of the curriculum”, promotes the idea of a direct relation of representation between individual and group ‘identities”, and the politicalprogrammatic staging of these identities, which in turn are assumed to be directly ‘reflected” or ‘expressed” in texts that are gathered up for curricular reform.
The vehemence with which such representation is pursued at every level should give us an inkling of the enormity of the project that an Africanising university transformation has taken on.
Not being able to rely on cultural capital obtained by inheritance or incremental acquisition through socially mediated channels, the new set has to develop its habitus by contrasting means. Against an older, relatively ascetic attitude of the traditional educated elite, it urges a morality of pleasure as duty, which makes it a failure, a threat to self-esteem, not to splash out and have fun.
‘Pleasure as duty”, now solicited as obligatory expression of conformity with the demands of conspicuous consumption, comes up against the sense of disgust, even horror, on the part of members of the traditional educated elite, for whom higher education is ostensibly associated with non-material gains.
For the latter enjoyment, the highest form of which is aesthetic experience, is annihilated in its subjugation to the concrete, to immediate sensation removing all distance through which the subject would experience his or her freedom. Trading in the taste of freedom, the new set upholds that which confers no distinction as that which earns credit.
However , thi s explanation addresses the complex issues associated with ‘transformation” only in part. Bourdieu, with the aspirant cultural capitalists so aptly characterised in one of his studies, loses sight of an important dimension of higher education — namely that of its critical excess in relation to an economy understood on the basis of acquisition, accumulation and commodity exchange.
For the exchanges involved in teaching and learning involve not only a transfer of services or commodities for a fee pitched and regulated as their equivalent; more importantly, they at least partly involve non-equivalent exchanges irreducible to a sociological or political-economic notion of inequality.
Academic teaching involves a nonsymmetrical relation of obligation that informs a network of ethical practices. This is a carefully guarded social value that can be understood more fully from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology.
Thus, the commercialisation and ‘Africanisation” of higher education has opponents other than oldfashioned, transformation-resistant, white fuddy-duddies — opponents whose force it has not reckoned with.
One of its strongest and most defiant opponents is the unconsciously held idea of ‘social value” that remains relatively immune to external rationalisation, Africanisation-by-precept, streamlining, fast-tracking, cost-cutting and managerialism in the higher education system.
The social value of education involving an ethical obligation derives its force from the import of (secularised) religious, ethical and creative artistic and scientific inspiration emanating from sources as authoritative as they are innovative, including revelation, ingenuity, wisdom or grace. (Has anyone ever seen anything of genius jumping out from a policy document or a piece of decreed research?)
The continuing import of these sources, pioneer sociologist Max Weber tells us, revolutionises society ‘from within”, as opposed to the relatively ephemeral effect of ‘external” bureaucratisation, policy directives and managerial dictates.
Ulrike Kistner is professor of modern European languages at Unisa. This is an edited version of a paper presented at the ‘South (African) Dream?” Affirmative Action Policy Dialogue, hosted by the HSRC on February 25-26