Let’s ask the hard questions and rebuild UCT together

Let’s ask the hard questions and rebuild UCT together

Sunday Independent / 07 Aug '16, 08:45am

http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/lets-ask-the-hard-questions-and-rebuild-uct-together-2054311

OPINION

The time is ripe for a transparent, democratic, intimidation-free, and unbiased investigation to identify problems and shared goals, says Tim Crowe.

Cape Town - Phantom racism, censorship, intimidation and fear versus academic excellence, heterodoxy and freedom at the University of Cape Town. Two articles on the same page of The Sunday Independent of July 31 sent telling messages to all South Africans.

The time is ripe for a transparent, democratic, intimidation-free, and unbiased investigation at UCT to identify problems and shared goals, says the writer.

The much longer one, by Professor Xolela Mangcu, continues his long-running condemnation of UCT. It also continues his practice of maligning unidentified racists based on their undocumented racist acts.

He begins by stating: “Our universities are dominated by self-designated Donald Trumps who have taken it upon themselves to protect the family silver from the barbarians at the gate.”

So, members of the UCT executive are racist, sexist and xenophobic demagogues bent on preventing “blacks” from acquiring knowledge and wealth. Hopefully, these “Trumps” will finally respond to this and past attacks on them.

Then Mangcu continues his practice of quoting controversial, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid intellectuals, this time the eminent Professor Edward Said.

Said, although described as an “anti-Semite” and “professor of terror” by his critics, was a sought-after speaker who gave a UCT TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture.

Nevertheless, the invitation to Said, a champion of Palestinian causes, to give a lecture to the Austrian Freud Society was cancelled in 2001 because of the political situation in the Middle East and concerns about the consequences if the talk went ahead.

Said likened his politically based censorship to that of another past TB Davie speaker, Professor Noam Chomsky, the greatest linguist of the 20th century and a world-renowned socio-political activist.

Like Said, Chomsky has been vilified as an “anti-Semite”, “patron of the neo-Nazis” and “the ayatollah of anti-American hatred”.

Sadly, a common tactic employed by members of totalitarian movements in dealing with their critics, when they cannot expose their moral or logical flaws, is to label any critique or call for debate an insult and to punish the offenders. We need only look at the SABC (past and present) and post-liberation Zimbabwe to find examples of this tactic.

Mangcu describes unidentified UCT academic departments as employing “embedded intergroup dynamics” operating “in the image of the British imperial monarchy” based on the “praxis” of unidentified “paternal master(s) and loyal servant(s)”.

Then, despite his being a “full black professor”, he alludes to undocumented instances in which he has had “to deal with such personal slights - from “masters”? - as being mistaken for a “delivery boy” - servant? - or being told to look for the students’ toilets or “having my intelligence and integrity questioned by my (unidentified) colleagues in full view of everyone (also unidentified)”.

The perpetrators of these racist acts are unidentified “untouchables” who sustain themselves by selling fellow (unidentified) white colleagues a false sense of security.

Mangcu says some of these “untouchables” have “special deals that are not entirely transparent” and that unidentified young black academics have left UCT because it cannot accommodate their (unidentified) projects.

During my more than 40 years at UCT, I have known many young academics (“black” and “white”) who have left UCT and other South African universities to go elsewhere in the public, private or academic sectors. Invariably, this has been for career advancement because UCT sets - or at least used to set - exceptionally high standards for ad hominem promotion.

Many of these emigrants - in my own field I could rattle off the names of dozens - have had successful careers locally and internationally. The alternative - in the “imperialistic” past and in at least some faculties currently - is to hang in there and meet the criteria to warrant unassisted ad hominem promotion.

At UCT, this takes - or used to take - “decades of effort”. An excellent example of how to get the job done right is Professor Bongani Mayosi, dean-designate of the faculty of health sciences and one of UCT’s newest National Research Foundation A-rated researchers.

To fast-track young and mid-career academics, UCT initiated the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity .

Despite this, Mangcu writes about “right-wing attacks on affirmative action”, but fails to identify the attackers, victims and the nature of the attacks.

He highlights a pervasive “subterranean anger among students”. The actions of MustFall students and other protesters have certainly been above ground.

Then Mangcu defames the duly constituted UCT Academic Freedom Committee, which he states has “invented its own version of academic freedom”, suggesting it would have invited “Adolf Hitler or Hendrik Verwoerd to our campus”.

Like the UCT executive and #RhodesMustFall students, Mangcu condemns the committee for inviting a “religious hate-monger”, journalist Flemming Rose, who is arguably no more controversial than Said and Chomsky.

Mangcu characterises members of the committee - including its chairman, ethics scholar and UCT council member Jacques Rousseau and eminent philosopher Professor David Benatar - as being “tone-deaf” and “arrogant”, and concludes: “Academic freedom is too important to be left in the hands of provocateurs.”

But Mangcu offers no evidence demonstrating that Rousseau, Benatar or anyone else are committing or enticing other persons to commit illegal acts. He also offers no replacement for this “imperialist” structure, other than suggesting it should have “black” and Muslim members.

What is the solution? Well, first it makes sense to identify the problems unequivocally. Mangcu could help lay the foundations for this by identifying the “Trumps” and their acolytes who have “trained [and continue to train] their guns” on him, and provide evidence of their nefarious activities. Better still, he could encourage similarly persecuted student or collegial “victims” to do the same.

Others, including myself, would go further. We call for a transparent, anonymous (intimidation-proof) democratic ballot or survey to determine the “real” views and experiences of self-identifying subsets of the UCT community.

This is because no one knows what’s happening at UCT and what it thinks. Key questions I would like asked in such a ballot or survey should relate to: the relative importance of academic merit and achievement as opposed to demographic representation in appointments and promotions; the exclusion of elements of the curriculum based on geographical, gender or racial provenance, the utility of programmes, departments, faculties and staff who absorb huge chunks of UCT’s budget, but deliver few successful graduates and little evidence of intellectual excellence or creativity.

Mangcu, staff students, alumni and invested parents and donors must be required to add other questions. Then it would make good sense to follow Mangcu’s advice to have “a public inquiry into the governance and decision processes” at UCT and to encourage other universities and/or the Department of Higher Education to follow suit.

The time is ripe for a transparent, democratic, intimidation-free, and unbiased investigation to identify problems and shared goals. Once this is done, rational, intimidation- and violence-free debate are the only way to arrive at solutions.

All we’ve had are unsubstantiated opinions and accusations and non-transparent, unjustified actions. If this continues, UCT could become a bunch of buildings, controlled by a few demagogues and occupied by censored academics and students with aspirations of mediocrity.

In short, it could emulate the SABC, as journalist Jacques Steenkamp describes it on the same page as Mangcu’s article.