Writing for the Mail & Guardian 10 years ago, I described sitting on a plane going to London on a “one-way ticket”. I had been dismissed from the University of Natal, now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), following a disciplinary hearing of 31 charges the administration had brought against me. Only two of the charges stuck but — significantly, as we shall see — they were “bringing the university into disrepute” and “insubordination”.
In 2009 the University of Cape Town (UCT) invited me to give a short series of lectures to second-year students on the subject of “Anthropology and Development”. Last year I was invited back to give 18 lectures on “Colonialism and Development”, again to second-year students, and I jointly chaired an honours seminar with a colleague in UCT’s department of social anthropology. This year I will be back, teaching the same course at UCT.
Ironically, I was delivering an early version of these very courses at the University of Natal when psychology students — who could see no reason for being forced to do it — complained about it. This began the process of my suspension and banning from the campus — and I was eventually sacked. When I asked colleagues at UCT why they think it’s safe for me, with my history, to teach their students, they reply: “But we always knew the charges against you were ridiculous.” Indeed, the most common response of academics, everywhere, on hearing I was sacked for “insubordination” is “congratulations!”
Many UCT colleagues signed a petition in my support at the time but apparently it never reached any University of Natal council members, to whom it was addressed. Tellingly, nobody at Natal signed that petition and only one colleague was prepared to give evidence in my defence. Always a star with students, he suddenly found himself facing “student complaints” and quickly departed for the University of Pretoria.
Now Martin Hall has written that the Council on Higher Education (CHE) audit of UKZN that he chaired in 2008 reported that “interviews with cross-sections of staff and students, as well as with external stakeholders, suggest there is what has been described as a ‘culture of hostility'” and “some aspects of this situation are expressed as lack of academic freedom at the university”. He wrote also that the audit panel “found evidence of stifled debate about institutional matters and of debates conducted in ways that obfuscate rather than elucidate issues”.
The CHE audit panel was concerned by several cases, following mine, where staff were threatened with charges of “bringing the university into disrepute”, and in the same month (October 2008) that the panel provided its oral feedback on the UKZN campus two more staff were threatened with dismissal on the same grounds. The cases received wide press coverage and have led to concerns about academic freedom at UKZN and talk of serious damage to the university’s “reputation”. The present vice-chancellor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, is the person widely seen as the cause of the disquiet.
However, it was under his predecessor, Professor Brenda Gourley, that I was dismissed and, in my view, it was upon the foundations she laid that Makgoba went on to build the style of university governance that has become characteristic of UKZN. Gourley constructed a “corporatised” university, not one based on collegiality and tolerance of robust debate, including debate about and criticism of how the university is run.
In a speech pointedly delivered at UKZN in 2007, Jane Duncan described a corporatised university as one where “power becomes ‘sucked up’ to the top and is often centralised in the person of the vice-chancellor”.
She continued: “The university becomes a brand in the commercial sense. Substantial notions of accountability to the academic project are replaced by narrow notions of accountability to administrators and managers; in fact, in the entrepreneurial university model, management is the university. Criticism of the management amounts to criticism of the university and therefore damage to the brand. Disciplinary measures against those who bring the brand into disrepute become an essential part of brand management.”
In a university where the academic project is what matters, the senate discusses and decides academic issues. Traditionally, university senates have consisted of full professors (the acknowledged intellectual leaders in their disciplines) sitting on it as of right. During the 1970s and 1980s most universities — correctly, in my view — expanded their membership to include representatives of non-professorial staff, non-academic staff and students. Professors remained in the majority, being those most experienced in the academic project.
In 1998 Gourley succeeded in completely altering the balance of power in the senate of the University of Natal. Arguing both for “greater representivity” and that senate was often so poorly attended that there was no quorum, she transformed the structure of senate. She created four constituencies: professors, other academic staff, non-academic staff and students. Each constituency, including the professors, was to elect an equal number of representatives.
This did not solve the problem of the quorum because the real difficulty at Natal then (and still at UKZN) is that academic staff could not afford the time it takes to get to a senate meeting on any campus other than their own — Pietermaritzburg and Durban being linked by about 65km of heavily trafficked highway. But it did solve the vice-chancellor’s “problem” of a senate that consistently put up a fight against her notion that managerial considerations should trump academic ones. I was one of those who earned her ire by arguing against her senate reforms.
Using Duncan’s terms, I would argue that under Gourley’s leadership “substantial notions of accountability to the academic project” gave way to “narrow notions of accountability to administrators and managers”. Because of this, the charge of insubordination to my faculty dean was not laughed out of court when it came to the disciplinary hearing. That no evidence was brought that I had refused a direct instruction is not relevant to the point I am making here.
What is relevant is the effect on the academic project of a university when a charge of insubordination of a senior professor to a dean can be made to stick because the professor’s accountability to the dean has trumped the normal collegial relations among deans and professors.
Gourley’s model of a university was clearly an entrepreneurial or corporatist one. This model replaces the collegial pursuit of excellence in which anyone, regardless of status, could challenge anyone else, whether on intellectual or practical grounds, with one where what matters is one’s position in the hierarchy.
At Natal senior professors became subordinates in a hierarchy based on other than intellectual considerations. Deans of faculties, who used to be “first among equals” for a few years before returning to their ordinary posts, were reconstructed as “line managers”, and they became subordinates in turn of their “line managers”, the deputy vice-chancellors and the vice-chancellor. In this realignment of power, it makes perfect sense for a subordinate professor to be charged with insubordination to her line manager, the dean.
Duncan’s point about the university becoming a brand in a commercial sense is also relevant. Universities today are all competing for the best staff, the best students and, above all, the funding to top up the ever-diminishing government subsidy. A university’s brand matters in this situation and many are prepared to spend a lot of money marketing themselves. In The Star of December 5 last year UKZN had a four-page, full-colour insert advertising its attractions including beautiful undergraduates sporting jaunty mortarboards.
Amid the competition for students, scarce talent and outside funding, universities that allow commercial considerations to outweigh the academic project easily become ultra-sensitive to criticism, interpreting it as damaging to the brand. They have no sanctions against critical comments by journalists or members of the public, but if their own employees — including senior academics — raise their voices against what is happening in their university, the management has a sanction ready to hand: the disciplinary charge of “bringing the university into disrepute”.
In the case of UKZN the brand appears to have become embodied in the person of the vice-chancellor. Any criticism of the university and how it is run is seen as damaging to the “UKZN brand” and to the vice-chancellor personally. As Dr Shirley Brooks (formerly of UKZN) wrote recently, he seems to be a particularly thin-skinned brand embodiment.
And so, although this university’s penchant for disciplining its academics on the grounds of bringing the university into disrepute was initiated by Gourley, there is no doubt that it has become uniquely sensitive to criticism from its own academics, resorting to this threatening accusation where other universities seem to be able to tolerate a more robust exchange of views.
The result is the “culture of hostility” Hall referred to in his CHE audit panel report.
Dr Caroline White is now a university disputes mediator in London, where she also chairs the management committee of the London Detainee Support Committee and is researching “foreign criminals” and indefinite detention.