Mamokgethi Phakeng explains UCT's position on excellence and decolonization

The University of Cape Town Executive explains its approach to institutional “decolonization” and why, without it, research excellence at UCT is unsustainable

Emeritus Prof. Tim Crowe

Part 2. Excellence

Mamokgethi Phakeng, a professor of Mathematics Education, an NRF B-rated researcher and UCT’s DVC for Research and Internationalisation, delivered the keynote address at the 2016 UCT Annual Research Function, at which the university's latest research report was launched. 

I quote from and comment on her address: Without transformation, research excellence is unsustainable.

” The old certainties – good and bad – are unravelling. What we thought we knew, we no longer know. We can be confident only that in the coming decades we will encounter a world of rapid and almost unimaginably profound change. And a question that we might consider tonight is how we, as UCT researchers, could possibly be prepared for the multiple and unforeseeable challenges that await us. My view is that to cope with this uncertain future that we face, we are going to need three things: an unrelenting commitment to excellence, an exceptional focus on transformation and the courage to do things differently.”
A bit scary, but great, so far.  But, now comes “context”.
The “truth is that what made us excellent yesterday, is no guarantee that it will make us excellent tomorrow. To continue in our trajectory of excellence requires the keen ability to manage the change and master adaptability.”
“Excellence is not innocent, especially in a country such as ours, with a history of discrimination and oppression. Excellence always has a context.”
“Excellence, when it is too rigidly defined, leaves us valuing certain stories over others, leaves us assimilating instead of reaching towards newer and better ways of being.” 
Does this mean that many of UCT’s current ‘excellent’ academics are “unravelling” and passé, their achievements benefitted from racial discrimination, redress has only involved assimilation and they have resisted transformation?
Then the brakes come on.
“I believe in excellence and, despite its complexity, I remain convinced that, in a business such as ours, excellence is non-negotiable.” 
“We should guard against a tendency to downplay excellence in favour of mediocrity, which is usually done unwittingly in interactions and considerations about equity, transformation and capacity development.” 
Are some of our excellent academics inadvertently compromising their and their students’ status in favour of mediocrity when they attempt to foster the development of the previously oppressed?
Back to “context”
“The complexity of excellence means that it always has a context – it means different things to different people. This is the reason why, when I talk about excellence, some people ask, “excellence for whom?” and, when some people hear that I am committed to supporting excellence, they misguidedly think that I am only interested in supporting academic indulgence.”
But, she doesn’t indicate who or what has been or will be “indulged”.
Then she refers to the “challenges” presented by “Africanisation”, “decolonisation” vs adaptive(?) “transformation”, “lowering of standards”, getting “more women and black Africans into the academy and up the professorial rank”, not abandoning assessment against the “objective standards of a meritocracy”, and “elitism achieved at others’ expense”.
Some of these are transformation/decolonization matters more suitable to the portfolio/purview of Prof. Feris.  But, if Africanization means adapting UCT’s institutional structure, curriculum, language(s) of instruction to focus on African culture and belief systems, essentialist mystifications, masculinist appropriation of dissent, and reverse racism under the guise of fatalistic populist millenarianism, it amounts to little more than retrogressive nativism.
I prefer the term “Afro-relevance” that emphasized utility rather than geography.
With regard to decolonization/transformation, I support Mamdani’s definition: “sift through historical legacy and contemporary reality discarding some parts and adapting others to a newfound purpose”.   
With regard to standards, meritocracy and elitism, the academic arena at world class research universities is a highly demanding, competitive [but not necessarily zero-sum] one.  If you want excellence, set high, but fair, standards and apply them without fear or favour.
Phakeng’s vision is to “ensure sustainable excellence in UCT’s research” by “creating an enabling environment” that contributes to “sustainable societal improvement”.   This requires focusing on excellent researchers who are “passionate”.
But, the bottom line in a global competition is: “Without transformation, our excellence will be unsustainable.” 
Note that she refers to “decolonization” only twice, in two successive sentences.
This means that transformation is to be an adaptive, progressive, pump-priming exercise that becomes self-sustaining and builds capacity.  However, this requires structured resolve in addition to potentially fleeting passion.
Conflicting obviosities, unsubstantiated statements and hard questions
“Peaks of excellence can spring up anywhere”.
“Excellence cannot be everywhere.” 
A “few excellent researchers or research entities [cannot] succeed at the expense of others”.
 “Excellence doesn't develop on its own. It requires nurturing and resources.” 
Why, after 22 post-Apartheid years after democracy do we have only one (and an ‘outsourced’ one at that) black African South African woman full professor? 
“We have excellent research support programmes for emerging researchers.”
“More than resources, excellence requires the right philosophy.”
We need “a commitment to transformation; a willingness to identify particular strengths and opportunities” and make “difficult choices as part of our research strategy”.
“Excellence requires a willingness to work to build up the right conditions and practices over many years.” 
To do this, we need to “work together” and “start doing some things a little differently in order not to stagnate”.
This requires agreement of the “essential truth” that we have “far more in common with each other than things that divide us”. [So, contrary to Feris, UCT has at least one “essential truth”.]
If we don’t “act now”, “others” [high-priced private institution] “will step in to do so”.
What does all this mean?
“Peaks of excellence” aren’t pandemic.  They emerge from well-thought-out visions developed, sometimes opportunistically, over several, sometimes many, years.  They can be a consequence of building on strong foundations (e.g. marine biology in Biological Sciences since the late 1940s) and/or capitalizing on innovative opportunities and charismatic entities (e.g. conservation biology, fynbos and birds at the Leslie Hill Institute for Plant Conservation and the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology).
Excellent researchers or research entities need not succeed at the expense of others.
The few formal Centres of Excellence at UCT are largely self-invented and are, in fact, ‘cash cows’ whose research programmes are largely self-funded and whose educational and research subsidy earnings cross-subsidize financially less successful departments.   This is documented in detail in the 2005 MBA dissertation of the FitzPatrick Institute’s former director Morne du Plessis [The nature of robust partnerships: balancing conflict and cooperation in collaborative ventures].  Morne resigned soon thereafter.
“Excellence doesn't develop on its own and requires nurturing and resources.” 

At UCT, excellence is almost invariably a consequence of strategic appointments (generally instigated by visionary Deans – e.g. Jack de Wet and Cliff Moran in Science), and at least some nurturing.  This is chronicled in detail for South Africa in On the Shoulders of Oldenburg by eminent UCT Emeritus Professor Christopher ‘Kit’ Vaughan, published in 2015 by the National Research Foundation.  At UCT, these ‘winners’ generally ‘self-developed’ with little investment from UCT’s Research Fund.  Sadly, some of these winners (e.g. Roy Siegfried, Cliff Moran, Morne du Plessis, Maarten De Wit, Richard Cowling, David Richardson and Graeme Cumming) clashed with the “people down the hill”, left UCT in frustration and flourished thereafter.  Read the “Moran Report”!

Why, after 22 post-Apartheid years only one (and ‘outsourced’ at that) black African South African woman full professor? 
This is because, going back to the 1980s, UCT has marginalized young ‘black’ students into initially ‘outsourced’, largely failing, expensive Academic Support/Development Programmes, rather than requiring UCT’s Core Departments to take them into their ‘families’ to foster their passions and have them nurtured by the excellent researchers that populate them.
“We have excellent research support programmes for emerging researchers.”
This has been disputed strongly. 
“More than resources, excellence requires the right philosophy.”

Spot on!  

Some decolonists strongly favour that of Michel Foucault for whom truth is elusive and inseparable from context.   Others promote the dismantling philosophy of “deconstruction” strongly linked with Jacques Derrida.  More others are influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, ‘father’ of the “public/organic intellectual”. Still others (especially radical Fallists) favour Frantz Fanon, whose ideas attempt to justify, even sanctify, violence by colonized ‘black’ people against the foreign colonizer as necessary for their mental health and political liberation:

“The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler.  For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.  For the colonized people, this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their character with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole.” 

Adaptive Transformationists argue for the ‘scientific method’ to search for hopefully universal truth using:

1.       Characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry);

2.       Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject);

3.       Predictions (reasoning including deductive reasoning from the hypothesis or theory);

4.       Experiments (tests of all of the above)

to choose (at least for the time being) the hypothesis whose predictions best survive testing and perhaps become Kuhnian Paradigms.  Many of them select Karl Popper’s ‘falsificationism’ as the preferred philosophy and parsimony/Occam's razor as the selection criterion.
We need “a commitment to transformation; a willingness to identify [and implement even over many years] particular strengths and opportunities” and make “difficult choices as part of our research strategy”.
This is tough for highly NRF-rated, currently “indulged” researchers who do not want to ”unravel” or   descend from their academic ‘peaks’, and is not popular among Fallists who favour radical decolonization.
To do this, we need to “work together” and “start doing some things a little differently in order not to stagnate”.
Researchers should not be required by ‘higher-ups down the hill’ to “work together” and/or “do things differently” when they don’t want to.  Those who need collaborators to achieve or maintain excellence will find their own way or drop down the excellence ‘ladder’. Force-feeding ‘inclusivity’ can act destructively when recipients don’t buy fully into the process.  But, researchers allowed to hide in epistemic “safe spaces”, however defined, can slide into ruts that become graves.
This requires agreement of the “essential truth” that we have “far more in common with each other than things that divide us”.
So, contrary to Feris, UCT has at least one “essential truth”.
If we don’t “act now”, “others” [high-priced private institution] “will step in to do so”.
This means opening the door wide to invasion, not by Fallists, but by neo-colonist universities from elsewhere who will cater to the demands of those wealthy enough to pay their exorbitant fees and pass on their uncriticised Western knowledge.
Then the public intellectuals occasionally populating offices and labs at the Pluriversity of Cape Town will have inoffensive, non-competitive conversations with the few colleagues that remain and thousands of students, with the latter departing after some specified time with a meaningless ‘performance’ certificate.  Research, if it’s conducted or supported at all, will be funded by end users who value the PI’s ‘opinions’ or donors who ‘invest’ out of guilt or ideological loyalty.
Exposing myself as Irish American, “bog trotter”, settler, I close with a quote from my favourite US gridiron coach [who would have kneeled with his players], Vince Lombardi:

 “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”