How can transformation and/or decolonization build excellence at the University of Cape Town?

https://rationalstandard.com/drives-academic-decolonization-uct/ 

Emeritus Prof.  Tim Crowe

Mamokgethi Phakeng, a professor of Mathematics Education, a National Research Foundation (NRF) B-rated researcher, UCT’s DVC for Research and highly touted contender for the post of vice-chancellor says: Now’s the time for transformation to build excellence in higher education.  This is because: ”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.”

What the research DVC doesn’t say, at least initially, is what constitutes “transformation” other than “thinking differently”.  

Phakeng tellingly does not use the word “decolonization” in connection with currently excellent, research-led South African universities like the University of Cape Town (UCT), scoring highly in international ranking systems.  This is because its researchers are NRF-ranked, highly cited, global leaders in their fields of study; produce postgraduates who become new leaders; and collaborate with equally eminent colleagues in reputable institutions across the globe.

But, DVC Phakeng suggests that continuing to follow this strategy will not guarantee a high university ranking in the future. 

She may be right on this score since, in October 2017, the NRF announced the effective termination of annual incentive (’curiosity’-driven) funding for rated researchers; something Phakeng knew about (but didn’t reveal) several months earlier.  There is also a rumour that the NRF will cease using international peers in the researcher-rating process.

What the DVC doesn’t suggest is a long-term viable alternative strategy for maintaining excellence.  All she offers is that there is a need to develop an “ability to manage change and master adaptability”.

Perhaps this “change/ability” is a component of her vision for “transformation”?
Phakeng next states that UCT’s” excellence is not innocent and always has a context”, because of its “history of discrimination and oppression”.

What the DVC (nor anyone else for that matter) also doesn’t do is provide evidence of this alleged tainted “history” at UCT.  This is because there is none.  In principle, since at least 1950, and certainly from the late 1970s in aggressive practice, UCT has a history of eradicating discrimination and resisting oppression in general, and that related to Apartheid in particular.  Noteworthy exceptions to this are the Mafeje, Cruise-O’Brien and Mamdani ‘Affairs’ which it weathered.  This is documented in detail in a two-part history of UCT Was/Is UCT an institutionally colonialist/sexist/racist institution? accessible on my Blog Site – timguineacrowe.blogspot.co.za

Instead, DVC Phakeng speaks personally, stating that she as: “an African woman – will never be excellent, no matter how hard I work, simply because the only way to be excellent in that context is to move away from who one is”.

First, I wish that she and other advocates of “profound change” at UCT would clarify how their views reinforce its existence as a non-racial institution.  Second, could UCT’s leaders please distinguish between the meanings (and continued use of) “African”, “Black”, “Coloured” and “Indian/Asian” to describe members of its community.  Why is this necessary, and who qualifies as an “African”?

Third, although DVC Phakeng is excellent, she reveals some disturbing “context”.  It came at a price – she had “to move away” from her ‘being’. 

She has still to provide an account of that “move”.  What did it involve?  Did it occur at her previous educational institutions, the Universities of North-West, Witwatersrand or South Africa?  Or did it occur after she joined UCT?

Back to excellence
DVC Phakeng then writes that we need to celebrate “all kinds of excellence” because it’s currently “defined too rigidly”, devaluing “certain stories over others” … “assimilating instead of reaching towards newer and better ways of being”.   

Excellence is normally understood as A talent or quality which is unusually good, surpassing specified standards - the knowledge and skills that a society expects that a student, educator and researcher should possess with proficiency to a high degree.  The BlitzBokke are excellent. The Springboks are not.

How can there be many “kinds” of excellence and, if so, what are they and what are their standards?
If the current definition is too “rigid”, please provide a more ‘relaxed’ one for evaluation?
What is being devaluated and who is being assimilated at UCT, and what role do these processes play in moving anyone away from his/her ‘being’?  One certainly does not get this impression reading UCT IN THE NEWS.  For decades, UCT has produced value-added graduates and staff who have embraced and enhanced Afro-relevance and excellence, locally and internationally.

Does DVC Phakeng have a personal vision for transformation at UCT?  Or do we need to simply apply the ‘pluriversity’ one proposed by Transformation DVC Prof. Loretta Feris and fellow critical realists on the Price-appointed  Curriculum Change Working Group?   This resulted in the highly controversial (if not disastrous) invitation to decolonist mathematician Prof. C.K. Raju to propose how internationally leading Mathematics at UCT might be ‘decolonized’. 

In order to have more women and black Africans at the professorial rank, do UCT’s faculties need to transform their longstanding, criterion-based policies relating to ad hominem promotion because they are discriminatory?   Yet, on 24 June 2017, UCT’s internationally acclaimed sociologist and educationalist Prof. Robert Morrell (currently heading UCT’s Next Generation Professorate Programme) announced the results of research conducted under of his supervision that demonstrates that there is no institutional racism in UCT’s ad hominem promotion process.  That announcement has been not made public.  Why?

DVC Phakeng, maintains that “mutually supporting” transformation and excellence are “sustainable over the long term” and will maintain “high levels of research productivity” with black African and women researchers taking the lead.  This transformation strategy is epitomized in her twitter of 20 December 2017:

“Amazing ceremony this morning for the Commerce Faculty.  We had 18 Ph.D. graduates and only three are white. Little by little transformation is happening!”

One might have preferred more emphasis on gender- rather than race-ratios.
But all this requires the right philosophy.

What is Phakeng’s philosophy

Given that Phakeng was forced to abandon her ‘being’ to become excellent, her focal philosopher could be Martin Heidegger.  This dead, old, white European man (DOWEM) is famous for coining the concept of “Dasein”, a “primal nature of being”, a self-identity based on a “shared history and destiny” underpinned by the anti-Cartesian ontology-based belief: “I think BECAUSE I AM”.  This exclusionary ethos ‘worked’ for a few years for Hitler and his Nazis, who were bent (with Heidegger’s explicit support) on wiping out Jewry and achieving world domination via war. 

However, a Dasein for the jig-saw puzzle of peoples in South Africa, including the ‘Coloureds’ (arguably the most morphologically, culturally, religiously and genetically complex and diverse ethnic group on Earth), might be a bit of a hard-sell.

Given her fascination with UCT’s heinous history and context, Phakeng’s next favourite philosopher could be to be another DOWEM, Michel Foucault, for whom truth is elusive and inseparable from historical context.   The underlying theme of Foucault's work is that “power”, rather than restricting “knowledge”, ubiquitously controls, defines and develops it relationally, past and present.  Like neo-Marxist, DOWEM Antonio Gramsci before him, he viewed 'power-knowledge' as the primary means of social controlling the masses.  Where they differed in detail, Gramsci favoured the development of “public intellectuals” (whose ideas are derived from the oppressed masses) to replace “traditional” Ph.D.-educated scholars at universities.

In her capacity of host of the 2017 dinner for the Fellows of UCT, Phakeng showed her Heideggerian colours by asking all the newly inducted Fellows to focus their inaugural addresses on the theme “Power”.  Tellingly, in her address, new Fellow Law Prof Chuma Himonga referred to Lord Acton’s famous quote: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Then there is Foucault-rival DOWEM, Jacques Derrida, best known for developing a form of analysis known as deconstruction.   Deconstruction is the key tool that the CCWG and DVC Feris use to expose flaws and instability in normative structures or universally accepted views in order to render them untenable.  Like Derrida, Phakeng takes the view, "there is no out-of-context".  For Derrida, there are no solutions; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total, even in the short term. There is just endless deconstruction, described by some as “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance.

The final, Phakeng and/or Fallist philosopher might be Frantz Fanon, who adds the remaining essential weapons to the Fallists’ ‘toolkit’: violence and destruction. According to Fanon, everything colonialist must collapse, because colonization is an inherently violent process.  Living in a colonized racist space is violence in itself, even if the racism is subtle, nuanced and “invisible” (which currently Davos-situated VC Price maintains is the case at UCT). An overtly violent response to such racism isn’t violence. “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.”

In short, the practice of violence binds them (and Phakeng?) together as a whole (Dasein?).

I close with a quote from my favourite US gridiron coach Vince Lombardi:

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