The University of Cape Town: the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

The University of Cape Town: the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

https://rationalstandard.com/uct-end-of-beginning/ 

The answer to the question posed by Dean/Prof. Suellen Shay in her piece The end of South African universities? is sadly yes, at least for her employer, the University of Cape Town (UCT).   Also, her disclosure statement is incorrect since she receives a very generous salary plus a massive performance bonus from a collapsing UCT experiencing a “chaos” that she welcomes.  Moreover, her bosses (UCTs “Senior Leadership Group”) led by VC Dr Max Price (all of whom are ‘rewarded’ even more generously) “benefit from this article”, despite her and their collective failure to deliver academic ‘goods’ to struggling ‘black’ students (Smith, Case & van Walbeek – 2014 - SAJHE 28: 624–638).

Her piece focuses on Prof. Jonathan Jansen’s book As by Fire – The End of the South African University.  She starts by erroneously dating the beginning of “the current crisis in South African universities”.  Rather than with the ‘faeces flinging’ of 2015, the “crisis” at UCT has its roots in the 1980s, when its executive chose to ‘outsource’ academic support for poorly educated ‘black’ students to largely short-term contract lecturers, rather than requiring ‘Core’ departments, especially in its School of Education to engage in this educational opportunity.  It further ‘missed the super tanker’ when VCs Ndebele and Price massively increased the intake of ‘academic support’ first year students and failed to maintain the recruitment and development momentum of ‘black’ lecturers and professors created by their predecessors.  Then, she erroneously attributes the “crisis” to “economic, cultural and political issues” rather than UCT’s failure to properly resource and nurture ‘black’ staff and students.

Then, she ‘identifies’ “problems with Jansen’s apocalyptic thesis” vis-à-vis: What in fact happened? Why did it happen? And what does the protest crisis mean for the future of South African universities?

First, she states that Jansen’s “analysis lacks a broad comparative perspective” “in relation to continental and global trends”.  Taking this ‘spin’ avoids admitting the failure of the South African government, Basic Education System, UCT and other local university executives and core academics.  Government failed by strangling funding for tertiary education.  Basic Education failed by allowing a horrific Bantu Education system that provided a semblance of highly limited training devolve into a grossly corrupt/incompetent one that effectively ‘disables’ school kids.  Universities failed by allowing a commodity-driven, centralized administration to spread financial support far too thinly and admitting far, far more ‘disabled’ kids than could be nurture successfully, even if core academics ‘bought into’ transformation.

She refers to “Jansen’s profile and tremendous power” when the power (at least at UCT) was wrested from Deans, HoDs and Senate and vested in overpaid/bonused VCs, DVCs, Executive Directors, deputy ‘everthings’ and a Dean of a Centre for Higher Education Development that did anything but.

She then asks, “Why would academics stay if they believed Jansen’s predictions?”  At UCT, if they would allow me, I could provide a long list of Deans, Heads of Department, Directors of Institutes,  internationally highly rated senior academics and, especially, brilliant young scholars who have or plan to ‘jump ship’.   Older academics with secure research programmes are hanging on to retirement.  Those that are not ‘portable’ keep their heads down and play ‘political correctness’.

Sure, UCT remains massively oversubscribed with local student applications [it was SA’s no. 1 university], but are losing top students to Wits and Stellenbosch which have chosen to resist capitulation to never-ending Fallist demands. [Shay advocates “engaging” them.]  Regarding international student applications [a major source of funding], I hear that they have dropped massively.  Current major donors seem to be hanging on, but who knows?  Certainly not Shay.

Then she refers to Jansen’s “small flag of hope” – civic action.  I agree that Jansen falls short here.  What could happen to buoy the sinking UCT ship are strikes by intimidated junior academic and support staff and class action suits by families of students that have been denied an expected high-quality, cost-effective education.

She follows this with a highly important section An important perspective on leadership.  But, she characterizes “university leaders under crisis” as helpless individuals “under fire, in some cases, literally”. This may apply at UCT, but not at Jansen’s Free State, de la Rey’s Pretoria, Habib’s Wits, de Villiers’ Stellenbosch and Mabizela’s Rhodes.   Had Chumani Maxwele defaced and destroyed university property and assaulted women under VC Ramphele’s administration, he would have been dealt with decisively.  Under the current administration, he evades adjudication until he is pardoned.

Perhaps when a new VC is appointed to replace the promised [but failed] Afropolitan decolonizer Price, things will improve.  However, if Shay’s vision for “compassionate competence” based on profit and prophetic promises, rather than decisive, principled leadership based on delivery prevails, UCT will ‘decolonize’ from a centre of excellence with delusions of grandeur into pluriversity with aspirations of mediocrity.

Review by peers is essential for high-quality research

Review by peers is essential for high-quality research

https://rationalstandard.com/review-peers-essential-high-quality-research/

This is a commentary on: “How to fix the academic peer review system” by Alex Welte and Eduard Grebe published in GroundUP on 3 August 2017.

The authors immediately make their views on the use of peer review crystal clear by using words/terms such as “holy cow”, “demand”, “feet in fire” to characterize it. 

They don’t like it. 

Why?

Because peer reviewers can be “jealous old boys” hiding behind anonymity; and the process is “frustrating”, “contradictory”, “misses the point” and “result-diluting” and no longer ensures that published work is “of reasonable quality”.

They then conclude (without citing evidence) that:

1.       “Peer-reviewed” journals are no longer meaningful filters.” and

2.     

           “Most academics don’t seriously “read” journals to keep abreast of developments in their field.”

Yes, peers can be nasty.  But my, and most of my biologist colleagues, welcome comments, debates and reviews by/with peers when/wherever we can get it.  This is because they can, and generally do, help us to sharpen our thinking.  When journal reviewers misbehave, there are editors who can deal with (even ignore/replace) them.  If reviewers and editors don’t do their jobs properly, journals lose their scholarly reputation; become repositories for the results of second-rate, even incompetent, researchers; and simply don’t get read.

In fact, when I or one of my students have a paper ready for review, we choose the most eminent, ‘toughest’ journal as its publication vehicle.  Publishing in Nature/Science is the ‘golden ring’, with top discipline-related journals being ‘silver’ and local ones ‘bronze’.  That’s how one develops a competitive CV, gets cited/challenged by peers and rises in the research hierarchy. 

Also, I take the advantage of my Institute’s and University’s world-class libraries and the internet to regularly read about 20 discipline-oriented journals as they appear – in addition to Nature, Science, et al.  Without this, researchers become mired in the potentially mundane academic past and interact only with one or another bunch of ‘frustration-contradiction-free’ ‘old boys’ with whom they concur.

What’s the authors’ alternative?  One is to “self-publish” with a bunch of academically complementary (complimentary?) co-authors “capable of critical self-appraisal” and deposit manuscripts in “research repositories”.   This allows “serious engagement” (with peers?) to discover flaws etc.

In this internet era, isn’t it wiser for researchers to first circulate their findings to respected ‘real’ peers to sort such things out before trying to publish?  That’s what a paper’s Acknowledgements section is for.  The authors’ alternative simply side-steps editors and valid challenges/contradiction from reviewers who they ‘fear’.  Also, it creates the need to search a massive proliferation of ‘repositories’ potentially packed with ill-conceived manuscripts full of “fake news and dubious scientific findings” and needing more work.

How does one evaluate the work of peers? The authors’ answer (without guidelines) is that “you have to be savvy” … and “eventually the cream will rise to the top”.

Then, “funders and academic employers, groaning under the weight of the modern knowledge edifice” will implement (unspecified) “more nuanced evaluations” (by peers?) of your research.  The will lead to the “collapse” of second-rate peer-reviewed journals.

The authors’ strategy is likely to produce a morass of mediocre ‘research’ that still requires review by peers – the already overloaded readers.

It’s artistic expression and free speech that are ‘visibly’ and institutionally repressed, while Fallist Fasci--racism reigns at a ‘decolonizing’ University of Cape Town

It’s artistic expression and free speech that are ‘visibly’ and institutionally repressed, while Fallist Fasci--racism reigns at a ‘decolonizing’ University of Cape Town

Right from its first sentence, UCT Assoc. Prof. Jay Pather’s UCT is not a closed and controlled gallery  is a shameless ‘spin’ document bordering on propaganda.  Destruction, consultation-free- removal, defacing, blacklisting and covering-up of artwork are anything but “routine” curatorial actions.  They are blatant further steps towards the elimination of academic freedom and freedom of expression at the University of Cape Town (UCT).  This nefarious ‘process’ is driven by Fallists and condoned, if not suborned, by an overpaid “Senior Leadership Group” (SLG) that now controls UCT’s Council, Senate, Convocation, Academics Association, illegitimate-“interim”-politicized Students Representative Council and Academics Union.  All of these purported non-racialist structures are blatantly pro-Fallist or have admitted, at least implicitly and in the absence of substantive evidence, that UCT is ”invisibly” institutionally racist and needs to be “decolonized” radically.

The author, is an eminent academic artist and director of the Isela Zonke Dance Theatre.  Yet, he describes the wilful destruction of artwork on UCT’s Upper Campus by several “Shackville” Fallist individuals on 17 February 2016 as “not an ad hoc [done for a particular purpose] incident”, “but one that occurred within a very particular context”.   He loosely describes the “context” of “this single wildcat incident” as “a range of issues” used by Fallists before and since to ‘socially justify’ illegal mass intimidation, assault and destruction on a campus that was once a centre of resistance to Apartheid. Then he attributes the mass condemnation of illegal behaviour (even at one time by the Black Academic Caucus) as “sensational generalisations that have followed tumble easily into questioning well-mediated processes of normal transformation” [decolonization?].

Yes, adaptive transformation at UCT, and further afield in South Africa, is needed desperately.  What is not needed is raw violence and destruction, censorship, academic ‘cleansing’ and the eradication or re-writing of history.  Dismissing the genuine fears of the vast majority of the UCT Community, whom I call the “silenced majority” as “knee-jerk response”, “hopeless generalisation” and “hysteria” while ‘contextualizing’ arson and alleged sexist assault benefits no one, except their perpetrators?

To paraphrase Pather, “In South Africa, understanding what we mean by “of this time and of this place” is intimately connected NOT JUST with South African society in 2017 – a society that remains among the most unequal in the world – as well as the international community.”  It IS connected with local and international society going back to the origins of the KhoiSan.  To focus only on local and current “developments in our society” is not just short-sighted.  It is dangerous.  To demand that “UCT [continues] on its way to abandoning the model of the detached ivory tower” [now “silo”} and follow an un/ill-defined path toward ‘decolonization’ dictated “with the full support of a society anxious for stability that can only be attained through transformation” is frightening.  Fallists, SLG, Council, Black Academic Caucus, UCT Convocation and SRC - please elucidate what is meant by “stability” [and not simply enforced acceptance] and, for the umpteenth time, provide some even vague details about ‘decolonization’ and its envisioned products and their benefits.  Stop stripping South African art from our hallowed halls and denying formally-invited speakers access to campus.

“Currents” don’t “determine art and its creation”.  Artists do.  Curation driven by capitulation to reason-and-debate-free demands from law-breaking ideologists is, at best, censorship.  Describing UCT’s non-consultative [at least according to artists affected] ‘curation’ policies as “based on shifting contexts and themes” smacks of Fascist oppression.  Prof. Pather’s dismissal of Ivor Powell‘s [who has degrees from the Universities of Cape Town (undergraduate) and the Witwatersrand (post graduate) in English, Philosophy and Art History; and with more than 30 years of experience as a writer, journalist and editor] article  The art of UCT’s Max Price: Siding with ignorance and misperception as merely “a flippant point of view” and “universalist twaddle”, and Powell as a “slippery humanist” does Pather no credit.  To understand more about why Powell writes that, “UCT appears to be building a platform from which it will be in a position to tell you what to think”, Pather should read Price’s A subtle kind of racism.                       In this piece, Price abandons his normal equivocation and admits that the UCT “system” “transformed” under his leadership during the last decade is institutionally racist and has failed ‘blacks’.  His failure thereby ‘justifies’ the Fallists’ racially-motivated “anger and alienation” and Price’s endless granting of ‘restorative’ amnesties of miscreants.  He also makes it crystal-clear that, with “no doubt”, there is “racism [amongst] white lecturers and students” at UCT.  But, he provides no substantive evidence of actionable racism, choosing to rather to cite Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael’s definition of institutional racism.  This characterizes it as “subtle” and inferred by victims and not obvious to its perpetrators.  Such ‘racism’ is also described within UCT as “invisible violence” by UCT Convocation President Lorna Houston and her kindred “progressives” who use it to ‘contextually, socially, restoratively justify’ naked violence perpetrated by Fallists.  Sexist Stokely Carmichael is also not a balanced scholar ‘without sin’, given his statement that 'the position of women in the [Black Power] movement is prone'. Of course, “there is no such thing as objective curation” and it “is imbued with a point of view”.  But whose point of view?  No one in the SLG or UCT’s art community submitted rational arguments for the removal of the 74 artworks, including major UCT benefactor (Fund for student support) Robert Broadley’s Flowers in a Vase, Roses in a Jug, Roses in a Vase and Tree in Blossom as being so offensive that they “dehumanize blacks” and “catapults you into unhealed wounds inducing a schizophrenia and distension”.  Apolitical Broadley was a keen golfer and portrait and landscape artist – nothing more, nothing less.  The plants he portrays inflict pain on no one.  Indeed, neither the SLG nor Pather’s Artworks Task Team (ATT) have explained why any of the artworks are artistically racist or allowed the artists and others to debate their significance.

The University as a Public Space

Quite to the contrary, UCT IS now “a closed and controlled space”.  Free speech, unless supported by the SLG and not opposed by Fallists, no longer occurs. Alleged assaulters of women walk free and even occupy positions of power.  Censorship is the rule, not the norm [see if UCT publishes this piece in the UCT NEWS].  Pather maintains that because “the composition of an audience at a university is much more diverse and unpredictable” than visitors to galleries, and the “residue of the [artist’s] action [whatever that might be] may clash with what exists in a contemporary context”, the SLG’s precipitous actions sanctioned by the ATT are warranted.  Neither the SLG nor ATT explains how their in/actions “create an open enough field for these identities to be played out with enduring principles of respect, listening, acknowledgement”. 

YES! “The point of the matter, which is being quietly sidestepped in the articles in question, is that the realism, texture and nuance of the contemporary moment can no longer be left to be described, critiqued, expressed and circulated by a single demographic.”  That “demographic” is a small minority “constituency” of radical, destructive Fallists.  Pather can’t deny the integrity of the artists nor dismiss their views by claiming that they “benefited under apartheid and indeed developed international reputations as a result”.   This slimy characterization of the likes of Breyten Breytenbach, Willie Bester, Richard Keresemose Baholo, et al. emulates Maxwele’s treatment of Rhodes’ Statue.

I close not with my views but with quotes from ‘blacks’ and VC Price.

18 April 2017

At a meeting of the Internal Reconciliation and Transformation Steering Committee - Samuel Chetty related the experience of staff during Fallist ‘protests’: “We brought our concerns to management but little was done.” “Frankly, management did nothing to protect our safety.”

25 March 2015 at the Rhodes-Statue-Meeting in Jameson Hall
Assoc. Prof. Xolela McPherson Tennyson Mangcu: “I wasn’t going to come here tonight because I stopped trying to explain things to white people a long time ago.”  “I find the issue of standards racially offensive.”  “Í am not here to justify myself to anybody.”  Since being ‘promoted’ to full professor and described by Fallists in print  as a self-serving, “condescending and anti-black” “house negro”, his pro-Fallist position seems to have slackened.

An unnamed speaker: Identifying himself as a ‘black’ Advocate (lawyer), attributed inordinate attention given to Jewish students/staff complaints about swastikas sprayed on a building “because they have money” and “black pain does not measure up to Jewish pain.”  His comments were met with cheers. 

 ‘Black’ woman accounting postgrad:  Aggressively asked Price: “What exactly have you done in your two terms?” “I call upon you to stand up and take leadership. Put your values and policies and implementation where your mouth is.”

Unidentified ‘Black’ man:  Claims that he sent an 8-page document to VC without response that described education at UCT as “mental slavery and colonization”.

Former student and SRC member: “This varsity doesn’t care about you; it’s not going to help you; and it’s not going to listen to you.”   “Max Price and his management team have failed you.”

Black male student: “For many years my multitude of emails, letters, affidavits to Price have been ignored”.

20 March 2015 – VC Price: "no-one would be left behind".

Max - Please re-iterate this to the WHOLE UCT Community, including Sam Chetty and the assaulted UCT women who have yet to receive “restorative” or any other kind of justice from your “system”.