Rethinking how we talk about the need for diversity in STEM

I once attended a Women’s Day event where we were told by a male leader how much the women were appreciated, because we brought the ‘softness’ to engineering. I nearly exploded – having my professional contribution reduced to ‘softness’, and also thinking of male colleagues in my department who I felt were possibly more skilled on the dimensions that were referenced in this clunky manner.

Fortunately, events like these have been relatively rare in my worklife to date as an engineering educator, having been in a progressive organization with mostly much more enlightened individuals, and it has been a huge privilege to be part of a team that has been focused on transforming participation in engineering to be more representative and inclusive of population demographics.  Recently I have been excited to join a new organization that also has these objectives high in its strategic priorities.

I thus find it surprising that the justifications for a more diverse STEM workplace that rest on reducing underrepresented groups to their ‘special’ contributions – maybe a little bit more subtle than references to ‘softness’ but still ‘special’ – still enjoy such currency.  In fact, it seems this is still considered a relatively progressive viewpoint in some circles in engineering education: If you take issue with any parts of this argument, you may be seen to be arguing against the need for diversity. So let me try and lay it out clearly here.

We should not still be having to persuade people about the need for universities and workplaces better to represent the demographics of the broader society.  This is a basic issue around social justice, around the kind of democratic society we want to live in, and that we want all people to be able to flourish to the best of their ability (more on that later).  So what I take issue with is not only with having to fabricate an extrinsic reason why diversity is desirable, but with saying that we need to do this because a more ‘diverse’ group will bring different viewpoints and allow for better engineering problem solving. Examples are given such as the design of the airbag, which neglected to design for children’s body sizes because there were only men in the design team. On the face of it, this might seem a good line of argument – at least it appears to be in favor of diversity – but I think it has at least two serious shortcomings because of the way it formulates this justification.

Firstly, even if claimed otherwise, it reduces people to an ‘essence’ of their identity: that your major contribution as a woman is to bring insights that relate to your female identity, rather than that simply being one of the best programmers, designers or managers in the room. Social scientists refer to the ‘essentialising’ of identity. Crucially, white males do not come into this argument; it is left unsaid that their contributions are at the heart of engineering and that others will bring in further contributions. As a woman your role in the airbag design team will be to remind the others that there are children in the world… “sorry no, but I had in mind a career that involved a bit more than that?”

The second problem with this argument is related to the important critiques that have been raised of the pipeline metaphor (that also refuses to die). It attempts to recruit people to a project that clearly will be on someone else’s terms. We may have moved beyond the simple numerical arguments based on the needs of the STEM workforce but we are still offering an argument that is not going to wash with many potential recruits: “We would love to have you in the room, to contribute to our project, and we have already defined what you will do”. This is actually a weak argument and I am not surprised that young people with options don’t fall for it. This very argument that is supposed to recruit underrepresented groups to STEM might be the very reason why participation rates have mostly plateaued.

There is therefore a much stronger way to go about this, but it requires a degree of social progressiveness that requires us to talk head-on about power. The starting point is that engineering knowledge is what has been termed by sociologists ‘powerful knowledge’ – access to this knowledge gives you power in the world to effect significant change and also to direct the course of your life. Moreover, while knowledge emerges from a social process, we should not fall for an ‘over-socialised’ conception of knowledge that suggests it can only be owned by the groups who have historically been over-represented in its generation. True democracy means a democracy of knowledge, of access to powerful knowledge for all.

Here let’s also note that not everyone with an engineering degree will go into a traditional engineering career. This should not be seen as a leak from the pipeline but rather as a demonstration of the power of that knowledge.

Another important position is to grapple with how we see human choice and agency. The Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen measures progress in terms of the capacity for individuals to live lives that they value, to flourish in terms of activities that matter to them. The issue for people who have been historically excluded from various professions is about having options to live life more fully on their terms. Don’t tell them in your recruitment that you have a cute little career lined up in the corporation and that they will have a special role to play as a woman (or an ethnic minority) – rather tell them that engineering knowledge is at the centre of our current world, and that access to this knowledge gives them unimaginable possibilities. If you are a woman who doesn’t want to be dependent on a man for your survival, then you should do what you can to get access to powerful knowledge, and an engineering degree is a great starting point.

There is a catch. To abandon our euphemistic rhetoric around diversity also means that we need to stare some difficult realities firmly in the face. The STEM workplace is not immune to the sexism (and racism) that is common across many contemporary workplaces, and it has its own special challenges being still predominantly male in some sub-contexts. There has been significant social change since the late 1960s – but there are still difficult steps to take to make our study and workplaces those where people can flourish no matter the identity flags that they carry with them. We need to support and mentor our students and younger colleagues; we need to tackle head-on stereotypes and biases that obstruct; we need to look at systemic barriers that stop people getting in the door. This often might involve special measures targeting particular groups, and opportunities to lobby with those who face similar challenges.  Crucially though we need to note the following: We are not going to address these core issues by hiding behind soft arguments on why we need ‘diverse’ individuals (and we are sometimes termed such!) to bring their own special ‘diverseness’ to this (only marginally changed) world. Take us on our own terms.

Storming of the UCT Senate – crossing of a new line?

Yesterday afternoon for the first time in my life I had a peanut butter sandwich thrown at me. It was also, I think, the first time I had someone shouting in my face that I was a racist. Both of these felt a bit surreal and in and of themselves are quite trivial. The potentially more significant issue is that I was in the UCT Senate meeting when this happened. An emergency meeting had been called of the Senate to hold discussion on the situation in which the university finds itself. Senate, comprising not only the professoriate, but also key representatives from students, administrative staff, and other academics, is an important grouping in the university. Compared to many other institutions whether public or private, the university is somewhat unique in that its academics are mandated to play a significant role in its governance.

The details have been reported elsewhere – in short a group of about 100 people including students and workers, and possibly other supporters, stormed the Senate meeting and refused to leave when asked to do so. Verbal and physical abuse of the vice-chancellor was reported. I know that in days to come we will have multiple positions and analyses in the media. My aim in this short piece, as with others on this blog, is to try to work through things in the moment, from what I hope is a somewhat informed perspective. I share these knowing that as a university community we do best when we try to make sense of things and deliberate over our emerging analyses.

Some people have started to say that this was the crossing of a line that should not be crossed. I agree, but I regret to say that I think that line was crossed already earlier this year. I was in the meeting that signalled the opening salvo on the #RhodesMustFall movement, in which an academic seminar convened by the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Prof Crain Soudien, was disrupted. At that point there was no jumping on chairs or throwing of food, but the SRC president, an invited member of the panel, insisted on speaking first and then leading out of the meeting most of the students who were present. The remaining audience did not feel that in these circumstances the meeting should be continued although Prof Soudien pleaded that we should not countenance the shutting down of discussion. We moved swiftly through a process then over the next few weeks to ‘decide’ on what to do with the statue. During the final event on this programme, a UCT Council meeting, we had an action that was entirely parallel to what happened in Senate yesterday, except that here the members of Council were also detained while tables were jumped on, etc. At the time, many of us felt that the moment for engaging with the symbols of our colonial past was overdue, and thus were persuaded that this messiness on the edges was simply unfortunate.

Fast forward to October 2015. I do not want to rehash a full account of these momentous last few weeks but just to point out a few things that have happened. At a national summit on higher education, students nationally started mobilising for a national protest over fees, given a dismissal of their concerns by government at this event. It must be noted that this movement was national and that UCT students do not appear to have been in the forefront of that development. The events of the week of 19-23 October 2015 were multiple but here I think it is important to say that there was visible contestation at UCT over who was leading the student protests. At one point – at a mass meeting on the Thursday – there was a public haggling over the megaphone when two groups had different views on whether the vice-chancellor should be allowed to address the students. Here is it important to note that the very large crowd of students assembled were insisting that they did want to hear the vice-chancellor. It is also important to note that the UCT students who marched to parliament on the Wednesday appeared to be a much broader group than those associated with FMF/RMF. At the conclusion of this week it was not the broader movement but the group now called FMF/RMF that insisted on ‘negotiations’ with the senior executive of the university leading to the closure of the university for a further week. During this period it is now reported that the SRC on two occasions tried to meet, but had their meetings disrupted by a FMF/RMF grouping. And it is this grouping that stormed Senate yesterday – if they want to claim that it wasn’t them then they need to move swiftly to do so.

So what is clear to me is that there is a group of students on campus who feel it is justified to break up academic meetings. Yesterday is not the first time this has been done this year. A related observation is that this group itself does not seem to favour open discussion and debate. Through the whole RMF mobilisation earlier this year I found it most frustrating that there were no formal positions put forward for engagement. We were told by those ‘in the know’ that there were amazing debates happening inside what was now called Azania House but despite all the social media at hand it was hard to find any of these debates emerging into the open. The only writing I could find were some pieces by the then SRC president Ramabina Mahapa, for example his speech on the moving of the statue, but there was no space for critically engaging with these (I tried to do so on twitter and got shouted down – I also recognise that debating the meaning of ‘whiteness’ is tricky in 120 characters). The other speeches that have been offered to date have mainly been in the political discourse of sloganeering and crowd agreement – I have no problem with political meetings being in this mode but as a university one would also like to see the kind of clear articulation of position that I saw by the UFS SRC at the recent SAERA conference.

In a recent piece I said there could be no return to ‘business as usual’ and I still feel that the events of the last few weeks have ruptured ignorance and naivety, and these particular ruptures were overdue. But I also need to re-emphasise that I do not mean that we cannot hold on to what we essentially are as a university. If we cannot be a safe space for open debate, for considered and reasoned engagement, then we are not a university. In railing elsewhere against some simplistic visions for fully online higher education, I have emphasised the significance of the face to face meetings that are central to higher education, as well as the individual quiet engagement with knowledge. Many hard lessons should be learnt from this recent set of events. Most importantly is that we can never compromise our essential mode of engagement. We should never shut our doors without all knowing why we are doing so, we must make our major decisions in full transparency and open debate, and we need to hold a unique space in society where all ideas can be considered and carefully worked with. We need to provide a safe space in which students can learn and grow. We are also a public institution. Our buildings are built and maintained with the sweat of taxpayers and are privileged spaces for academic work and the administrative support thereof – we cannot tolerate any vandalism of this precious resource, that is an insult to the person on the street whose VAT on a loaf of bread paid for small part of it. We cannot avoid being fully exposed to the serious problems in our society, and this will mean that things will repeatedly get heated – but if we use this as an excuse to shut down discussion we will cease to be a university. And then we will see another wave of the African intellectual diaspora and I pray it doesn’t come to that.

At the same time though, let us not use the actions of a small group to close our ears to very real concerns in our midst. Let us not retreat into the laager. Let us hold on to the important ways in which the broader events of this year have got us to seriously question anew the ways in which our university system operates – but if we cease to be a university we will not be able to engage with these questions as we should, or indeed produce the kind of thinking and the kind of graduates that society so desperately needs us to do.

Luister. Weer.

Early last week it became clear to me how this unprecedented nationwide student protest had disrupted the institutional silos in which we live. My institution anxiously tried to remind students that our own internal financial scheme is really good (it is) and that protests were unwarranted. But in an action that showed up the paucity of our insular thinking, students insisted that the situation facing so many of their peers across the country could not be ignored. Of course in working through the aftermath of the protest we are caught up in institutional micro-politics and next year we will be having to creatively balance the books, but right now let’s not lose sight of the important new perspective that has come into focus.

Today I had the privilege to join the South African Education Research Association Conference held at University of the Free State, and thus an opportunity to physically step out of my UCT bubble. Of course I have been reading widely throughout this period and have caught so many viewpoints whether in 120 characters or more, but as those of us teachers know, there is nothing quite like a face to face meeting of minds. An absolutely central point of this conferencing day was to be addressed by student leaders from UFS, both from the SRC and other organisations involved in the protest. The brief to the students was to talk about what this moment means for them both emotionally and intellectually, and the brief for us academics was to listen. The main speaker was Nokuthula Sithole, a BComm honours students in economics and an SRC member. She explained how apartheid had been a system of so many rules of what you can’t do – and how they felt that post-apartheid had reproduced so many of the strictures. Their wish was for university campus to offer a ‘safe counter-cultural space’ for young people where they could work intellectually with their experiences of the world. She outlined a number of critical issues that students were talking about. They want institutions to actually confront their apartheid legacies – here they wanted to know what happened to the oversight committee on transformation that was established in the wake of the Soudien report. Students felt that their freedom of expression was limited on campus – if you say the ‘wrong thing’ on your facebook page you could get into trouble with university management. She emphasised the issue of identity – of being able to work through who you are and what authenticity means to you – which might mean opting more for spirituality than religiosity. This comment really interested me as I have been waiting for some commentator to note what a huge challenge this contemporary movement is for the widespread popularity of a charismatic and relatively conservative form of religious practice on our campuses. These students are also concerned about unintegrated campuses – and are concerned when in their view academics seems to shut down discussions on race.

In closing, Nokuthula implored us to recognise that a society that does not care for its youth does not care for its future. They do not feel cared for and they are the leaders of tomorrow. These students feel energised by the moment and excited by the broad base of support for their movement, including that from more privileged peers. They agree with academics that much more public funding is needed for higher education. And they don’t want to be characterised as criminals. They felt that shutting down the campus was legitimate for this cause and they are adamant that all they did was to obstruct entrances peacefully, sitting down.

The way things have worked out on my campus has meant that I have not yet had the opportunity to be in this kind of environment to hear a clear exposition of the full student position. I have mainly heard slogans through a megaphone (this is how mass meetings are, no complaint) and have had to supplement this with informal discussions and online connections. So as a proper firsthand catchup on what is at the heart of #feesmustfall, today just blew me away. I have heard from colleagues how this national movement really came together during the HE Summit that the government convened – students put a clear position forward and were essentially dismissed, as reported by my colleague Suellen Shay. But what I heard today was that this Summit was the moment where nationally a broad range of students realised they were all on the same page and that the time was right for broadening out the protest that had started at Wits.

In the contribution from the UFS SRC chair, I heard a clear confirmation that the national position was that the call for ‘free HE’ refers in fact to ‘free HE for those whose parents can’t afford it’. So we can stop having to rehash all those arguments on why fully free HE would be a retrogressive move in a context like ours. The students get it. In fact we already have policy and institutions to support this, the problem as so often in South Africa is a matter of implementation (including political will and capacity to deliver).

I have a sense of intellectual ferment in our country. This was also borne out by some really superb presentations from younger researchers at the conference – Siphelo Ncgwangu from Wits (REAL) offering a grounded and empirical critique of the (now hegemonic) ‘scarce skills’ discourse, Batandwa Sonamzi, a school principal whose meticulous masters work (with a supervisor at Stellenbosch Univ) reports on the domestic practices in an impoverished township family to support their children’s education. In a plenary panel Michael Cross from UJ and Joel Samoff from Stanford both pointed to the moment in independent Tanzania where the precursor to UDSM was the centre of an intellectual movement that changed the study of African history (it was also pointed out in discussion how the death knell to this intellectual space was incursion by the state). With regard to the central debate on knowledge and what knowledge matters in the academy, Lis Lange from UFS pointed out that this debate is alive and well in parts of what we used to call the third world – and asks why we are not engaging with it.

In closing Lis Lange made the observation that is seldom that a society gets two opportunities to ‘get it right’. This is in fact our second opportunity, and she said, to use good Afrikaans, we had better not ‘bogger dit op’. As universities we got seduced by that simplistic argument that the most important thing we were doing was producing ‘skills’ for the economy. This moment should force us to seriously reconsider the crucial role of higher education in building society. And we are not going to achieve anything in this regard if we do not take our students seriously and listen to what they are saying.

No return to ‘business as usual’ for South African higher education – the necessity of ‘living in the middle of things’

As I write we have just experienced a week of nation-wide and quite unprecedented student protest in 21 years of our South African democracy, coordinated under the banner of #feesmustfall, a protest against a system where student fees continue to increase above inflation due to declining government subsidy, and a system that should provide bursary support for financially needy students fails to meet its mandate. But as many commentators have pointed out, this is not only a protest about student fees, it is a much broader revolt against a whole system that continues to reproduce the inequities of the colonial and apartheid past. As has happened previously here and elsewhere, while so many adults make their quiet compromises with some (the South African majority) pushing on in grinding poverty while others (the South African minority) anxiously hope to hold on to a good livelihood for them and their children – it is the youth who stand up and reject the inevitability of these unequal futures. As has been widely noted, we should not for a moment think these are the first protests against the failures of our democratic settlement: poor black South Africans, whether miners, students at HBUs, or ordinary citizens failing to receive civic services, have long been bearing the brunt of the state clamp-down on angry expressions of dissatisfaction. The change we have seen this week is that middle class young South Africans have stood up en masse to join the protest.

There is no question that this is a signal moment for the democracy. I will leave it to the political commentators to help us understand the meaning of this moment and the possible scenarios that can unfold from here. In this piece I want to reflect from the position of someone deeply embedded and invested in higher education in South Africa and try to draw together some preliminary thoughts.

To the best of my knowledge, my university (UCT) has never before experienced a full shutdown of its operations, even at the height of anti-apartheid protests on the campus [see correction in comment below – it did at least twice, first in 1989 for two days and then for one day in 1991]. Even recognising the huge significance of the broader movement and that it would have unlikely to have achieved such traction without shutdowns of a number of campuses, we can also recognise that this is a very difficult state of affairs for a university. The urge is to get things ‘back to normal’ as soon as possible and we need to respect that this urge stems from a deep commitment to the academic project which runs on a tight timeline – lectures run at a huge pace during a crammed semester, a quick breathing space follows, then we move into closely scheduled examinations, tight assessment and administration deadlines and at UCT we even manage to fit in graduation at the end of the year (No one is saying it yet but I will be very surprised if we see December graduation ceremonies this year…). Thus it is not surprising that from early in this week we had emails from our university leadership trying to reassure us that tomorrow it would be back to ‘business as usual’. With Friday’s announcement at the Union Buildings we all breathed some relief that some response had been made on the issue of fee increase (even though without a concomitant public commitment to covering the funding shortfall that will ensue) and I am sure I am not the only one that starting hoping that UCT would open again on Monday. Yesterday my husband attended a reunion event at the GSB and the phone call later on asking me to fetch him as he could not remove his car from the parking lot due to the protest sent all my assuredness on that point out of the window. Updates today are that Wits will not open on Monday and we would be glib not to recognise that UCT quite likely faces the same situation, now that the demands have shifted to the outsourcing of workers, potentially a more challenging one than that of reducing the fee increase.

So I want to grapple here with what it means to live ‘in the middle of things’, drawing on the work of sociologist Randall Collins and hopefully not pulling his ideas too badly out of context. Collins notes how sociology is often quick to pronounce a ‘break’ with the past – that was then, that was how we used to think, now we have some version of a ‘new sociology’ that is a decisive break. Collins warns against the limitations of this kind of thinking and argues instead of living ‘in media res’, in the middle of things. Now I recognise that Collins is talking about theory and I am talking about something that is maybe a bit closer to practice, but I want here to try and use his framing to thinking about a way of being in the space that South African higher education currently finds itself. On one hand there is a desire to return to ‘business as usual’, to reject a break, on the other hand there is a strident voice that encourages us to think that everything has now changed and will change quickly. I want here to recognise some very significant changes that have happened to our national conversation in a very short time, but I also want to try and hold a space for living in the middle of things. We are kidding ourselves if we think there is any possibility of things returning to a place where they previously were, but we are also misguided to think we are going to get to swift resolutions and an easy move on into a new future. Here I want to respect the space for political discourse that must work in idealities but I want to hold the broad academic project in a slightly more complicated space. I heard someone celebrating that we can now rejoice in being a fully ‘African university system’ but having spent some time at publicly funded institutions in East Africa I would prefer rather to avoid any simplistic conclusions or solutions.

To open this conversation I would like to offer some preliminary observations on things that I think have irrevocably changed this week. Firstly it is clear that our discourse on the ‘born-frees’ has been hugely simplistic and we should simply drop that term, as one commentator has noted. Young people born into poverty in a democratic South Africa are not sitting back in complacency as noted earlier, and neither are the new black middle class (while we are at it can we also now drop that marketing term ‘black diamonds’) or a significant group of the old white middle class. Secondly, we can stop right now in thinking we can work in a paternalistic manner with South African students. Students have shown how a small vanguard can shut down a campus and be joined by a large movement in sympathy and together have shown how they are also prepared to risk a lot. I do not see this generation continuing to accept, for example, our best education solution to date which hives a group of largely black students into a separate programme, even if we were to scale-up extended degrees for the majority (with a small group of mainly white students on an ‘accelerated’ degree). Thirdly, students have shown us the paucity of our headspace which focuses on our own institution and smugly ignores the lot of those who have a greater proportion of poor students. At the start of this protest institutions like mine kept emphasizing how we have a system where high fees allow a cross-subsidizing of poor students by wealthier students – as much as this has been laudable the students are refusing to confine their concerns only to their enclaves of relative privilege, and so should we.

In short, in my view the field of Higher Education Studies where I work has experienced a significant and important change this week. Of course we have been writing closely around the issues of the inequities in South African higher education for a long time but arguably we have been trapped in a mindset which locates quite a lot of the problem in individual deficits and rests on an assumption that the overall system cannot significantly change, that it will be very slow and incremental but that we will support that. We have celebrated the successes of individuals who have succeeded against all the odds, and we have committed ourselves to work harder, but we have maybe also been a bit timid. We know about the impact of financial need on studies but we have kept our rage in track. I am personally delighted that we have been so hugely kicked in the metaphorical backside this week, challenged to stand up and be at least a little bit more bold in interpreting our analyses. We have been slow to take up the postcolonial work on the structural inheritances of our past, we have certainly completely underestimated the possibilities for collective student agency!

But. We also face a huge challenge to find a way to continue the essence of the academic project amidst what will certainly be a continued state of uncertainty (if it is possible to say that). I am struggling to think how many students are going to find the headspace even next week to ‘knuckle’ down and focus on their mathematics or English literature exams. How can we hold together both a significant and sometimes angry engagement with the state of our society, with the necessity of the sometimes detached and quiet work that is needed for academic growth. The protests only further emphasise for all of us the importance of quality higher education to produce the kind of graduates who can engage with the huge challenges in our society. They have shown us that they want to do so, and we need to work with them to keep these passions alive while developing their minds.

We are very much focused now on the practicalities of the short term and so we should be. We all recognise that it would be a sad state of affairs to abandon the academic results of the second semester of 2015 and we hope it doesn’t come to that. We are going to have to do some extraordinary administrative work to avoid this possibility. I don’t have an oracle but I do hope that we are going to be open to things like a blanket offer of January deferred examinations for any students who find themselves needing these. We need to recognise that students have been affected in a myriad of ways at this time. With my ‘bootcamp’ hat on I hope that we can also open up our campuses and provide support to create the academic focus that will be needed whenever that point comes. More importantly, we need to offer solidarity with our students and try to avoid the kind of antagonisms that are not helpful to university life.

We are all aware that in the next short while it is also going to take extraordinary university leadership to resolve the current impasse and find a way to move forward. We will need to find a way to accommodate the legitimate request that students have to continue to push for a better future, but I do hope with all my heart that we can also manage to do this alongside the conclusion to this academic year – that students will all have a fair opportunity to complete their courses in which they have already invested so much (not only financially).

How we act over the next while will set the scene for the longer term. Let me say it again, let’s ban the phrase ‘business as usual’ from our lexicons, not only because of its market connotations. Let’s together with our students accept that we cannot continue with business as usual. We are correctly very much focused on the financial challenges that this interim 0% resolution poses to universities and I do hope we will have the guts to march again if the state does not come to the party with a widespread bailout. But let’s also accept that universities have to be dynamic and living institutions, and that if our students are calling out the colonial vestiges that continue to hinder us moving forward, for heaven’s sake let’s not trip up over things like statues.

In the previous blogpost I tried to draw on lessons from the 1968 protests, mainly because of the charge that the anti-apartheid disruptions were legitimate due to the illegitimacy of the state but these conditions no longer hold in a democracy. I wanted to kind of ‘normalise’ the possibility that a significant student uprising can in the longer term be necessary for shifting the sedentaries even in established democracies like in the west. But now I want us to also turn in to our own history. I know that for colleagues who were actively involved in the struggle against apartheid, that this week has prompted so many flashbacks on so many levels. Someone said that it was easy then, I am not so sure – I do accept that the obvious injustices of an undemocratic system were maybe easier to see but let’s also remember how many people payed with their lives in that struggle. For the academic project I think we do have many useful lessons we can draw, and these were laid down in our national soil. We must not be surprised when students again form the catalyst for a significant and important protest. We must not be naïve to think that the academic project will not be affected. I am acutely aware of how many South Africans of my age paid for the struggle if not with their lives then with lost years of schooling and university. Many of these colleagues have already played an important role in supporting and advising students this week and they are going to be crucial in helping us know how and when to return to the academic project. I have also seen this week how students though are not simply going to suck it up when someone from an older generation vaunts their struggle credentials. These students are sharp and critical and need to know that these commitments extend into the present. Thus I want to respect the role of radical politically active academics in this space. But I also want to carve out a space for those who are not necessarily going to be behind the megaphone but who will be hugely engaged and happy to be in the other layers of academic work that are going to be needed going forward. There is challenging work going forward, but that is why we chose the academy. We are going to have to be people who can hold together complexity and be open to change. We need to be creative and flexible. More than anything, we need to connect closely and respectfully with our students; the days of patronising are fortunately very much over. We are also serious people who are inducting others into our disciplines and this is work that operates with boundaries – academic work will never be a space of ‘anything goes’. There are good arguments and there are weak arguments and we are educating students to know the difference. If you want to be a socially engaged engineer you are still going to, for example, know how to do a structural analysis to be sure that the bridge won’t collapse, and learning that knowledge will take focus, hard work, and being told when you are getting it wrong.

In closing, I want to recall a comment made a very long time ago by a thoughtful colleague in academic development. Someone was reporting on a ‘skills’ type programme that was well meant in trying to induct black students into the university – but had so many overtones of requiring docility and compliance. My colleague remarked wisely that it seemed we were wanting our students to be passive while she remembered being so angry (and productively angry) for so many of her UCT student days in the 1970s. So yes, let’s not provide a too safe and domesticated higher education for compliance, let’s expose our students to ideas, encourage them to engage, and support them in their very important academic journeys.

Collins, R. (2000). The sociology of philosophies: A global theory of intellectual change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lessons from 1968?

At a number of moments during the #rhodesmustfall protests earlier this year I wondered if this was our 1968 moment, and I am wondering that again. Of course I am fully mindful of Mamdani’s (1996) caution against ‘analogical reasoning’ – the assumption that all countries go through similar developmental trajectories and for everything happening in Africa you can simply find an earlier European analogy. However, here I would like to suggest that if we proceed cautiously there might be something to learn from earlier significant moments of student protests elsewhere in the world.

Much has been written about ‘1968’ – in fact many scholars would suggest that this properly needs to be analysed in a slightly broader time period and not as one year which ‘rocked the world’ (Kurlansky, 2005). Nonetheless what happened in 1968 and took many people by surprise were protests on a number of campuses in Europe, the USA, Mexico and Brazil. There has been substantial scholarship on the impacts of this period on the broader social and political context and I am no expert in that area, but I want to rather focus in on whether we might be able to draw selective pertinent observations for thinking about the current #feesmustfall protests in South Africa, particularly in relation to higher education. This is especially because I think from our repressive apartheid past it is too easy for many of us (particularly white South Africans) to dismiss the potential wider significance of student protests – to focus on the inevitable messiness and with this to miss the important message.

There are two pieces written in the aftermath of 1968 that I am finding particularly useful in this task: Martin Trow’s classic 1973 piece on expansion in higher education systems (Trow, 1973), and a 1970 piece by Fritz Stern, reflecting on the international student movement (Stern, 1970). Trow points to the underlying causal potential of expansion in higher education – when you have rapid expansion of the system it is unavoidable that there will be a number of consequences, all of which are interlinked. One of the most immediate is about the ability of the state to fund an expanded system and to maintain quality and this was one of the key pressure points particularly in Europe in 1968 – most countries had seen repeated doubling of their student populations in very short periods of time, following the prosperity of the post war period. The lay response assumed that these students should have been exceptionally grateful for the opportunities that their parents didn’t have, and were somewhat surprised that they are protesting. At a simple level the system was bulging at the seams and so students were protesting a lack of quality in their educational experience, as particularly was the case in France at the time.

What possible relevance might this have for contemporary South Africa? Well the important flashpoint for the current protest is on student fees – with the underlying issue that South Africa’s commitment through the NSFAS Act of 1999 to be able to fund all academically eligible students has not been possible to maintain, partly through university administrative capacity, but also significantly through a lack of funds. The state has also not been able to maintain the direct subsidy to universities at an inflation-linked level year on year. We need here to note that the number of students in South African universities has in fact DOUBLED since 1994, something we don’t seem to have sufficiently at hand in our deliberations. There is no evidence that any of the budgetary allocations to higher education, either in direct subsidy or in NSFAS bursaries, have in any way been tracking this trend. Thus what we have is a ‘crowded elite’ system (Weko, 2004) which is now bursting at the seams. And this trend is unstoppable. Around the world scholars are noting the continuing demand for higher education amongst all parents who have aspirations for their children. Currently in South Africa we only enrol 12% of the black African and coloured youth cohort and we should expect to see significant growth off this figure over the next short period of time. I am not sure if anyone has taken note that in 2015 we have a significantly larger matric class than we have had for a long while…

So at one level these protests are importantly focusing our attention on funding issues, and these need to be contextualised in terms of a growth trajectory in the sector. The experience from other countries in Africa and some in South America suggests that if the state can’t fund this expansion that it will happen through private higher education, but that has many ramifications for the strength of the public system, and if one looks at the way this trend has played out in South African schooling it is clear that this does not offer a long term solution of sufficient scope.

But Trow also notes that when you move from an elite to a massified through to a universal system there are significant shifts in how one needs to think about the purposes of higher education. Here we need to take up Mamdani’s point and move to a more contextual post-colonial analysis. We have a university system that was historically designed for a colonial elite. During the 1960s and 1970s it expanded its enrolment of white South Africans to move towards a massified enrolment of the minority, but maintained very low levels of black enrolment – as per the structural arrangements of the bifurcated state that is the colonial inheritance. Many commentators would argue that in the post-apartheid period we have failed to change these underlying structural realities. We have a small black middle class that are largely the population accessing the formerly elite universities, and a slightly larger group in lower status universities. The latter have suffered the brunt of poor quality schooling, limited funding for higher education, and limited university resources. Protests have been happening on these campuses for years but it is only now that they have spilled over on to the elite campuses that we are all being forced to pay attention.

But we need to also move beyond the structural dimensions to consider what one could term the cultural dimensions of the student protest; here it is useful to consider Stern’s piece – describing what he felt were the deeper causes of this movement (never only about academic reforms): “an upsurge of cultural grievances, couched in political terms, which was likely to pose altogether new challenges to a world precariously being rebuilt after decades of depression, fascism and war”. Stern locates these “cultural grievances” in three main arenas: 1. A rejection of authority and the requirement for automatic deference to elders 2. A discrediting of national and political authority and 3. A dissatisfaction with bourgeois culture based on material affluence and consumption. Personally I find it rather startling to read these and find the first two easily locatable within the current South African moment – in our political discourse the last year has seen an unprecedented pushback to the authority of the elders and a widespread expressed disillusionment with the way the democratic settlement has worked out. I think the third aspect would need recontextualisation for our South African realities – instead of a large and growing middle class feeling the emptiness of what their parents strove for in post-war Europe, we have a small middle class that is feeling a deep dissatisfaction with the deal that is available for their poorer peers, and a majority remaining excluded from the possibility of material advancement and starting to get more vocal on that. If the 1968 youth were denouncing the moral hypocrisy of their elders we are seeing a similar denouncement of the so-called rainbow ideals in a democratic South Africa.

In closing I want to dwell on Stern’s reflections on the academic responses to the student movement. Firstly, he notes how many academics stayed long in denial at the strength of this growing movement – feeling a relief that it hadn’t hit their campuses and hoping it would all die down very soon. I don’t want to be simplistic but sounds all too terribly familiar (not surprising giving the universal spread of the cultural norms of the university). He notes:
“If academics and administrators had realized the force of the movement and its contagiousness, they might have quickly instituted needed reforms and improved their rapport with the majority of students, who for a long time remained accessible”.

He notes how over time “many people gradually changed their perceptions, and in this openness to reason and experience lies the best hope for arriving at some kind of new consensus.” But he is also pessimistic about some of the aspects on the negative side of the balance sheet – this was 1970 and so we can also reflect on these in the long term now. He notes a growing estrangement between teachers and students, and a decline in the possibilities for the quiet order that is a necessity for scholarly work – in this regard Trow notes that an inevitable consequence was that academics more frequently took overseas sabbaticals or stayed at home in order to get on with academic work and avoid the increased demands on campus. Stern was writing at a point where the scars were still fresh and I think it useful to not be naïve about the kind of challenges we most probably do face. Nothing can ever quite be the same again. Of course the American and European campuses opened again and got their classes up and running, but the neoliberal political trend that can be interpreted as a kind of backlash against the 1960s and 1970s had its equivalent in the rise of managerialism and commercialisation in the university.

And at this point I think we need to depart from the 1968 analysis. These were protests taking place in democracies that were in a different place than South Africa 2015 in terms of their economies and historical inheritances. We face what is most probably a much more significant challenge in that the majority of our youth cohort currently has very little chance of getting to higher education, and there is not a clear political strategy in place to change that. Thus with Trow we need to realise that we haven’t even started the pains of massification and with Stern we need to realise that these protests are related to much deeper issues, to the failure of our society to keep pace with the legitimate aspirations of young people, the assumption that they would be happy with the sad compromises we made when we wanted to keep our worlds safe and predictable.

Kurlansky, M. (2005). 1968: the year that rocked the world: Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism: Princeton University Press.
Stern, F. (1970). Reflections on the International Student Movement. The American Scholar, 123-137.
Trow, M. (1973). Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education. Berkeley: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.
Weko, T. J. (2004). New dogs and old tricks: what can the UK Teach the US about university education: Higher Education Policy Institute.

Grappling with #feesmustfall

There is nothing like a nation-wide student protest with to date three prestigious campuses shut down to get you thinking. Like any serious academic I feel an acute pain at the knowledge that we have just lost two days of teaching but on the other hand I do have to admit that there are conversations and debates currently foregrounded that have lingered in the background for too long. I have been in the institution for nearly two decades and working in academic development I have been aware of the financial challenges that many students face. NSFAS was a great arrival in the early 2000s and UCT Financial Aid also grew dramatically over that time, but still it is too easy (especially if you haven’t got a knowledgeable parent to help you navigate the admin) to fall through the cracks – losing a bursary, not being able to fund a summer term course, losing your residence place because you hadn’t realised your fee account was overdrawn. And we know that the situation for many students on other campuses is worse and has dramatically worsened these last few years as NSFAS for a range of reasons has insufficient funds and by its own admission can only fund 50% of eligible students. But I guess these were just the realities we felt with lived with. The budget debates have got tighter over the years and again these were just the realities we lived with. Individual institutions did their own budgetary juggles and increasingly had to make up for the state subsidy shortfall by above-inflation student fee increases. And I think many of us in this increased climate of institutional competition felt quietly smug that we weren’t at a more beleaguered institution, those like the UoTs and the HBIs that did see annual protests over student fees, given that they had a majority (not a minority like UCT) of students who were financially needy.

Now it has fallen to some of our students to raise a flag and to say ‘enough is enough’ – this situation cannot go on. And I have to admit they most probably would not have got our attention if this had been a polite little protest on Jameson stairs. I have to admit that I don’t think the VCs would be in an urgent meeting with the Minister of Higher Education today if there weren’t three campuses already shutdown (with more likely to follow tomorrow). In my understanding, although the flashpoint has been the proposed fee increases at particular institutions, the actual issue is not about this or that institution and its Financial Aid policy. UCT, for example, does not charge upfront registration fees and uses its income from relatively high fees to fund its Financial Aid programme which now guarantees funding for all needy students. The proposed fee increase thus will not affect the most needy students directly, and in fact in a microcosm models the kind of cross-subsidization that some commentators have suggested (a needs-based fee). However, UCT can only do this because of the composition of its student body which is majority fee-paying. But it doesn’t help to put a fence around ourselves when the rest of the institutions are experiencing a real crisis for what is in some cases a majority of students. It hasn’t served us well as an academic community to pat our institutional backs (and focus on our global ranking). It has allowed the state to consistently reduce (in real terms) the quantum of subsidy to institutions. I know that the VCs in the form of HESA do form some kind of lobby group but there has never been a sense of a serious challenge being mounted to the status quo and that this is in the public domain.

The discussions about the protests give me flashbacks to all the stuff that was said by the white people around me as I grew up in apartheid South Africa. That the ANC had (reluctantly and finally) embarked on a (modest and largely ineffectual) armed struggle meant that they were beyond the pale and thus a democratic solution could not possibly contemplated. The same for students who protested poor quality schooling and the students who protested bush college universities. They are ungrateful! (it was said). I am remembering all the smug little arguments and realising that they are all still with us, and so easy to mobilise.

What we need to do is to focus on the essence of what is being said, and (sorry to say) maybe we have to accept that at times these things will get messy around the edges. We urgently need to listen. And then we need to realise that this is a moment that is far bigger than a protest on, say, fees at UCT. It is at least in part about our government’s inability so far to change the fundamental structural realities that are our colonial and apartheid inheritance. Students do tend to hold up a mirror to the societal ideals they were promised, and not to settle down quickly when the mirror does not show a pretty picture. The rest of us have too often settled down and accepted the status quo, got on with managing our own little piece of turf. We should be pleased we have young people and that they still have ideals. Students at privileged institutions are showing solidarity with peers across the country, and demanding change. In South Africa, I have also been reminded, it has always been the youth who are at the vanguard of the struggle. Every generation has its struggle. Just because we come from a generation which saw the arrival of democracy, it doesn’t mean that this generation is going to quietly sit back and continue to cheer that achievement. Questions are being asked of how the state manages it budget and we should all welcome the asking of these questions. We pay absolute lip service to the notion of a ‘developmental state’. We only have 12% of our black African and coloured youth cohorts enrolled in higher education and we can’t even fund that properly! I shudder to think what this means for the inevitable demand for increased participation that is an unstoppable trend across the world.

On politics, scholarship and the university

In my first year chemical engineering class on Friday a fairly engaged discussion sprung up around two resources that I had put forward around the topic of sustainable development.  First was a short video, Story of Stuff, in which Greenpeace activist Annie Leonard presents a stripped down analysis of why our model of economic growth resting on expanding consumerism, is not sustainable.  Second was a short article by environmental economist, Edward Morey, who uses the principles of conservation of mass to arrive at a fairly similar conclusion.  However, while Story of Stuff ends with a rousing call to arms and invites us all to ‘do our part’ with recycling etc, Morey doesn’t offer this sanctuary, showing that recycling cannot possibly be ‘the answer’ and that ‘zero waste’ is also not attainable.  Most of the students said they preferred Morey’s piece; there were many who did not like the way they felt Story of Stuff was pulling at their heartstrings.  Some of them railed at what they felt were ‘oversimplifications’ in this piece.  Then one of my first years, a young man from Matatiele in the Eastern Cape, put up his hand.  He said to the class ‘I want to be devil’s advocate here’ and he proceeded to say that Story of Stuff had inspired him; it had made him feel there was work to be done and he could be part of it.  I thought this was a profoundly insightful point with bearing on so much more than a class discussion comparing two texts on sustainability.  What this young man was pointing to was the value of the political.  Of necessity it is stripped down and emotional; it needs to rally around a central focus and it can’t get waylaid in particularities.  It shakes you up and makes you feel uncomfortable.  But it might inspire you to action.

For me on that day the resonances of this discussion expanded beyond the brand new Snape Lecture Theatre, over across the upper campus and its troubling heritage, down to the Bremner building where at that time the administration were preparing for a student sit-in.  The point was simple but profound.  Political discourse has its role in society.  It is a stripped down and deliberately emotive language and it is intended to cause discomfort and to inspire action.  As much as my political sympathies don’t rest with the current band of SASCO led protesters, I have to recognise that their actions have got the university talking, thinking, planning.  The VC himself has noted that while we might have already been discussing these matters, the transformation debate at UCT was hardly being conducted with a sense of urgency.  For me it was not comfortable to sit in a seminar on Monday that was forcibly disrupted by an angry group of students but I will admit it really got me thinking.

We live in a deeply unequal society and for many of us middle class types the only way to maintain a presence here is to not think too much about that.  If we really put our minds to the obvious instability in our midst – the anger and the rage – we might find have to check the Australian visa points again.  We don’t want to leave home.  And so we close our eyes.  But a university cannot be a university if it is not alive to the most difficult questions in the society on hand.  As a student you come to the university and it should shake you up.  I came to UCT in the early 1990s as an education student and I had a year that totally shook me up.  I did my first teaching practical in Khayelitsha and I had the likes of Peter Kallaway taking me through the apartheid history that had not been in my history textbooks.  It disturbed all my naivety and it upset my white liberal confidence that I could stride into a school and make a difference.  It took me a very long time after that to find a productive way forward for myself (ironically back again some years later at UCT) but this was the signal year where it started for me.

So yes indeed, let’s have protest on campus.  Let’s have daily reminders that our society is so not well.  Let’s remember (thank you Neliswa Dludla) that only 30 minutes away from our flushing toilets, young girls have to hold their bowels till the morning, afraid of being raped at night when going to public amenities.  If the young people in society are not angry about injustice, then what hope can there be for our future?

But then.  And I go back to my first year class discussion.  These students have embarked on a four year engineering degree, and it is fair to say that Story of Stuff might open up some questions and prod for some action, but that as a university class we have to go further.  If we are specialising in chemical engineering then we do need to go with Morey into the territory of the special laws around mass and energy that put inherent constraints on material production.  To be the future engineers that are going to come up with different technical solutions to these deep problems, my students are going to have to put their heads down, hold their emotion on one side for a while, and grapple with complex academic knowledge.

And here I return to another event of that Friday morning.  At UCT we do have a vibrant set of African studies scholars, and it so happens that in this very week, A/Prof Nick Shephard was running a masters seminar on the colonial legacy of the UCT upper campus.  One of his students encouraged him to open it up to the broader academic community, and it was thus that I found myself in a brilliant discussion grappling with these issues.  Nick took us through the historical record – the Rhodes bequest, the design of the campus by Solomons, the building over of the the Rustenburg slave burial grounds, through to the present day.  From this he built a rich argument about the ‘deep inscription’ of the colonial imagination on this campus.  The neo-classical design and its location hearkens back to an idea from antiquity of the ‘temple on the hill’, and, once you have schlepped up from the Main Road to be with the gods in the temple, you turn back and, with Rhodes, you can hold the ‘imperial gaze’ on the hinterland (that is yours to conquer and subdue – in academic words and later deeds).  What does it mean in post-colonial times to be an academic community living in the ruins of the colonial imagination?  Nick’s talk resonated with a 2013 piece that the former VC, Njabulo Ndebele, wrote in a forward to a book.   These are the deep questions with which an academic community has to seriously grapple. Njabulo deliberately inverts the Rhodes legacy by gazing out from the steps but looking at the townships and the informal settlements, thinking of the tragedy of the frequent shack fires: “…lives charred and belongings incinerated, families traumatised…”

So I am actually excited by the possibility of a campus that has rowdy protests and daily reminders of our difficult society.  This would be an important counterpoint to what feels like an escalating materialism on our campuses.  When I was a student it would have been embarrassing to ‘look rich’ and we competed with each other in our home-made clothes, old sandals, and battered cars (if we had them).  Nowadays, it seems that the grasping consumerism of these last few decades have also transformed our campuses and students parade around their wealth.   Here, I want to say, I think we have to ask some hard questions of our UCT SRC.  For a while I have wondered the increasing presence of advertising campaigns on our central plaza and wondered who was sanctioning these.  I have recently heard that it is the SRC who gives this permission, and takes in the fees.  Even if – as they say – these fees are used to help poor students – I don’t think there is any excuse for this daily saturation of advertising that the student body is exposed to.  So yes, I do welcome a new radicalism on campus.  I hope that it is going to start to look uncool to show off the sports car that daddy bought you before you came down to UCT.  I would prefer to see placards on our plaza than the latest advertising campaign from Samsung or VW.

But then let’s walk from the protests into our classrooms and seminar rooms, let’s have the difficult discussions and then let’s get down to the hard work of grappling seriously with these questions. Let’s produce thinking students and decent scholarship.

On rage, suffering and the university

A South African university like UCT is a privileged space: here we have flushing toilets and the luxury of study.  For those who qualify there is financial aid from the state and the university to make study possible, no matter your family background.  For every student the taxpayer is paying roughly R1 for ever R1 of fees that was paid on your behalf.  How do we live with our position in this uneven Gini distribution; how do we square up the fact that the state can’t solve poverty but it can fund professors?  A logical reaction is rage; is to spread a bit of the poo in the UCT direction, to wake us up from our complacency.

But the campus is not isolated from society either.  And so even if you get financial aid, as a poor student arriving on UCT campus you are about to face the shock of your life when you find out what your school background means for the reality of trying to pass UCT courses.  You were the top student in your school, in your village, and here you are told repeatedly that you are not very good.  You work hard and it might not be enough.  At the end of the year you might be shown the door.  At UCT you are surrounded by many students who do not appear to have the same struggles.  This is the real suffering at the heart of the apartheid legacy in the South African university.  This is a private rage that is almost impossible to bring into the open because it speaks of personal failure.  It festers.  And, I am thinking today, this is the elephant in the room in the statue protest.

What does academic struggle have to do with Cecil John Rhodes?  Everything.  The reasons why a student from a township school and a township family finds themselves without the cultural capital to succeed at a UCT have to be traced back to our long and wounded history.  In the time of Rhodes the university was largely for wealthier English speaking whites.  In the inter-war years UCT saw protests by Afrikaans speaking students who did not feel that the university included them and their interests.  The apartheid era gave a massive academic leg up to all white South Africans, whether English or Afrikaans speaking, whether from wealthy families or not.  Jonathan Jansen traces this closely in his book Knowledge in the Blood.  In 2015 we may have a new political dispension but we have made only tiny dents in the systems in place which deliver students to the university.  So the emerging black middle class has squeezed into the overcrowded small set of good schools in the country (some of this pressure averted by the growth of private schooling) but for everyone else the chance of getting to university, let alone succeeding, are relatively constrained (this so clearly pointed out in the recent CHE report authored by Ian Scott).

These are the facts.  What, therefore, to do?  I find rage uncomfortable but a useful spur to thinking.  Some of the best scholarship on the experience of black students at UCT has come through from two of my PhD students, Linda Kotta and Disa Mogashana, who have enabled their interviewees to express pain and rage.  We can’t even start to be a university if we don’t grapple with the most important challenges of our society.  If we are scholars of education and higher education we need to take as a daily starting point that we as a country have a broken system.  If the majority of our young people are denied a real education that gives them the tools to think, to flourish and to find their way in the world, then we have a problem.  So as a university we need to realise that a lot more rage needs to be expressed on our campus.  And that it can’t go away until our society has changed.  I don’t see that happening in my lifetime so I need to learn to live with a daily expression of rage and discomfort around me.

But then.  As a university our impoverished society is dedicating significant taxpayer money for us to do what we need to do.  So we cannot – I don’t think – suspend teaching and learning because we feel enraged.  We need to find a productive space to work as a community.  We need to live with difference and with hard questions.  We certainly need to continually rethink the symbolism of how the university represents itself.  But then we also need to get on with the hard work.  Moving statues might be important and indeed right but it is not going to change patterns of educational success in our society.

For me the hard work is about the experiences of students for whom school and family has not equipped them best for university.  These are smart and dedicated young people and I have spent nearly 20 years working alongside them, researching, innovating, and teaching, and trying to find ways forward.  Let us not for a moment think that this is a simple ‘problem’ with a technical solution.  I do have technical solutions, loads of them, and I have written about them – active learning in the lecture theatre, intensive work in peer groups, ‘boot camps’ in the vacation, even a thoroughly reformed undergraduate curriculum (in chemical engineering) centred on facilitating student academic success.  But these efforts will be limited if they do not work with real students.  The university needs to offer a safe space for learning and a solidarity for the struggles of learning.  Lecturers need to signal this every day.  We need to get to know our students and to listen to them.  They need to know that we want them to succeed.  At UCT we have pockets where we are getting this right and we have pockets where we are not.  I would like to see a much more sustained commitment to the university ‘Size and Shape’ document in which we committed ourselves to something like a 75% graduate throughput.  I think it is attainable for a university like UCT and I have some clear ideas on what we should do.

So if I was an undergraduate student at UCT, this is what I would be marching about:

• The short academic year. At 120 days this is globally a very short academic year.  It is the shortest academic year in South Africa.  Senate is never on its own going to vote to change this but if I was a student I would get marching.
• The shortened examination period. A few years ago it was decided to compress UCT exams into as short a period as possible.  I won’t go here into the stated reasons but if I was a student I would get marching.
• The cost of vacation accommodation. The university campus is a place of learning and students benefit massively from using summer term or the newly introduced ‘bootcamps’ in EBE.  Somehow the university should budget that vacation accommodation for catering residence students can be factored into the overall package and not be an extra add on not funded by bursaries.  I would get marching.
• Who is teaching. UCT cannot be a great university until its staff are drawn from across South African society.  We need more black lecturers.  We need this to be an institution that fosters some of the best black scholars on the continent.  Let’s just stop being defensive on this point.  I am ready to march on this one.

Council on Higher Education. (2013). A proposal for undergraduate curriculum reform in South Africa: The case for a flexible curriculum structure. Pretoria.

Jansen, J. D. (2009). Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Cape Town: UCT Press.

Kotta, L., Case, J. M., & Luckett, K. (2014). Contradictions in the situational logic of the university: implications for student success. South African Journal of Higher Education, 28(2), 514-532.

Mogashana, D. (work in progress). The interplay between structure and agency: How Academic Development Programme students ‘make their way’ through their undergraduate studies in engineering.  Unpublished PhD, University of Cape Town.

The statue, the poo and the university

On statues.  I am pleased we don’t really live in an age of statues; these generally are from a past age where big men were made bigger and people presumably were impressed.  So the statues amongst us are generally relics from the past, with some exceptions.  So we are talking here about relics from the past, and indeed about the past.  We have a painful past.  If anything I am pleased that this debate reminds us that the pain was not only from the apartheid era, but stretches long before that in the way that colonialism divided up who could own land and who could not.  In this regard the figure of Cecil John Rhodes is pertinent.  Rhodes was a businessman, an unscrupulous one, who made effective use of political patronage to further his business interests.  In modern day terms he was corrupt.  But he also thought enough about his legacy to throw some ill-gotten gains in a philanthropic direction, most notably in the establishment of the Rhodes scholarships and in the donation of land for the new UCT campus on the slopes of Table Mountain.  In 2015, what does the presence of this statue mean for the university?  For me to date it has simply been a relic of the past and part of the neo-classical look of this campus built in the 1920s.  Now it has become a flashpoint for something else and we need to talk about that something else.  Then we can come back to the statue and what to do with it.

The real issue is about the university in 2015.  A university is not actually a collection of buildings (with or without statues), it is a collection of people come together for a common purpose, around learning (around the dissemination of knowledge we already have, and around the exploring of that still needed).  This is a real privilege and in our society it is a small group of people who get that privilege.  But it is a hard task, to learn is to get your ignorance exposed, and your very person stretched.  You can only put yourself to this task in place which is safe to do so.  Thus, at the same time the university offers challenge it needs to offer solidarity[1].  What does this mean in South Africa in 2015?  We come from a society where the actions of Rhodes and his ilk still live with us in terms of who has access to what, most importantly in terms of who gets access to knowledge and to the privilege of a higher education.  When we come together to learn this society comes with us too.  It is the starting point for our most important learnings, but it is also a potential constraint on that learning.  If staff and students in the university do not feel that they are legitimately part of that community, that their voices can be heard, and that their struggles can be held, then we cannot really learn.  This, I think, is what the statue debate is really about.  Now there are maybe some of us who feel that this was all neatly stated in about 1985 amidst the teargas, and that nowadays UCT unproblematically continues to carry this flag.  That is unfortunately a naïve take on the university.  It will never be a comfortable place, the notion of ‘transformation’ is a university business that can never be complete because these are not simple questions.  The only issue is whether the community is a safe space, where difficult questions can be entertained, and where staff and students can feel they belong.  I think what we are hearing is that we are far from offering belonging and safety to all our members.

Let’s get the issue of poo out of the way.  Throwing poo on campus is a form of vandalism.  Obviously as a community we have to have sanctions for that and I don’t think anyone would expect the university not to discipline such actions.  In 2015 in Cape Town throwing poo is of course a political action too.  In that regard we should not think that the campus will be immune from politics.  But let’s also remember that politics, while an important space in a democracy, has slightly different modes of functioning to those we would like to foster in the university.  Let’s take the political calls as an alert to issues we might have been blind to, but let’s not think we are limited to tackling them in political ways only.

So to get back to the statue.  I am completely open to a university community having robust deliberations on the symbols that are on its campus, and potentially to rethinking how some of these function and indeed their very presence.  In this regard there would be a few options at hand and here I think of how the Iziko museum went through such a complex process of thinking through the contemporary relevance of its San dioramas (which nowadays have a critical recontextualisation at play alongside them; in my view a more productive option than simply moving them to the basement).  So a statue could certainly be moved (most probably not a cheap exercise) or it could have an artistic reworking; am thinking how someone like Brett Murray would relish such a challenge.  So let’s put our minds to it, as we do in a university.  I have to admit here that I find the baying crowd a little bit alarming.  I might have missed something but I found the SRC’s issuing of an ‘ultimatum’ to the university just days after what appeared to be the first public student meeting on the matter, to be a little bit premature.  The university community is made of staff, students, and alumni.  We of course all have the ability to issue ultimatums when we feel that some part of the university is not listening to us, but that doesn’t feel right as a first move.  Maybe what we are hearing here is a frustration from prior engagements, a sense of not being heard?  I would like to hear more.

So to those who say, don’t UCT students have anything better to worry about, I say, this is not just about a statue.  This is about our past and our present, it is about how the pain of the past reaches into the present.  It is about how a university can offer both challenge and solidarity to all its members.  It is an important conversation.

[1] Mann, S. J. (2007). Study, power and the university. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Coda

This afternoon I attended a meeting that the university had set up a while ago to discuss heritage, symbols, etc.  You have most probably by now read about this meeting in the press.  The SRC president and his entourage pulled what felt like a Julius stunt.  They insisted that the SRC president speak first, and then they left en masse. The general view of the meeting hereafter was a diagnosis that the university management has lost credibility with the SRC, and needs urgently to work to redress that.  The meeting itself was cancelled.

All I can say is that we are in a bad way.  Partly I feel that this has been a long time coming (see my blogpost from last year “Racism on the Hill?”).  For too long it we have exhibited a defensive approach on real transformation questions.  We need a much more active engagement.  But I fear that this brand of student politics is going to afford that.  I certainly grant them their right to protest and I think we need to hear these voices stridently in our ears .  But I am not convinced that this particular group is really interested in any sort of dialogue at all.  It feels like sheer political stuntmaking.  Great for the building of future political careers but not likely to deepen the university community.   It is going to take extraordinary progressive leadership on both sides to get us out of this impasse and I will be watching closely.  I still think this is the most important conversation we need to have.

Racism on the hill?

I am not writing this in my personal capacity.  I am a UCT academic and I am writing in that capacity.  I guess I always do; that is both the privilege and responsibility of an academic position – you have the freedom to express yourself without any fear of consequence for your job, and indeed you should.  Especially now.

Over the last while in the media we have seen a number of reports of white people allegedly assaulting black people in our city, and some of these have involved UCT students.  There are a number of predictable responses to this.  The one is that the law will take its course and they will get their just desserts.  An official view might be that no comment should be made while the matters are sub judice.  Another view is that these are just the extreme ends of the stupid things that students can do when drunk, in other words this has nothing to do with race.  And that these students represent an extremely tiny minority of UCT students in general.  There is part of all of these responses that I understand but I think they are missing something bigger in the picture – the symbolic significance of these events.

It is not really about the actual cases and the individual merits thereof.  What I think all of white South Africa needs to wake up and realise is what gets triggered when a case like this is reported.  Our rainbow nation has a lot of unfinished business.  There are lingering hurts that go back through the centuries.  And nowadays while most urban black citizens do not get daily experiences of assault, there remain not infrequent feelings of humiliation and exclusion – as a child getting racially profiled in a shop and followed for shoplifting, as a student getting subtly excluded when trying to make contributions in a student group, as a parent trying to get your child into a Model C school, and so on.

So let me get back to UCT and to UCT students.  When I was a schoolkid UCT was colloquially called ‘Moscow on the Hill’ because of its anti-apartheid stance during the 1980s.  I think it is too easy to think that because of the bold statements that were made back then, that it must be obvious to everyone that we are a progressive institution that is (obviously) firmly set against all forms of racism.  And of course in many respects we are.  But just like every generation has its struggle, I think UCT needs to be alert to the struggle of 2014.  As the South African institution that has crested the wave of the global international rankings, the commitment to access and inclusion needs restating and reworking.  The complexity of contemporary challenges does not make this easy, as can be seen in our deliberations on our admissions processes over this last while.

So have I had any arrogant and entitled white students in my class over the years?  Sure.  Most probably at least one or two in every class.  I have noted the behaviour; the demanding of my exclusive attention, the assumption that I might share their outrage at the perceived weaknesses of some of their classmates.  I have politely held my ground and done my work as a lecturer.  And then I have watched over the four years of the degree how the system deals with them.  White students have never been more than about a third of my class, and thus there is only so long that you can strut around like this before your classmates start to take you out.  I need to note here that the extreme forms of this behaviour have often been correlated with less than sterling academic talent, and thus the system of academic progression has also played its role.  But I do need to note here that vestiges of this attitude sometimes remain and I have noted most tellingly in angry reports to me that they haven’t got their choice job ‘because of affirmative action’.  In these cases I have also thought of a few alternative explanations for the recruiters’ choice of the other candidate.

At the other end of the spectrum I am always excited to see the other kinds of identity that this new South Africa is forming: there are always a few white students who manifest an explicit awareness of their privilege and are able to use their talents in quite extraordinary ways – networking across the spectrum, able to move out of the comfort zone, often quiet and unassuming and humble in their capacities.  As a parent of young (white) children I watch and I hope that mine will be like this.  But let’s note that in giving you these two polarities it is too easy to think about ‘good white students’ and ‘bad white students’.  There is also a huge group in the middle who are neither overtly racist or overtly nation builders. (And please do note that I am focusing here on white students because I am insisting that we focus for a moment on white racism).  We all have work to do and a big part of this problem is white denial of the past.   I do think that education in a multiracial space with progressive educators has some power to promote some understanding and cohesion but maybe that is not enough.  From first year we regularly put students in random groups and force them to make some level of connection.  From my course evaluations and my research I do see that many students appreciate this even though they sometimes find it difficult.  Right now I wonder if I need to be more explicit in fostering a conversation about race, in talking about the things we find difficult.  I contrast this to a somewhat more open conversation around sexism: Teaching in engineering on the odd occasion where someone makes a statement that implies a certain gender stereotype I have no problem in speaking up.  When someone calls the females students ‘chicks’ I ask the female students whether they like this or don’t like this.  (For the record, most recently they said they didn’t).

You might be wondering why anything of this matters.  Surely all we need to do is teach them the knowledge and send them on the way?  There is a long tradition of seeing university education as more than this, in the European terms a ‘bildung’, a formation of the graduate.  In educating a professional there is no question that we are also interested in the dispositions and the qualities of the person that we turn out.  And so I am challenged to think a bit more about how we deal with the vestiges of white racism that are in our society and seep subtly into the classroom spaces.  But I am feeling that right now is not the time for telling everyone of how much we are doing, how well we are doing things.  It is the time for a bit of soul searching.  Why do most South Africans seem to view Cape Town and the university on the hill as some kind of refuge for white conservatism?  Let’s not tell them how much we do, but let’s rather listen.  Let’s hear a bit more about how it feels for the person on the street to hear a report of a UCT student who assaulted a cleaning lady.  Let’s not rush to tell them about all the good things that most of our students are doing, but let’s just listen a bit more.  Let’s really listen to black students telling us about what they find difficult about being at our university.  And please, let’s really listen to our black colleagues when they tell us how UCT does not feel like a welcoming place for them to work and grow.  And let’s ask young black postgraduates why they are not applying for academic jobs, rather than assuming we know why.  To be part of the conversation we need to listen.  One of the important roles that a university needs to play in society is the modelling of a special sort of democratic space committed to open and searching conversations.  We should be a wellspring of new and challenging ideas.  We need to be a part of the conversation.

P.S.  Push back if you disagree with me.  Talk about it.  Push back if you want to take this argument further.  Find the holes in my argument.  Please do.  But let’s talk and let’s listen.