Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa: Essays and Interviews on Higher Education and the Humanities 1611485983, 9781611485981

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ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA

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CONTENTS ______________________

Acknowledgements Foreword J M Coetzee Acronyms Introduction Occasioned writings

PART ONE Essays 1

The Scholar-Warrior versus the children of Mao: Conor Cruise O’Brien in South Africa

2

Academic freedom in the New South Africa

3

‘It’s literacy, stupid!’ Declining the humanities in NRF research policy

4

Institutional culture as keyword

5

Making the case for the humanities

PART TWO Interviews 6

‘A grim parody of the humanities’ – Terry Eagleton

7

Criticism and democracy – Edward W Said

8

‘Living out our differences’ – Jakes Gerwel

Conclusion

for 2 sisters Val & Carole education is a door closed in your face opening suddenly behind you

Acknowledgements

My thanks go first and foremost to all the people whose kind invitations led to the writing of the essays brought together here, and who forced me to the painful task of arresting my thoughts in writing. For Chapter 1, my thanks go to the Progressive Education Group at the University of Cape Town (UCT) which flung me into the raging debate around O’Brien and academic freedom soon after my arrival at UCT, and special thanks are also due to my former colleague at the University of Geneva, Bruce Robbins, who encouraged me to extend that work for inclusion in the collection he edited, Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. My gratitude to Philippe Salazar and Rheingard Nethersole for organising the South African Society for Rhetoric Conference in Johannesburg in September 1998, where key elements of Chapter 2 were first presented. Discussion at the conference led to an invitation by Wlad Godzich to develop my remarks for an article for a special issue of boundary 2 on the university. Many thanks are due to him for the hours of discussion and exchange we had in both Johannesburg and Cape Town, conversations in which many of the seeds for this book as a whole were planted. Particular thanks must also go to Ulrike Kistner, for the work of organising the conference at which a first version of Chapter 3 was presented, and for inviting a revised and extended version for a special issue of the Journal of Higher Education in Africa. More importantly, though, this is an occasion to acknowledge the many years of consistently stimulating, supportive and engaged discussions we have had on this and many other topics. Similarly, my thanks to Louise Green, both for her contribution to formative discussions of this chapter, but, above all, for many years of intellectual friendship and always probing exchanges. I am extremely grateful to Saleem Badat for taking the long shot of asking me to write on the topic of institutional culture for the Council on Higher Education, and for many other moments of encouragement and collaboration which have worked their way not only into Chapter 4 but also into the fabric of this book. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peter Vale, both for commissioning Chapter 5 as part of the research behind the Academy of Science of South Africa’s Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa, and also for setting up the interview with the late Jakes Gerwel which concludes this volume. His constant intellectual generosity and engagement remain indispensable. A part of the Conclusion to this book was first written for the colloquium ‘“Beginning the

real debate” on changing governance relationships in higher education’, organised by the ever energetic Nico Cloete in 2005: my thanks to him for that opportunity, as well as for the other valuable discussions and exchanges we have enjoyed. Many other people have played a part in sharpening or encouraging the thinking that went into this book, either through detailed comments, the sharing of their own work, or the casual insights that arise in conversation. Notable among these are my former colleagues in the department of English at UCT: Eve Bertelsen, John Coetzee, Dorothy Driver, and David Schalkwyk; and, outside the department but within the university, John Noyes and Christine Murray; at Cambridge Training and Development in the UK, to Joyce Cade and Martin Good; and to Ian Cloete, former director of the International University in Germany, where I was given the opportunity to test some of these guiding ideas in practice. I am also happy to acknowledge the support of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation for awarding a research professorship in the Archive and Public Culture project at UCT for 2009 and 2010. This enabled much of the writing of Chapter 5, while the warm support and intellectual generosity of Carolyn Hamilton, as well as the supportive criticism of the Archive group as a whole, contributed a great deal to the finishing of this project. My thanks extend to the University of Johannesburg, and especially to its ever alert dean of the humanities, Rory Ryan, for the regular opportunities to share and discuss my work in the best common room in the country, and my gratitude also to Karen Scherzinger and Andrea Doyle for making these occasions work so pleasantly and well. I am extremely grateful to Hendrik Geyer and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies for the award of a fellowship in 2011. This great institution – a model for research support in the country – provided invaluable space and time for completing aspects of this work, and also occasioned several stimulating and useful conversations with another fellow at the Institute, Manuel Castells, whose general support and encouragement I also acknowledge here. My thanks to David Macfarlane at the Mail & Guardian for encouraging what I see as a crucial and necessary interface between academic work and public discussion, and giving me several opportunities to publicly present some of the key ideas developed here. Sadly, my thanks for the interviews must go in the first instance as thanks in memorial to Edward W Said, who died in 2003, both for this exchange and many others; and to Jakes Gerwel, who passed away in 2012. My gratitude also to Terry Eagleton (still alive and kicking) for sharing his thoughts and ideas both on the occasion recorded here and on many others. I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the loving support of my wife Philippa, which extends to every area of life, including her design of the beautiful home study where most of my work is done, and which is the envy of every visiting academic; and to celebrate the happy, refreshing distractions provided by our two sons, Thomas Lys Higgins and Adam John Higgins. None of the above can be blamed for the failings of the book: these remain the special property of the author. This book is dedicated to the memories of three friends who in different ways and in different guises exemplified the values of academic freedom and committed enquiry: Edward W Said, Jonathan Berndt and Christopher Snow.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following permissions to republish: ‘The Warrior​Scholar versus the children of Mao: Conor Cruise O’Brien in South Africa’, which first appeared in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (edited by Bruce Robbins, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990); ‘Academic freedom in the new South Africa’, boundary 2 27(1): 97–119 (copyright, 2000, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu); ‘“It’s literacy, stupid!” – Declining the humanities in NRF policy’, Journal of Higher Education in Africa 5(1): 95–112 (2007); ‘Institutional culture as keyword’, Review of Higher Education in South Africa: Selected Themes (Council on Higher Education, Pretoria, 2007); ‘Making the case for the humanities’, research paper prepared for the Academy of Science of South Africa as background to the Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa (Pretoria, 2011); ‘A grim parody of the humanities’, Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 9(2): 187– 192 (2000); ‘Criticism and democracy’, Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10(2): 153–161 (2003); and ‘Living out our differences’, Thesis 11 115(1): 7–24 (2013). In addition, various paragraphs and formulations also first appeared in a number of articles written for the Mail & Guardian newspaper, notably ‘Academic freedom: Right or practice?’, feature article in Mail & Guardian 2–12 February 2009, and ‘Eagle eye of Marxist intellectual’, Mail & Guardian 26 March– 2 April 1999; ‘The dilemma of the humanities’, feature article in Mail & Guardian Getting Ahead supplement 24–30 June 2011, pp. 49–50; as well as in Times Higher Education Supplement, ‘He spoke the truth to power’, October 10, 2003, p. 22.

Foreword

Dear John, Thank you for letting me see your essays on academic freedom in South Africa. The general question you address – Is a university still a university when it loses its academic autonomy? – seems to me of the utmost importance to the future of higher education in South Africa. Hardly less important is the junior cousin of that question, namely, is a university without a proper faculty of humanities (or faculty of humanities and social sciences) still a university? As you point out, the policy on academic autonomy followed by the African National Congress (ANC) government is troublingly close to the policy followed by the old National Party government: universities may retain their autonomy as long as the terms of their autonomy can be defined by the state. The National Party had a conception of the state, and the role played by education within the state, to which such tenets of British liberal faith as academic freedom were simply alien. The indifference of the ANC to academic freedom has less of a philosophical basis, and may simply come out of a defensive reluctance to sanction sites of power over which it has no control. But South African universities are by no means in a unique position. All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy. You argue – cogently – that allowing the transient needs of the economy to define the goals of higher education is a misguided and short​sighted policy: indispensable to a democratic society – indeed, to a vigorous national economy – is a critically literate citizenry competent to explore and interrogate the assumptions behind the paradigms of national and economic life reigning at any given moment. Without the ability to reflect on ourselves, you argue, we run a perennial risk of relaxing into complacent stasis. And only the neglected humanities can provide a training in such critical literacy. In chapters 4 and 5 of your book you provide exemplary specimens of critical literacy at work, as you probe the occluded history of the concept of organisational culture, set the vastly overrated CP Snow in his proper context, and take to pieces the rhetoric of managerialism in the academic sphere.

I hope that your book will be high on the reading list of those politicians busy reshaping higher education in the light of national priorities, as well as of those university administrators to whom the traditional humanities have become alien ground. I hope that, having read and digested what you have to say, those politicians and administrators will undergo a change of heart. But alas, I do not believe that your hopes and mine have much chance of being realised. There are two main reasons for my pessimism. The first is that you somewhat underestimate, in my opinion, the ideological force driving the assault on the independence of universities in the (broadly conceived) West. This assault commenced in the 1980s as a reaction to what universities were doing in the 1960s and 1970s, namely, encouraging masses of young people in the view that there was something badly wrong with the way the world was being run and supplying them with the intellectual fodder for a critique of Western civilisation as a whole. The campaign to rid the academy of what was variously diagnosed as a leftist or anarchist or anti​rational or anti​civilisational malaise has continued without let​up for decades, and has succeeded to such an extent that to conceive of universities any more as seedbeds of agitation and dissent would be laughable. The university of the past, the university that you defend, liked to think of itself as standing slightly outside and slightly above the everyday political scrum. A degree of disengagement, of independence, of self​determination or autonomy, it argued, allowed its members to engage with questions of the public good in their own way, namely by formulating an intelligent, non​partisan, historically informed critique. The response of the political class to the university’s claim to a special status in relation to the polity has been crude but effectual: if the university, which when the chips are down is simply one among many players competing for public funds, really believes in the lofty ideals it proclaims, then it must show it is prepared to starve for its beliefs. I know of no case in which a university has taken up the challenge. The fact is that the record of universities, over the past thirty years, in defending themselves against pressure from the state has not been a proud one. Few academics appreciated, from the beginning, the scale of the attack that was being launched on their independence or the ideological passion that drove it. Resistance was weak and ill organised; routed, the professors beat a retreat to their dugouts, from where they have done little besides launching the intermittent satirical barb against the managerial newspeak they are perforce having to acquire. This leads me to the second reason why I fail to share your optimistic faith that the tide may yet be turned. A certain phase in the history of the university, a phase taking its inspiration from the German Romantic revival of humanism, is now, I believe, pretty much at its end. It has come to an end not just because the neo​liberal enemies of the university have succeeded in their aims, but because there are too few people left who really believe in the humanities and in the university built on humanistic grounds, with philosophical, historical and philological studies as its pillars. I don’t want to spurn the class to which you and I both belong, the clercs, but the fact is that too few of us have been humanists in heart and spirit, too many simply card​carrying academics. You argue that only the faculties of humanities are equipped to teach students the critical

literacy that allows a culture to continually renew itself, and you make the argument with such persuasive force that I am sure it will be taken on board, at least by the more enlightened of university administrators. But then, I envisage, a telling question will be asked of you: even if we grant that critical literacy is as important as you claim, do students really need to know about Hesiod and Petrarch, about Francis Bacon and Jean​Paul Sartre, about the Boxer Rebellion and the Thirty Years War, to attain a sufficient competence in such literacy? Can you not simply design a pair of one​semester courses – courses in which all undergraduates, no matter what their career track, will be required to enrol – one course to be entitled ‘Reading and writing’, in which students will be trained to dissect arguments and write good expository prose; and the other to be entitled ‘Great ideas’, in which they will be briefed on the main currents of world thought from Ancient Egypt to the present? A pair of courses like that will not require an entire faculty of humanities behind them, merely a school of critical literacy staffed with bright young instructors. Basic courses in cultural literacy are not a new idea. They have been mounted at countless American universities under the rubric of Freshman Composition. These universities have been responding to precisely the same pressure that the humanities in South Africa now feel: pressure to prove the relevance and worth of a humanistic vision within a modern educational set​up. There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too? I could not be more strongly on your side in your defence of the humanities and of the university as the home of free enquiry. I respect your basic approach, which, as I see it, is to mount a strategic defence of academic freedom, the kind of defence that stands a chance of swaying the relevant decision​makers, as opposed to a quixotic defence that can be easily brushed aside. But in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society. In institutions of higher learning in Poland, in the bad old days, if on ideological grounds you were not permitted to teach real philosophy, you let it be known that you would be running a philosophy seminar in your living room, outside office hours, outside the institution. In that way the study of philosophy was kept alive. It may be something along the same lines will be needed to keep humanistic studies alive in a world in which universities have redefined themselves out of existence. Best regards, John Coetzee

Acronyms AFC ANC ASSAf ASTEC BBC CHE HEFCE HESA NAIL NDR NRF OECD STEM UCT Unisa UWC WITS

Academic Freedom Committee African National Congress Academy of Science of South Africa Australian Science and Technology Council British Broadcasting Corporation Council on Higher Education Higher Education Funding Council for England Higher Education in South Africa narrative, analysis, interpretation, literacies National Democratic Revolution National Research Foundation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development science, technology, engineering and mathematics University of Cape Town University of South Africa University of the Western Cape University of the Witwatersrand

Introduction ______________________

Occasioned writings ______________________

In the Students’ Union Foyer, at the base of the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library, hang a series of paintings by the artist Richard Baholo. These form part of a permanent exhibition that commemorates the university’s resistance to the 1959 Extension of University Education Act, and celebrates the final stage of its repeal in 1993.1 One of the paintings depicts a demonstration against the De Klerk regulations (discussed in Chapter 1) that took place at UCT on 28 October 1987. For me, the painting captures a certain dimension of academic freedom, one that was powerful enough to be registered by the new Constitution but that has been undermined since then (or so this book argues) in most policy, discussion and debate.2 In the painting, with a sense of irresistible forward momentum, a crowd of academics, workers and students flows down the steps from UCT’s Jameson Hall. The forces of apartheid law and order – here figured as a single policeman in blue at the bottom left of the painting – are pushed casually aside by the crowd descending from Jameson Hall. They carry placards which reiterate the key educational slogans of the day – ‘Forward to people’s education’, ‘Education is a right not a privilege’, ‘Viva Nusas Viva Sansco Amandla’3 – while the specific occasion of the demonstration is made evident by those reading ‘PHANSI with de Klerk’s bills on education’ and ‘No subsidy cuts for UCT’. What interests me most here is the central organising banner for the demonstration, and from which the demonstration seems to flow: how it gathers everyone together under the slogan of ‘Academic freedom’ (or more specifically, ‘Stop de Klerk assault on academic freedom’). What this painting evidences, I would suggest, is that at this moment in the social imaginary, academic freedom is seen as a positive social force and as an essential component of the democracy to come. This book, in its various essays and interviews, argues that we should insist on remembering this once powerful sense of academic freedom as a positive social force at a moment when policy and politics together are determined that we forget it. In this attempt, the essays and interviews brought together here under the title Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa are best read as examples of a particular kind of

occasional writing that we might call occasioned writing. While occasional writing refers largely to a specific literary genre – that of the writings produced by poets laureate to mark and celebrate specific national occasions – occasioned writing does, or seeks to do, something else.4 Occasioned writing in the sense I put forward here is academic writing addressed to a public moment in a deliberately reflexive manner, and its central task is to try to disturb the easy flow and circulation of received ideas. It seeks, as Edward Said put it, to ‘break the hold on us of the short, headline sound​bite format and try to induce instead a longer, more deliberate process of reflection, research, and inquiring argument that really looks at the case in point’ (Said 2004: 74). In this book, the case in point is that of the place of the humanities in the contemporary higher education policy, with particular attention paid to related questions of academic freedom in South Africa. Different dimensions of the general case are examined in the related chapters that make up the first part of the book, while in the second, they come through as central themes and queries put to three exemplary figures from the tradition of the critical humanities: Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, and Jakes Gerwel. In occasioned writing, academic writers move cautiously beyond the usual scope of disciplinary specialisation, step outside the charmed circle of a purely professional address to fellow scholars, and seek to find or address a more open and undefined public. As such, they necessarily run the many risks inherent in that form. Like all non-specialist writings on topics which enjoy large specialist literatures, it is inevitable that (despite much discussion, advice and reading) they are marked by comparative degrees of ignorance and misunderstanding, and stand in need of (always welcome) specialist correction and amendment. At the same time – and as is apparent in the concrete arguments engaged in each chapter – the wager of the book as a whole is that specialist literatures themselves tend to embody forms of professional consensus that can have their own blind spots and biases, and that these are perhaps more easily registered by an outsider’s eye. In any case, given the real complexity of issues raised by debates on academic freedom and the social functions of the academy, and the simple fact that no single perspective is likely to capture all of these, the essays and interviews in this work are offered as so many occasions for further reflection, engagement and argument.5 The prefatory notes at the beginning of each chapter seek to describe or throw some light on the occasion behind or within each separate essay and interview; but what of the collection as a whole? Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa is motivated in large part by a dismaying sense – at least with regard to the difficult and contested relations between the university and the state – that the wheel has come full circle, and that this is so in ways that were certainly never anticipated when the first chapter was written. The first chapter – ‘The Scholar​Warrior versus the children of Mao’ – was prompted by the threats to academic freedom embodied in the ‘De Klerk regulations’ of 19 October 1987. Now, as I draft this Introduction in April 2013, Minister Blade Nzimande’s Higher Education and Training Laws Amendment Act of 2012 appears to threaten an unexpectedly similar assault on the autonomy and academic freedom of South African universities. The sense of these disturbing continuities has already surfaced in public responses to the new Act. Barney Pityana, former vice​chancellor of the University of South Africa, argues that ‘rather as in apartheid style legislating’, the new Nzimande regulations ‘give the minister open​-

ended and ill​defined powers to intervene in higher education institutions well beyond the powers already available to him’, while Ihron Rensburg, current vice​chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, emphasises that the new legislation – though at the moment of writing still to be signed into law by President Zuma – ‘undermines the careful balance struck between university autonomy and public accountability crafted by the Constitution and the initial Higher Education Act’. The new Act not only gives ‘one individual enormous power [over] the higher education system’ but, he warns, ‘also confuses the “public” with the “state”’.6 Similarly, and in line with Rensburg’s analysis of the anti​democratic authoritarianism at work in the new legislation, is the simple fact that it was developed without following any of the usual processes of consultation with stakeholders and interested parties established in higher education to encourage democratic participation and accountability since 1994. Neither the statutory Council on Higher Education (CHE), which exists precisely to advise the minister on higher education matters, nor HESA (Higher Education in South Africa), the body which represents all twenty​three vice​chancellors at South African universities, was consulted prior to the promulgation of the new Act. ‘Under normal circumstances,’ notes HESA chair Ahmed Bawa, ‘the minister would have consulted us on his intentions to introduce new amendments to the Act and would have given a context for the new amendments and the inadequacies they seek to address in the current legislative framework,’ while the CHE notes that New Clause 8 – 49A (1) is even more broad and open​ended and provides the Minister with the power to intervene and to issue directives on a range of matters and the power to appoint an administrator if an institution does not comply. The nature of the directives that the Minister can issue and the steps that institutions would be expected to take in response are not defined, nor are there any limits placed on ministerial action.7 These and other existing responses suggest that the new Nzimande regulations, like De Klerk’s before them, may similarly be found to stand ultra vires: that is, above and beyond the scope of the administrative power envisaged for the minister by the Constitution, and therefore null and void. That will have to wait for the decision of the Constitutional Court, if the matter goes that far, as HESA fears it will.8 In any case, whatever the outcome of this potential conflict in the Constitutional Court, the intended new legislation draws attention to the simple fact that debates around institutional autonomy and academic freedom and, indeed, the very definition of the university and its purposes in the contemporary world, are far from over. Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa maintains that in these current debates around the social functions of the university, it is essential not to lose sight of or marginalise the teaching of the humanities. In retrospect – and not surprisingly – the reader will find that the chapters here all necessarily tend to embody much of the case they end up arguing for. This is the book’s central and defining idea – that the core skills of humanist education (often referred to here as the skills of a ‘critical literacy’, discussed throughout, but particularly in chapters 3 and 5) have much to contribute to the public good in ways which are being denied, or simply

made invisible, by the terms currently dominating higher education policy.

NOTES 1 The individual paintings are not given names, but depict several key moments, including various demonstrations, and culminating in the relighting of the academic freedom torch, which had been symbolically extinguished in 1959. Together, the Tertiary Education Act of 1988 and the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act of 1993 undid the provisions of the 1959 Act. The university’s record in this regard is more complex and contradictory than might at first be thought from its principled and evident commitment to academic freedom. See, for instance, the enlightening discussion around UCT’s participation in the 1959 Van Riebeeck tercentenary festival in Leslie Witz (2003) and Premesh Lalu’s (2007) intriguing subtle deconstructive probing of the idea. 2 My reservations with regard to the constitutional provision are outlined in the Conclusion. For the most recent criticism of my defence of academic freedom, see Suren Pillay, ‘Decolonizing the humanities’, Mail & Guardian Getting Ahead supplement 5–11 April 2013, pages 33–34 and ‘Is institutional autonomy a myth?’ Mail & Guardian 7–14 June 2013. Minister Nzimande himself criticises defenders of institutional autonomy and academic freedom in ‘We will not uphold the status quo’, Mail & Guardian 4​11 July 2013. 3 SANSCO = South African National Student Congress; NUSAS = National Union of South African Students 4 Samuel Johnson’s observation that in ‘an occasional performance, no height of excellence can be expected’ (1968: 232) seems to have been largely confirmed in the subsequent history of work, and perhaps explains in part William Wordsworth’s insistence that he would accept the position of laureate only on condition that he never had to write to order. 5 I echo here the conclusion of the important Council on Higher Education (CHE 2008) report on academic freedom that ‘no one party can know how, or should have the sole power, to draw a fixed boundary between higher education and society, or between academic freedom and institutional autonomy and accountability. It believes that any party claiming to know how to do this – or vested with unilateral power to do this – may in practice suppress necessary engagement and free expression of difference’ (CHE 2008: 26). I address the report more fully in ‘Academic freedom: Right or practice?’ (Mail & Guardian 2–12 February 2009). 6 See Barney Pityana, ‘Free our universities from Nzimande’s blade’, Sunday Independent 4 November 2012; Ihron Rensburg, ‘Regulatory overkill threatens academic autonomy in South Africa’, Business Day 31 January 2013. 7 See the summary of the HESA and CHE positions in ‘Universities round on Nzimande and his higher education Bill’ in Mail & Guardian 9 November 2012. For Luzuko Buku, deputy secretary general of the South African Students Congress, the implications of the new Act are clear: they ‘empower government to disband some of the previously white institutions, such as the University of Free State and University of Stellenbosch for their racist, sexists’ [sic] policies and or [sic] discriminatory institutional practices’ (accessed from http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2012/11/15/nzimandes​blade​must​cut​where​it​is​mostly​needed​ilive on 3 June 2013). See also Jeremy Gauntlett’s considered and powerful analysis, ‘Minister given a blue light to ride roughshod over academic rights’, in Mail & Guardian 17 May 2013. 8 See Cornia Pretorius, ‘Universities may take minister to court over autonomy’, World University News 16 December 2012.

REFERENCES CHE (Council on Higher Education). 2008. Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and Public Accountability in South African Higher Education. Task Team report of the Council on Higher Education. Pretoria. Johnson, S. 1968. Lives of the Poets. Volume 1. London: Dent. Lalu, P. 2007. Apartheid’s university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment. JHEA/RESA 5(1): 45–60. Said, EW. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Witz, L. 2003. Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South African National Pasts. Bloomington/Cape Town: Indiana University Press/David Philip.

1 The Scholar-Warrior versus the children of Mao: Conor Cruise O’Brien in South Africa

This chapter first appeared as part of a collection of essays published in the United States, Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Robbins (ed.) 1990). It was written as a response to what became known as the ‘O’Brien affair’ at the University of Cape Town (UCT), an event which the vice-chancellor of UCT at the time, Stuart Saunders, described as a ‘major crisis’ for the university (Saunders 2000: 180). My account set out to reframe the discussion that arose around O’Brien’s visit, and to pay attention to the specific social and political context in which the debate was taking place. This frame was provided by the larger political struggle around the disciplining of the universities initiated by then Minister de Klerk in what proved to be the last throes of the apartheid regime. At the heart of the matter was the cutting short of a visit to UCT by the outspoken Irish academic and anti-apartheid activist, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien. Students disrupted two of O’Brien’s lectures, and staged a sit-in at his host Political Studies department after O’Brien had repeatedly attacked student support for the international academic boycott of South Africa, referring to this as a ‘Mickey Mouse affair’. Saunders warned O’Brien of the danger of further disruptions, and he decided to cut his lecture series short, thus provoking an agitated debate on campus and in the press around the politics of academic freedom, academic boycott, and freedom of speech (Saunders 2000: 181–184). As it later turned out, much of the student response was found to have been orchestrated by a police spy and agent provocateur who had been placed on campus with the deliberate mission to foment the kind of disturbances which would justify further government intervention in the universities. The chapter brings together materials I had prepared for frequent public debates on and around the issues, as well as the materials for a lecture in a new course I had devised in the first-year programme in English Studies. This course – Language in Action – sought to apply the methods of literary analysis to more general forms of social, political and cultural representation. In so doing, the chapter can be read as an exemplary instance of what I later came to call ‘critical literacy’: the putting to work of textual, theoretical and historical analysis

INTRODUCTION: University activism and the De Klerk regulations On 19 October 1987, new regulations concerning state funding of the South African universities came into operation. These regulations – commonly known as the De Klerk regulations after their prime architect, FW de Klerk, minister of Education responsible for the universities – claim to have as their aim the safeguarding of academic freedom on university campuses.1 The year 1986 had been a troubled one on South African campuses as students responded to the increasing pressures of what even the state acknowledged to be a revolutionary situation. At UCT, one of South Africa’s largest desegregated universities, two events stood out. The first was a student protest against South African military intervention in neighbouring states and the killing of striking miners in Johannesburg. A peaceful placard protest on De Waal Drive, the major motorway link between the centre of Cape Town and the white suburbs, turned to violence as police pursued protesting students onto campus. The second was what has become known as the ‘O’Brien affair’ in which a visiting lecturer, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, was forced to cut short his stay at UCT when students, infuriated by his repeated attacks in the South African media on their calls for progressive education and an academic boycott, disrupted two of his lectures and staged a sit​in at the Political Studies department. The new regulations attempted to bring an end to such expressions of political dissent by threatening the universities with subsidy cuts in the event of further campus activism. The government claims that the new regulations are only designed to enable the unhindered running of the universities on a day​to​day basis, and such a claim, seen in isolation, might seem reasonable. But it is likely to be treated with some scepticism in the light of the increasing number of new regulations that aim to stifle dissent by criminalising any ‘left wing’ opposition to the policies of the ruling National Party. Important new restrictions on the press were announced two months earlier, under which the minister of Home Affairs, Stoffel Botha, can close for up to three months any publication he finds offensive.2 These new measures have been imposed in addition to the already powerful array of new state powers contained in the State of Emergency regulations. Under these regulations, an officer may judge whether a particular person is a threat to the state, and place that person in detention for an indefinite period. The officer’s judgement need never be tested in court. Thousands of people have been imprisoned in this way since the regulations came into force in 1986.3 As a piece of legislation, the De Klerk regulations share the totalitarian paradox of these other recent rulings. Through the due process of law that is legislation, the new regulations effectively do away with that due process of law. In its place, an arbitrary and absolute power is vested in the agents of the state. Just as it is Stoffel Botha’s opinion that is the sole criterion for whether a publication is offensive or not, it is entirely in the hands of Mr PJ Clase, minister of Education and Culture, whether or not a university is judged to have offended the new regulations. A glaring example of the entirely subjective nature of the minister’s exercise of judgement in this regard can be found in Clase’s reply to the objections the universities made to the initial draft of the regulations:

I would like to stress that the obligation to report on incidents and occurrences as set forth in paragraph 2 of the conditions does not mean that your Council has to report to me on, for instance, typical student pranks, horseplay or similar trivialities.4 Paragraph 2 of the conditions makes a university responsible for ‘any incident of unrest or disruption or any other occurrence against the happening of which the preventative measures … are directed’. The minister’s qualification, which in any event as correspondence and not legislation does not have the force of law, betrays what it seeks to conceal. Under the new rules, it is entirely up to the minister to determine whether or not an ‘occurrence’ constitutes a triviality to be ignored or an infringement of the rules that will result in a subsidy reduction. Will the Day of Protest against the imposition of the regulations be counted as a ‘typical student prank’ by Minister Clase, or will some or all of the universities observing the Day of Protest be penalised?5 The simple and central criticism of the De Klerk regulations is that they are ultra vires: in the sense that they both extend the jurisdiction of Minister Clase beyond its natural boundaries and seek similarly to overextend the jurisdiction of the university authorities over their own members. The draft regulations sought to make the university responsible for disciplining ‘any student or staff member who conducts himself [sic] in a seditious or riotous manner within a radius of two kilometres from the perimeter of the campus’ while the equivalent section in the imposed regulations extends that responsibility to ‘any place’. As UCT pointed out in its reply, the state is attempting to make the university responsible for the activities of its members as members of civil society rather than of the university; to hold it responsible, in effect, for policing the politics of its constituents.6

DECISIVE IMAGES It is in the context of this substantial attack on the autonomy of South African universities that I wish to address some of the issues involved in the questions raised by concepts of academic freedom in the South African context. I take as my starting point an article published in the Cape Times (1 December 1987) by Professor Andre du Toit of UCT’s Political Studies department.7 In this article, Du Toit examines what he sees as the dynamics of public support for the government’s new repressive measures. Du Toit writes, ‘The idea that firm action is necessary to restore law and order on the campuses is a very popular one,’ and he seems to suggest that this popularity – the basis of public support for the De Klerk regulations – is the natural response to a number of what he terms ‘decisive’ incidents. I want to begin here by questioning this assumption and to argue instead for a recognition that the interpretation of such incidents as ‘decisive’ is, rather, an ideological operation. I intend this to be taken in the classic sense of the term in which a biased and selective account of events is passed off as a complete understanding of them. Let us examine a crucial passage in Du Toit’s argument: It is the Conor Cruise O’Brien incident, the stoppage of traffic on De Waal Drive due to

student demonstrations, the refusals to let Helen Suzman or Chief Buthelezi speak on campus, the images of students in violent confrontation with the security forces or toy​toying in protest which continue to be decisive. And these popular feelings are then harnessed to such liberal values as the need to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech. What is it that makes an image – the mere likeness or representation of something – decisive? What can lend to humble appearance the incontestable status of the conclusive or the determinative? Perhaps an image becomes decisive only when there is something to supplement that appearance. The process of representation transforms the raw material of an incident into the smooth​surfaced commodity of the image, and it does so by fixing the meaning of the image. An image is decisive when one interpretation of an incident is fixed upon as the meaning of that incident; when one point of view is selected as the frame for the whole incident. Two examples from Du Toit’s account will suffice to illustrate this force of representation in which the language of the description is always at the same time the language of the explanation of events. When he writes ‘the stoppage of traffic on De Waal Drive due to student demonstrations’, the responsibility for this stoppage is placed entirely on the students. It is an interpretation of the event that neglects that it was the decision of the security forces to close De Waal Drive to rush​hour traffic. Such a closure would be guaranteed to make the placard demonstration unpopular with commuters, and unlikely to be the aim of the demonstrating students themselves. The police claim that the closure was due to stone throwing needs to be assessed in relation to the apparent role of the police agents provocateurs in the one outbreak of stone throwing in the three days of demonstrations.8 And again, when Du Toit offers the image of ‘students in violent confrontation with the security forces’, it locates the students as the prime agents of that violence. The explanatory surplus of this description can easily be grasped if one reverses the grammar of agency and produces as ‘decisive image’ the security forces in violent confrontation with the students. Description, which may on the surface appear neutral, is always bound up in representation with explanation.

THE O’BRIEN AFFAIR In this chapter I want to examine the representation of what has become known as the ‘O’Brien affair’ at UCT. In particular, I want to examine the deployment of notions of academic freedom and freedom of speech in the representation of that affair in the news media. I write ‘deployment’ here in order to emphasise the ideological meaning of that ‘harnessing’ that Du Toit describes, and in order to emphasise that even ‘eternal values’ (of which more later) are given a particular meaning by their expression in a particular time and place. The title of the chapter points to what might be called the ‘narrative image’ given to the whole affair by the press accounts.9 As the ‘Scholar​Warrior’, O’Brien is the hero of the story. His heroism, in this case, lies in his fearless defence of the liberal values of academic freedom and freedom of speech. The villains of the piece are the ‘children of Mao’ – a phrase that

refers to the students who protested against O’Brien’s presence at UCT by disrupting two of his lectures. What is the main effect of representing the protesting students as ‘the children of Mao’? I believe it blocks any attempt to understand the motives of the protesting students by offering the reader a position from which the events can be immediately understood. We might say – to invert a favourite term in the vocabulary of Russian formalism – that it familiarises the reader with the students in such a way that an investigation of their particular motives is made unnecessary. A great deal is understood, or rather appears to be understood, once the protesting students are seen as ‘the children of Mao’. They are represented by others, and not allowed to represent themselves, in Marx’s telling phrase. We shall see that this structure of repressive representation is a central characteristic of the reporting of the O’Brien affair. Before examining some of the media reports of the events, let me begin by offering an account of the events drawn from the Commission of Enquiry report. This report has, of course, its own bias; it too attempts to frame an understanding of the events. But whatever the agenda of its interpretation, its ninety​eight pages at least fulfil the discursive obligation proper to the report of a commission of enquiry, and contain the fullest account of the events and the background to them. O’Brien had given two lectures in the department of Political Studies at UCT in 1985. No protests or disruptions occurred during this visit, though the notorious ‘academic boycott’ was still in operation. O’Brien was invited to return in 1986 to participate in a series of lectures entitled ‘The politics of siege societies’ with Professor Heribert Adam of the University of Vancouver. Adam (one of many overseas visitors to UCT in 1986) completed his course of lectures without disruption, while two of O’Brien’s lectures were disrupted, resulting in the cancellation of the remaining three. These disruptions and the final abbreviation of O’Brien’s visit were widely reported in the press, and stimulated a lengthy debate on questions of freedom of speech and academic freedom in South African universities, as well as spirited discussion of the academic boycott tactic. UCT ordered a full enquiry into the whole affair, and this report was itself the object of further controversy.10 O’Brien had made clear his opposition to the academic boycott in a letter to the Times on 6 September 1986.11 He arrived in Cape Town in late September and continued to make public his opposition to the boycott and to calls for a programme of progressive education in the local press and on the state​run radio and television networks. The first expression of student dissension took place on 2 October during a lunch​hour meeting with students organised by the Social Science Students’ Council. According to the Commission of Enquiry: No real debate took place. Dr O’Brien was apparently subjected to a series of repetitive and rhetorical questions which attacked his position on the academic boycott and questioned his sincerity. Apparently he lost his temper as a result of the attack. (UCT 1986: 17)12 It was this exchange that led to a lunchtime mass meeting on 7 October. After this meeting, the

students marched to the main administration building to demand an end to O’Brien’s stay at UCT. In the evening, a public lecture was disrupted after eighty to a hundred protesting students who had been refused entry to the lecture forced their way in. A second lecture was disrupted the following morning, after a meeting between students and administration had been unable to reach any immediate solutions. Students staged a sit​in demonstration at the Political Studies department on 9 and 10 October. Saunders requested O’Brien to cancel his remaining lectures. O’Brien agreed, having being warned that further lectures might lead to an escalation of the disruptions. O’Brien left South Africa shortly after.

‘THEY’RE DEBATING FREEDOM OF SPEECH’ I want to examine in some detail a few sections of the BBC ‘Newsnight’ report of 8 October in order to demonstrate the workings and dynamics of representation.13 My principal criticism of the BBC report concerns what I see as a structured complicity between O’Brien’s account of the events and the account offered by the BBC report. I shall examine some of the ways in which the report positions its viewer so that he or she is likely to accept and to endorse O’Brien’s interpretation of the events. The BBC report begins as follows: Recorded visual image: students scuffling in a corridor with security guards. Recorded noise: indistinct shouts and chanting. Recorded phonetic sound (voice-over): In Cape Town’s college cloisters they’re debating freedom of speech. The phrase ‘college cloisters’ sets the British home viewer at a comfortable distance from the events depicted. One of the narrative logics of the report becomes that the events that took place at UCT would not take place in an English university. Just as Cape Town does not have college cloisters because it is not organised on the ‘Oxford’ model, neither does it have debate on freedom of speech, but instead scuffles, violence, transgressions. Indeed, I do not think it would be too exaggerated to suggest that one of the major issues involved in the whole O’Brien affair is prejudged by the very logic of this opening sequence. The question of whether or not the university should be an ivory tower, cut off from the struggles of the rest of South African society, is already resolved here. The disruptions at UCT are ‘explained’ by ‘saying’ that UCT is not that ivory tower: its ‘cloisters’ are visibly not quiet. This is what happens if you bring politics into the university. This first sequence is followed by some footage and some discussion of student politics in South Africa as background to the events. But what is crucial is that the third sequence of the report offers O’Brien’s own words in the place of the authoritative or narrating voice​over. His words begin and carry the viewer over a cut in the visual sequence from students scuffling in a corridor to O’Brien addressing an audience and picking up his words. He speaks at this point from two positions in the report: as the informing voice​over and also as Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien:

Can anyone imagine that my presence on this campus has anything to do whatever with either fomenting or averting civil war? This question is rhetorical and invites a negative response. What is occluded here is that this rhetorical question is given as an answer to a question from a student – an answer to a question from a student, moreover, in a debate on academic freedom and freedom of speech! As a reply, it is impatient and evasive, displaying the anger and frustration that apparently characterised the whole debate between O’Brien and the students on that Tuesday afternoon. In a sense, this omission of the question to which O’Brien’s question is an evasive response reflects the structure of omission in the report as a whole. For what is omitted is precisely the voice and viewpoint of the protesting students. A second – and perhaps even more important – delegation of the narration occurs at the end of the report. The closing sequence is introduced by the following voice​over: Recorded phonetic sound (voice-over): Dr O’Brien had come to Cape Town to deliver a series of lectures comparing South Africa to Israel and Ireland … ‘Societies under siege’. What is emphasised here is O’Brien’s essential innocence. There is an echo of an earlier description of him as ‘an unlikely target … supporter of sanctions’. This innocence is crucial to the establishment of his identity as the ‘Scholar​Warrior’, thrust by circumstances beyond his control into a courageous confrontation with the forces of chaos represented by the ‘children of Mao’. Any of the more complex problems regarding his stance as a liberal opponent of apartheid are left unmentioned: the debate between O’Brien and Neil Ascherson, the anti​apartheid movement’s disapproval of his visit to UCT, the problematic relations with the Observer, in brief, his whole status as a controversialist.14 The narration, having identified O’Brien as the innocent and courageous hero of the story, delegates the narration to him. He is given, quite literally, ‘the last word’: It is a determined challenge from a determined minority – and whether that kind of thing – the shouting down of teachers – shall be prevented as a university or not. What is challenged here is the freedom to teach and to learn – values that are absolute and eternal – important from the days of Socrates and Plato and whose value will still be here long after apartheid has vanished into the garbage can of history. This ‘last word’ operates a crucial shift of emphasis in the report as a whole, which began with the question of freedom of speech (‘In Cape Town’s college cloisters they’re debating freedom of speech’). At the end of the report, the focus is on academic freedom: ‘What is challenged here is the freedom to teach and to learn.’ What are the effects of this shift? The concepts of academic freedom and freedom of speech share what might be called, to borrow Wittgenstein’s term, a ‘family resemblance’.15 In Western liberal discourse, the two are associated as values and ideals belonging to the notion of democracy. In South Africa, as practices rather than ideals, the two are in very different positions. Freedoms of speech and association are severely restricted in South Africa, with further restrictions being added almost

every day; and, as we have already seen here, the autonomy of universities is under threat from the De Klerk regulations.16 The easy conflation of the two for the BBC audience does not stand serious scrutiny in the context of South Africa. The report’s equivocation on whether academic freedom or freedom of speech was at stake in the O’Brien affair serves to obscure, as we shall see, the case against O’Brien. The conflation works to make O’Brien’s defence of the ‘absolute and eternal values’ of academic freedom a defence of O’Brien’s own exercise of his personal freedom of speech. In an important sense, the report makes O’Brien represent the values of academic freedom and freedom of speech. He is their embodiment, and any attack on him is thus an attack on those values.17 Let me try to clarify why I see this conflation of the two as so important. I want to say that the real stakes of the O’Brien affair should not be understood as a conflict about the abstract principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech, but rather as a conflict concerning the practical exercise of those freedoms in a particular time and place. The conflict that interests me here is between an idealist view of such freedoms and a materialist analysis of them. What is ignored in the BBC report is exactly a sense of the particular time and place of the events, the context necessary for a fuller understanding of them.

THE DEBATE The coverage of one particular incident in the report can serve to illustrate this in an especially striking manner, and at the same time display the extent to which the report acts to endorse O’Brien’s interpretation of the affair as the correct one. It is the reporting of the debate that took place – or did not take place – between O’Brien and the members of the Social Science Students’ Committee. It is worth noting that the Commission of Enquiry assigned an important causal role to this encounter: The overwhelming view of those who gave evidence before us was that the ‘debate’ and Dr O’Brien’s response to the students on that occasion was in fact the trigger which set off the subsequent disturbances. (UCT 1986: 44–45) The Commission’s view of the debate emphasises O’Brien’s ‘response to the students’ as a crucial factor. In their view, it was the tone adopted by O’Brien in response to his questioners that infuriated students enough to begin protesting against his presence at campus. The report gives the following account of his immediate reflections on the lunchtime debate: I was insulting and condescending. I did not follow my own standards. I was guilty of an error of judgement. (UCT 1986: 17) It is important to note that O’Brien has since stated that he never made such a statement, and strenuously rejects the way in which the report made him at least partly responsible for the disruptions.18 Once again, I wish not to attempt to adjudicate between two different interpretations of what happened but only to show the way in which the interpretation of the BBC report itself decides the issue. The ‘story’ (itself a revealing term in news reporting) is

constructed so as to represent O’Brien as the heroic Scholar​Warrior in conflict with the forces of evil represented by the children of Mao. The BBC report gives a number of sequences from the debate and, in all but one of them, only O’Brien’s reply is heard – a fact of some importance in itself. In the instance in which both the question and O’Brien’s response are shown, I want to examine particularly the structures of representation at work. O’Brien described the event in the New Republic (27 October 1986): On October 2, at the university, I had my first serious encounter with the militant students. I had accepted an invitation from the Social Science Students’ Committee to take part in a debate on the subject of the ‘academic boycott’. When I showed up and asked who would represent the case for the other side, I was told, ‘Nobody. You are to speak for about five minutes, and then it’s questions.’ It began to dawn on me that I had been set up. By accepting the invitation, I had let myself in, not for a debate, but for an organised grilling. It was a neat trap. Saving what I could, I told them I didn’t accept their ‘five​minute’ ordinance, but would speak as long as necessary to present my case. Then they could put their questions. This was agreed. One might question whether being given the opportunity to ‘speak as long as necessary to present [his] case’ constitutes a very formidable trap; but the crucial point is O’Brien’s sense of the existence of a trap and who was responsible for setting it up. For O’Brien, the trap was constituted by the form of the debate. In his view, the absence of a single other debater was a clear departure from the rules of civilised debate: ‘I had let myself in, not for a debate, but for an organised grilling.’ In his interpretation of the event, the very aim of the ‘debate’ was to make a ‘neat trap’ for him. There is a striking similarity in the way in which the BBC report begins its main coverage of the debate. These are the words that introduce this sequence: And he fell into the trap, agreeing to take part in a debate with them only to find himself in a rhetorical shooting match with him as the target. The report also sees the debate as O’Brien was to see it in hindsight, as an ‘organised grilling’, ‘a rhetorical shooting match with him as the target’. It is important to note that an alternative explanation of the structuring of the debate does exist. The Commission of Enquiry reported as follows: The evidence before us clearly suggests that whatever Dr O’Brien’s prior expectations might have been, there was no scholarly debate concerning the merits of the academic boycott. The students believed with justification that they were prohibited by the Emergency Regulations from advancing the cause of the academic boycott. This seems not to have been adequately explained to Dr O’Brien. (UCT 1986: 43–44, my italics) My point here is not to adjudicate between these two explanations of the particular form the debate/grilling took, but simply to note that the BBC report chooses to endorse O’Brien’s

interpretation. Like him, the report ignores or appears to be ignorant of the prohibition of any public endorsement of boycott strategy to which the Commission refers. O’Brien’s account and the BBC report share an important emphasis on the Western ideals of debate and freedom of speech; but it is an emphasis made at the expense of attention to the material realities of state repression of just those issues in South Africa today.

QUESTIONS OF RHETORIC There are further important connotations at work in the way in which the BBC report represents the event as a ‘rhetorical shooting match with [O’Brien] as the target’. A shooting match is usually thought of as a competition between two or more opponents in which the skill of each is tested. The weapons of this match are words – it is a battle of rhetorics, or persuasions. But once again, O’Brien is given an ambiguous position. He is seen at the same time both as one of the opponents in the shooting match, and as the target in the match. The force of this is strengthened or made clear by the quotation of O’Brien’s view of the debate, which immediately follows. ‘These questions appear to me quite frankly rhetorical. They are not questions designed to elicit information. They are questions designed to make ideological points.’ I shall come back to the concept of communication that is implicit in the notion that questions should be asked only to elicit information (it is the status of communicator or teacher that is important). For the moment, I only wish to note the way in which rhetoric – here a pejorative term – is assigned solely to O’Brien’s questioners. In this representation, only O’Brien’s opponents employ rhetoric; only they have ‘ideological points’ to make. The implication is that O’Brien’s responses to the questions are free of rhetoric; the assumption is that he had no desire or need to make ‘ideological points’. The exchange is closed/framed by the following commentary: The liberal at bay, surrounded by young radical opponents determined not to accept his arguments, driven to the edge of anger. Why describe his opponents as ‘young’ and ‘radical’? Radical here takes its meaning in opposition to liberal. The information that his opponents do not share his liberal views is perhaps superfluous; but the connotation of radical, particularly when linked to young, suggests that the opponents of O’Brien’s views are wrong. The implication is that they lack the experience and authority conferred on O’Brien by his status as a teacher and internationally known figure. What is described as their determination not to accept his arguments is then understandable. It is not that they have rational grounds for rejecting those arguments, but that they simply are determined – by their youth, their inexperience, their very radicalness – not to accept them. Once again, the children of Mao. And once more, the heroic Scholar​Warrior, ‘surrounded’ by opponents (in fact, facing them from the authority of the podium), ‘at bay’. Why describe O’Brien as ‘driven to the edge of anger’? This implies that he did not in fact become angry. Why should he become angry? Because his opponents would not agree with him? But then this would suggest too strongly that he was their opponent, and equally

determined not to accept their arguments. So, ‘driven to the edge of anger’ only. My own reading of what is shown does not fit the interpretive frame offered by the commentary. To my eyes, O’Brien is visibly upset and angry in this sequence, driven over the edge, and the narration is here attempting to occlude that visible upset. Let us now turn to the actual verbal exchange that is framed in the manner described earlier: Anonymous questioner: To what extent and in what particular ways are you advancing your struggle against apartheid by being here? O’Brien: I’m not a soldier in a revolutionary movement, nor am I playing at being a soldier in a revolutionary movement. And I don’t intend to do that or be that. And I don’t accept the right of these people or any people to dictate to a free scholar when he should teach. And I don’t think that principle should be accepted by any university [boos from the audience]. Nobody who is a liberal could endorse an academic boycott – it is anti​liberal in the extreme. I am not going to have the framework of my liberalism set for me again by other people with whom I don’t agree. O’Brien’s answer seems to read the question as asking him why he has broken the academic boycott. His reply is that he does not agree with the academic boycott. What is occluded in that reply is the relation between his principled opposition to the tactic of academic boycott and his struggle against apartheid. The questioner seems to interpret O’Brien’s breaking of the boycott as being in contradiction to his opposition to apartheid. O’Brien’s response evades or refuses that contradiction in the name of maintaining his individual identity as a liberal. A response to this exchange would be unlikely to accept the interpretation offered by its framing in the report – namely, that O’Brien had no ideological points to make and did not employ rhetorical, persuasive or emotive language. It would be difficult not to hear the strains of rhetoric in O’Brien’s opening statement, ‘I’m not a soldier in a revolutionary movement, nor am I playing at being a soldier in a revolutionary movement.’ Surely the coordinate clause is highly emotive, and suggests precisely the aggressive condescension O’Brien was later, in some accounts at least, to admit and then later still to deny? It is also difficult to see how a statement such as ‘Nobody who is a liberal could endorse an academic boycott’ is not asserting an ideological point! The whole effort and effect of the representation of the event are working against such perceptions as these, and toward a view of O’Brien as innocent of any political intentions, the innocent victim of the political intentions of others – a claim that, as we shall see later, is directly controverted by an untelevised portion of the interview footage.

‘YOU GUYS DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING’ In the BBC report, the viewer is engaged in a relay of points of view in which he or she is addressed either by the voice of the narrator or by the voice of O’Brien. What is strikingly absent in the report is any direct representation of the views of the protesting students. They are represented usually in the third person, outside the ‘I–you’ circuit that links the viewer to the narrator and/or O’Brien. For only one shot in the report is someone critical of O’Brien

allowed to speak directly to the camera. For some seven seconds an anonymous student is interviewed on the steps of Jameson Hall. The content of this student’s remark endorses the interpretation of events offered by the Commission of Enquiry, but the way in which the viewer is positioned by the authority of the narration works against such an interpretation. This is what the student says: He seemed somehow contemptuous of the efforts people are making here to bring about change and he seems to come in as an outsider and say, ‘Well look, you guys don’t know what you’re doing. I know what I’m all about – I have my individual rights and therefore I’m here.’ It’s a sort of contempt for what people here are doing. There are two main aspects to the narration’s refusal of this point of view. The first is the choice of venue for the interview. It is an informal interview, on the steps of the university’s Jameson Hall. Its casual nature contrasts strongly with the interview accorded to O’Brien in the garden of a Cape Town house. Its informality detracts from the authority of the statement made in the same way that the anonymity of the interviewee does. The informality and the anonymity work together to suggest that it is not a considered opinion – not the opinion of an expert like Dr O’Brien – at all. The better to grasp my point here one only has to ask what difference it would have made to identify the student as Patrick Bulger, the chair of the debate, a person who certainly thought through the issues involved as much as O’Brien did, and if the interview had been conducted in the quiet of an office rather than in the bustle of the campus.19 More telling still is my second point, the sequence that precedes Bulger’s remarks: Recorded visual image: Students marching on UCT campus carrying a banner marked GO HOME O’BREIN. Recorded phonetic sound (voice-over): Left​wing students may not be able to spell his name, but they see him as the overriding issue of the moment. An unlikely target … supporter of sanctions … Here the ‘spelling mistake’ (it has been suggested that it could be the equivalent of a bad Shakespearean pun) is used to prepare the viewer to accept the contention, ‘You guys don’t know what you’re doing.’ The narration says that O’Brien is an ‘unlikely target’ and claims that he is seen by the protesting students as ‘the overriding issue of the moment’. The convergence of the two suggests quite simply that the students are wrong in regarding O’Brien as the ‘overriding issue of the moment’. Once again, the narrative of the report works to make O’Brien’s interpretation the preferred reading of the events for the television viewer.

‘I’M NOT JUST A SCHOLAR … I have to go public’ The crux of the matter came to be O’Brien’s notorious attack on the academic boycott strategy, and its widespread dissemination in the local and international press, as well as on the state​run radio and television networks:

It [the academic boycott] exerts no effective pressure on the regime in Pretoria where I believe it is good for a laugh. It actually damages the anti​apartheid cause by the conjunction of conspicuous silliness with overt bloody​mindedness. In all its aspects and its supposed political objectives, the academic boycott is Mickey Mouse stuff. (BBC ‘Newsnight’ report) This is not, surely, the language of temperate academic debate – as qualified and polite in its detailing of an opponent’s arguments as it is rigorous and implacable in its arguments against them. It is rather the language of provocative polemic and ridicule: the journalistic style of an upmarket Sun leader. It is worth noting that these challenging words are addressed not to a present equal, who would have the right to reply in kind, but to the absent and disempowered ‘third person’, who, according to the Emergency Regulations, would not even have had the right to reply in public. I think my principal criticism of the BBC report is probably clear by now. The report tells the story of the events from the point of view of the Scholar​Warrior himself – seeking all the time to maintain his status as the hero of the story. In so doing, it is content to cast the protesters in that most clichéd of roles – that of mindless left​wing activists, the children of Mao. For all its apparent endorsement of the liberal values of free speech, the report chooses to ignore what the champion of free speech, John Stuart Mill, regarded as sine qua non: the granting of an equal degree of rational motivation to each side in any dispute.20 The report consistently focuses on the expression of O’Brien’s arguments and ideas at the expense of any exploration of the views of those who grew to oppose his visit to UCT. Of course the complicity of the BBC report with O’Brien’s views need not be seen as a conscious strategy. Rather, O’Brien has the ‘natural’ privilege accorded a ‘public’ figure: the right to direct address, to a relatively unmediated expression of his views. O’Brien’s very status as that public figure empowers him in a way that is denied to his absent, third​person opponents. It is worth quoting from an untelevised section of the final interview in which O’Brien identifies himself as just that kind of public figure, and at the same time acknowledges what is strikingly absent from the televised BBC account: the intentionally provocative nature of his visit to UCT. He is replying here to a question as to whether or not he was surprised by the disruptions: I was expecting something of the kind. I went public breaking the academic boycott because I’m not just a scholar. I’m a journalist and a communicator, so I have to go public. This acknowledgement of his particular status as a journalist and communicator gives a context for understanding an earlier remark. ‘They are not questions designed to elicit information’ was his complaint about the questions thrown at him by the Social Science students. That particular complaint sheds light on the kind of power O’Brien is used to having as a public figure. It is a power that has been admirably described by Suzanne Kappeler (1986: 188) in her essay ‘Communication’:

In the domain of public communication … ‘to communicate’ means speaking in an amplified voice to a silent mass audience. The contributors are monologuers, their contributions are monologues, their need to communicate is a monologue. Communication has become a one​way process, a transitive transfer of information, ‘facts’ and opinions (representations). The term ‘communication’ is most inappropriate and should be replaced by ‘self​expression’ if not ‘monologue’, although both these terms fail to make explicit the coercive aspect of the process with regard to the receiver group – the ‘general public’ or, as it is known among the professionals of the media, ‘the target audience’. It is this coercive aspect that needs to be attended to in order to understand the full effects of that conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech that I began by pointing out. The real stakes of the O’Brien affair were never the abstract rights of academic freedom and freedom of speech, but the material embodiment of those rights in existing South African society. The core of the O’Brien affair was never O’Brien’s right to hold the opinions he had on those issues, but the political questions raised by his ‘going public’ with them in the South African media in October 1986.21

OPINION AND NUISANCE Once again, it is worthwhile returning to some of the detail of John Stuart Mill’s arguments in favour of free speech in order to grasp what was consistently evaded in the BBC coverage – the politics of the O’Brien affair. It is my belief that these can best be understood as the politics of speech as a particular form of action or agency. Mill’s essay ‘On liberty’ (1859) is justly famous for its defence of freedom of speech. Perhaps the most widely quoted section is the following: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. … We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. (Mill 1964: 142–143) Above all, it is proper that a university should seek to defend that essential liberty. But a less cited passage contains a distinction that is crucial to an understanding of the O’Brien affair. It is the distinction Mill takes between holding and expressing opinions. According to Mill, there are certain circumstances in which expressing an opinion counts as an action; and, as he puts it, ‘No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.’ He continues: Opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn​dealers are the starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a

corn​dealer, or when handed​out among the same mob in the form of a placard. … The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. (Mill 1964: 184) O’Brien’s case differs in important respects from the ones imagined by Mill, but I think that the central principle is the same. It was precisely O’Brien’s desire to ‘go public’ and to ‘make himself a nuisance to other people’ that places his case beyond the bounds of any real possible defence in terms of freedom of speech or academic freedom. Rather, going public in the way in which O’Brien did in South Africa constitutes a direct political challenge to the majority of the progressive movements in the country. By locating speech as a kind of action, Mill brings to our attention the fact that language is not simply the neutral medium of expression it figures as in liberal idealist arguments. Rather, language itself is both the stake and site of political and ideological struggle. In that struggle, it seems rather absurd to seek to defend O’Brien against an attack he both expected and provoked. Nevertheless, it is as the innocent victim of the children of Mao that O’Brien is represented in the report. What this representation refuses is any explanation of the events that would see them as ones in which a directly political challenge was met by a directly political response; where public provocation was met with public reaction; where the context was between the political force of coercive monologue and the political force of mass protest. It is a commonplace of television criticism that its news coverage represents the outside world as hostile. In the pseudo​dialogue that takes place between the television report and the television viewer, that hostility is likely to be embodied in the bearer of the third​person address, the dialogue’s ‘other’. The commercial pressures under which television ‘coverage’ is produced are unlikely to foster any serious understanding of the complex realities that form the raw material from which the commodity (i.e. news) is produced. The general case is, I think, all too well illustrated by this particular instance. I have tried to emphasise here precisely what is involved in the deployment of a ‘universal value’ such as freedom of speech and academic freedom in a particular – and particularly complex – material context. The obvious question raised by such an emphasis is: Why bring this ‘universal value’ to bear on only one particular incident and not on others?22 Surely such a selective use of a supposedly universal concept only destroys its claims to any ethical force? It is for this reason that I have tried rather to evaluate the rhetorical force of this deployment of the concept, its force as representation.

CONCLUSION: Local coverage, the questions (not) asked In conclusion, I should like to add a few points concerning the particular effects of that deployment in the South African coverage. It might be thought that the local coverage would be able to go beyond the simple ‘Scholar​Warrior versus the children of Mao’ narrative that structured the BBC coverage. Anthony Heard’s Cape Times article, ‘But why do students act like this?’, made a number of points that would be essential for a deeper understanding of the whole affair – but this belated coverage was only to appear as late as 18 October, when the

structure of the dominant representation was already firmly in place. Heard’s frustration is evident: What makes students disrupt meetings and break down doors to stop a world figure, who incidentally favours economic sanctions and interventions, from merely speaking? If this question is not asked, the matter is not remotely addressed, because something must drive otherwise normal students to such behaviour. The answer, it would seem to me, is simply that black bitterness has grown so exponentially that there is, currently, little room for traditional reason. The classic statements in favour of free expression and academic enquiry, however noble, are seen to be meaningless in a country under a State of Emergency, indeed close to military rule, where freedom is denied. The local press reports ignored these questions just as much as did the BBC report, preferring to offer O’Brien’s account of the incidents rather than explore the motives of the protesters. But there are two important and related differences in the local coverage. There is an emphasis on the necessity for adopting punitive measures that is absent from the BBC coverage, and related definition of the object of such punitive measures. It is this dual response that was crucial in the imposition of the De Klerk regulations. The first of these differences can be gathered from the initial report of the disruptions in the Cape Times of 8 October 1986. Once again, it is O’Brien’s account that is offered as the major interpretive context for the reader’s understanding of the disruptions. He is quoted as follows: Universities are about communication and freedom of intellectual communication – not about having people shouted down. Those who do try and do this must be resisted and discouraged and I think in the end there should be no place for people who do that on a university campus if they persist. Here the need to defend academic freedom is given a particular emphasis that is absent from the BBC account. It is an emphasis on the necessity for a punitive response to the disruptions of lectures: ‘… there should be no place for people who do that on a university campus if they persist’. I find it difficult not to see this kind of response – the denial of the right to a university education to protesting students – as a special kind of ‘shouting down’ of people in itself. Such a response does not seem to me to meet the standard of equal and rational exchange proposed by Mill, but rather to be a mirror image of the ‘violence’ of the disruptions themselves. The second difference is in the identification of the object of that punitive response. This is a more complex matter. The Cape Times (18 October) again differs from the BBC in offering a second interpretive context – though still not that of the protesting students themselves. This is the one offered by UCT’s Moderate Student Movement (a right​wing student organisation usually associated with the policies of the ruling National Party): Once again left​wing students have demonstrated their intolerance of views with which they disagree. They have once again displayed their total disregard and contempt for the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech which they claim for themselves.

The object of that punitive response can here be read as students who represent the forces of anti​apartheid activism. It was precisely this dissatisfaction that was behind the government enquiry into the ‘breakdown of law and order on campuses’ reported on by the Sunday Times of 9 October 1986. What was to be most important in the accounts to follow was the ways in which those forces were themselves represented, not as anti​apartheid forces, but as anti​rational.23 What we can see is a ‘shouting down’ of opponents no less violent than that decried by O’Brien himself, a ‘shouting down’ that takes the form of equating the disruption of a lecture with the familiar forms of state terrorism and the most brutal and terrifying forms of township violence. I offer two quotations in support of this, the first from the editorial in the Cape Times of 10 October 1986: The gross discourtesy shown to Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien was as symptomatic of mindless left​wing zealotry as police sjambokking of peaceful protesters is illustrative of right​wing ideological obsession. The second is taken from a letter by N Harris of Noordhoek in the Cape Times of 15 October: These tub​thumping trendies have no solution to offer and their anarchism strikes one as being very close to the mindlessness of the necklace murders of the townships. … I am deeply ashamed of the bad manners of these culpable radicals. The language here betrays the strains of trying to equate the discourtesy of disrupting a lecture with the physical violence of sjambokking or necklacing, but it also serves to reveal a third central component of the local coverage. A great deal of the local coverage dwells on the ‘mindlessness’ of the protesters, seeing their actions as an attack on the standards of Western rationality itself. In a letter to the Cape Times (15 October 1986), Eve Bertelsen commented on the oppositions set up between the dissenting students (‘mindless intellectual terrorists, bigoted zealots’) and the supporters of O’Brien (the ‘civilized community, reasonable, scholarly, in the Western tradition’): It does not require a Sigmund Freud to piece together from this series of verbal slippages the most shameful set of racial stereotypes. For what the Cape Times, of course, is talking about (although the words themselves are never voiced) is black students and black resistance politics in South Africa today. What is largely absent from the BBC coverage – the representation of the views of the protesting students – is also absent from the local coverage; but in the local coverage that absence in itself is represented in a particular way. The figures of the ‘children of Mao’ are crayoned in with the violent colours of white minority fear. In liberal discourse, the concepts of academic freedom and freedom of speech may well be used to refer to a timeless realm of universal values. But the decision to bring those values to bear on a particular situation at a particular moment in time is likely to be worthy of analysis. As Kenneth Burke remarked long ago, ‘All questions are leading questions. … Every question selects a field of battle, and in this selection it forms the nature of the answers’ (1957: 56–57).

The decision to focus an account of the O’Brien affair on the concepts of academic freedom and freedom of speech had, in the BBC report, the effect of making it difficult to examine the motives of the dissenting students. In the South African coverage, it had the effect of blackening their motives, making it – consciously or not, which is to say ideologically – near​perfect propaganda material for the National Party’s attempt to discipline the universities through the De Klerk regulations. Perhaps the proper defence of ideals requires a more scrupulous materialism than any liberal would be likely to dream of.

NOTES 1 Compare with the Guardian Weekly (8 November 1987): ‘The government claims to be acting for the taxpayer. But the universities have amply demonstrated in their PR campaigns that their public money is efficiently used and that student activism has little effect on academic standards, and is probably beneficial. … The minister of Education responsible for the universities, FW de Klerk, is a leading contender in the presidential succession stakes. “Dealing” with the English language campuses boosts his image as “tough man” of the Nationalist party.’ 2 The New Nation was the first newspaper to be banned under the new regulations, though several other publications have been warned. As the Sowetan (23 March 1988) notes: ‘With all the laws at its disposal, the government is not prepared to test the cases it has made against newspapers in a court of law and outside the media regulations. We challenge the minister to do just this.’ The Weekly Mail, also under threat, observed that ‘the purpose of issuing a warning must be to enable the newspaper to avoid falling foul of the minister’s opinion again. … [the editors] could discern no rational criteria for what the minister accepted and what he objected to and no way of inferring such criteria’ (15–21 January 1988). 3 The Weekly Mail (18–24 March 1988) reports, for example, that a total of 1 338 youths aged seventeen or under had been detained under the Emergency Regulations in 1987, and 234 are currently in detention. A number of respected lawyers such as Raymond Suttner have been in detention without trial since June 1986. 4 Letter from Minister Clase to the chairman of UCT Council dated 13 October 1987. The extremely condescending tone of the letter as a whole is also evident in the misspelling of the chairman’s name: LG Abrahamse is given in the reply as Abramhamse. 5 On 19 October, a day of protest against the imposition of the regulations was observed at the universities of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Western Cape, and UCT in Cape Town. A group of students and staff also held a protest meeting at the University of Stellenbosch, long regarded as the ‘think tank’ of Afrikanerdom. The University of Natal held an earlier meeting and the University of the North staged a one​day boycott in sympathy. 6 See the letter from the chairman of the University Council to Minister Clase, 27 August 1987, page 11: ‘Staff and students are citizens. The university has limited jurisdiction over them. … Council is required to act in respect of acts undertaken by staff or students off the campus. In many or all of such cases such offenses, if proven, would be outside the university’s jurisdiction.’ The regulations have now (March 1988) been successfully challenged as ultra vires by UCT and the University of the Western Cape in the Cape Division of the Supreme Court and by the University of Natal in the Natal Division. 7 ‘Open universities face state threat without support.’ 8 Daniel Pretorius, a member of the Students’ Representative Council and the Social Science Students’ Council (which organised the crucial Tuesday debate with O’Brien), confessed to being a police spy in August 1987. UCT’s Monday Paper (17–24 August 1987) reported that Pretorius ‘said he was convinced there was an overall plot to undermine “progressive” organisations in South Africa. Dr Saunders [the vice​chancellor of UCT] was regarded as a liberal and an “enemy” by the security police and that it was his perception that the security police would make use of organisations such as the National Students Federation to provoke incidents on campus. These incidents were designed to give the minister of Education, Mr FW de Klerk, ammunition with which to take action – particularly in terms of the proposed regulations on which the vice​chancellors of universities had to report​back [sic] on August 31. And Pretorius claimed there could be “another three” campus spies at UCT. … His involvement with the police was subsequently confirmed by Minister of Law and Order Mr Adriaan Vlok.’ A series of desecrations of campus mosques at UCT and the universities of Durban and the Witwatersrand suggests that such destabilising activities continued to be a tactic in 1988. 9 ‘Narrative image’ is the term used in film criticism to designate the ensemble of effects by which an anticipatory image of a film is offered to its potential audience. By using it here, I wish to emphasise the ways in which the language describing the events of the O’Brien affair constantly prefigures an interpretation of those events. The two terms of the title were never, as far as I know, brought together elsewhere. They figure separately as the title of an important Sunday Times editorial (19 November 1986), and in the Business Day report of 22 September 1986, ‘A Scholar​Warrior busts the academic boycott on

South Africa’. O’Brien himself used the comparison; see, for example, the New Republic (27 October 1986: 10): ‘What was being conducted in South Africa under the name of an academic boycott seemed to be a sort of creeping form of the Cultural Revolution, which had wrecked the universities of China and which the China of today had repudiated with abhorrence.’ 10 See UCT (1986). For a spirited but confused attack on the report itself, see Charles Simkins’s article in the Cape Times (31 March 1987), ‘UCT report on O’Brien is flawed’. UCT’s publication, Forum, devoted a special number to the whole issue of academic freedom in the South African context in 1987. An early version of the ‘Opinion and nuisance’ section of this chapter appeared there as ‘Freedom or nuisance? Some notes on the O’Brien affair’. 11 The letter attacked Neil Ascherson’s endorsement of the academic boycott in relation to the World Archeological Congress at Southampton. Ascherson’s reply can be found in the Argus (19 September 1986). 12 It was this accusation that most angered O’Brien in the later controversy with UCT over the report. See the correspondence between O’Brien and Saunders, the vice​chancellor of UCT, published in the Cape Times (7 March 1987). 13 I should like to thank Cliff Bestell for his generous cooperation in the use of this material, and Craig Matthew and Joelle Chesselet of Doxa Productions for the use of their video suite in my repeated viewings of the material. 14 Neil Ascherson’s reply to O’Brien’s letter to the Times (6 September 1986) was reprinted in the Argus (19 September 1986). The Weekly Mail (26 September 1986) reports the anti​apartheid movement as saying O’Brien’s ‘is an open and shut case. He is totally out of step and misguided in breaking the academic boycott’. Bill Buford’s (1984) editorial in Granta examines some of the contradictions in O’Brien’s relation to the Observer and ‘Tiny’ Rowlands’s interests in Bophuthatswana. Tom Paulin’s essay, ‘The making of a loyalist’, examines the contradictions in O’Brien’s opinions on Northern Ireland. Paulin’s contention that ‘the dazzling light of “international attention” transformed him into a personality … his authorial personality owes much to his sense of his audience’s expectations’ (1984: 29–30) throws some light on O’Brien’s status as a media personality, a question we shall return to later. 15 Wittgenstein (1974, 1975) discusses the notion of ‘family resemblance’ several times in the Philosophical Investigations and The Blue and Brown Books. The particular emphasis I wish to make is that concepts derive a great deal of their meaning from the circumstances in which they are used. Wittgenstein decisively abandoned the notion of context​free concepts in his later work. 16 The latest prohibitions include the severe restrictions imposed on seventeen organisations, and the prohibition of the committee formed to protest against those restrictions, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy. 17 This line of thought is most clearly expressed in the letter from Charles Simkins to the Cape Times mentioned earlier. 18 See the correspondence between O’Brien and Saunders, published in the Cape Times (7 March 1987). O’Brien writes: ‘I invite your attention to the statement in the report (p. 17 thereof) that I admitted that my attitude to students on a particular occasion had been “insulting and condescending”. The statement is false. I never said anything of the kind, and I do not accept these words as an accurate description of anything I said or did while on your campus.’ 19 Patrick Bulger’s account of the affair, ‘A strange democracy’, can be found in the Sunday Star (12 October 1986). As many readers may not have access to the original report, I have omitted detailed discussion of the ways in which the visual rhetoric of the report also empowers and endorses O’Brien’s interpretation of events. 20 Mill notes the difficulties of this in his essay ‘On liberty’, and notes, ‘With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of those weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men’ (Mill 1964: 181–182). The coverage of the O’Brien affair displays these features to the full. 21 Compare with Eve Bertelsen’s account in an unpublished paper for UCT’s African Studies seminar, ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable’: ‘A visitor arrives at UCT. He not only breaks a boycott which these students respect (others have come and been politely received), but he does so militantly and defiantly, throwing out a challenge from the day of his arrival to all comers. In the name of “free speech” he uses platforms such as the SABC [South African Broadcasting Corporation] and SATV to discredit the peoples’ organizations and their allies abroad. He is given column inches ad lib to pursue these themes in the daily newspapers as well. Under the circumstances it would not be too difficult to construe this degree of calculated insensitivity as deliberate political incitement. At any rate this is clearly the way it was read by the students. They responded with indignation and anger, staging several lively protests’ (19). 22 Carla Sutherland, president of UCT’s Students’ Representative Council, noted in the Cape Times (13 October 1986): ‘If we are talking about an issue of academic freedom, or freedom of speech, then why did UCT academics and students not quiver with the same outrage, as they do now over the O’Brien affair, when SADF [South African Defence Force] troops invaded and occupied schools in black townships or when the University of North is held under military siege? UCT’s senate recently passed a motion stating that there is no academic freedom in South Africa. Nor will there be until apartheid ends. Yet that same body refused to endorse the section of the University Assembly statement that called for the removal of troops from

the townships, the lifting of apartheid and security legislation, the unbanning of political organizations and the release of all political prisoners including Nelson Mandela. All of these infringe on academic freedom and freedom of speech, and yet, there is no similar sense of outrage at their continuation.’ 23 The leader of the National Students’ Federation (the parent body of the Moderate Students’ Movement at UCT), Phillip Powell, is quoted as making the following protest: ‘In the past year, we haven’t managed to hold one speaker event, man one information table or organise any public activity on campus’. Once again, to selectively deploy the ‘universal value’ of freedom of speech for the protection of the National Students’ Federation would seem to me to destroy the apparent ethical force of such a value.

REFERENCES Buford, B. 1984. Editorial. Granta 13: 3. Burke, K. 1957. The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York: Vintage. Kappeler, S. 1986. The Pornography of Representation. London: Polity Press. Mill JS. 1964. On liberty. In M Warnock (ed.) Utilitarianism. Glasglow: Fontana. Paulin, T. 1984. The making of a loyalist. In T Paulin Ireland and the English Crisis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. Robbins, B (ed.). 1990. Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saunders, S. 2000. Vice-chancellor on a Tight Rope: A Personal Account of Climactic Years in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. UCT (University of Cape Town). 1986. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Events Which Occurred on the Campus of the University of Cape Town on 7 and 8 October. Cape Town. Wittgenstein, L. 1974. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by GEM Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 1975. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

2 Academic freedom in the new South Africa

This chapter was published ten years after the O’Brien chapter, but the intervening years saw a continued and deepening engagement on my part with academic freedom, and with contrasting ideas on the social role and economic function of the university. This engagement was manifest in two forms: in my work as a member of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) Academic Freedom Committee (AFC) between 1987 and 1996, and as an editor of a South African academic journal, Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies (1989–2003). These two roles came together in the ways in which in both the AFC and the journal I sought to promote public discussion of academic freedom and the idea of the university in and across two very different contexts: first, from the late 1980s as South Africa began to look forward to a democratised post-apartheid society and higher education system, and, second (post-1994), as the templates of an emerging global higher education policy were increasingly applied to South African universities, at times to the detriment of academic freedom in both principle and practice. The core function of UCT’s AFC was to organise the annual lecture on academic freedom given in memory of Thomas Benjamin Davie (1895–1955), who had been vice-chancellor at UCT from 1948 to 1955. Davie did much in his lifetime to try and resist the government’s determination to extend apartheid into higher education, speaking out against this at the Commission of Enquiry on Separate Training Facilities for non-Europeans at Universities in 1954, and formulating what came to be known as the ‘TB Davie definition of academic freedom’. After the passage of the Extension of University Education Act 45 on 11 June 1959, which prohibited black people – those racially classified as African, coloured and Indian/Asian under apartheid – from attending traditionally white universities without the express permission of the minister concerned, UCT initiated the TB Davie Memorial lecture, and featured both local speakers such as ZK Matthews and international figures such as the British feminist Juliet Mitchell. Speakers during my own tenure on the AFC included Walter Sisulu, Edward W Said, Gayatri C Spivak and Noam Chomsky, among others. The best of the TB Davie lectures, as well as many related essays and articles, were published in Pretexts, and in my editorials I often continued to argue the case that I was repeatedly making on the AFC: that the challenges to academic freedom might well be different in the new South Africa,

but challenges there would be.1 This proved to be partly correct: some challenges were different; others were very much the same. The new democratic regime took academic freedom seriously enough to accord it a specific place in the Constitution, but one that I argued from the start was badly conceptualised, and therefore likely to be the occasion for new kinds of challenges to academic freedom. At the same time – and in much more troubling and paradoxical ways – the new policy documents seemed to prioritise the largely instrumental role for universities and higher education in general that had previously been associated with the authoritarian nationalism of the Afrikaans universities in the apartheid period. This chapter emerged from a growing sense that the new democratic dispensation (as the peculiarly South African idiom for government has it) might well hold its own dangers for academic freedom. In my own institution, UCT, some of the implicit dangers were made absolutely explicit in the drive for programmes, initiated (in part at least) as a response to the government’s 1995 White Paper on Education and Training. This – together with the related closure of the academically excellent departments of Afrikaans and Comparative Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand – prompted the writing of this chapter, which brought together and extended a number of arguments, talks and observations made in the period following the O’Brien affair. UCT joined the drive for programmes with an announcement from the Academic Planning Framework Committee that it was looking to reduce posts at the university by ten per cent, and at the same time seeking to restructure all academic offerings as vocationally oriented programmes. The implication was not hard to discern, and was, indeed, usually pointed out by the members of the Committee: disciplines not joining the programme drive would very likely find themselves on the scrap heap, their staff relieved of their duties. The background to this call was, as Paula Ensor put it, ‘the desire’, in South African higher education policy, ‘to steer SA along a “high skills, high growth” path of economic development, which would lay the foundation of a new democratic society’ (2002: 272). To achieve this, the intention was to ‘bring formal academic education and vocational training into closer alignment’ (2002: 273). For Ensor, the ‘rationale for this was clear and compelling’: the ‘intended impact’ was ‘to produce curricula that was [sic] more relevant to the world of work’, with this relevance ‘to be achieved by eroding traditional disciplinary boundaries in favour of interdisciplinarity’ (2002: 273). In retrospect – and as Ensor effectively concedes – the thousands of person-hours spent on discussing programmes at UCT were largely wasted hours, and the new programmes that did emerge were ‘still organized largely on a disciplinary basis’ (2002: 289). In the end, ‘contemporary curricula in sciences and humanities look little different from the way they did before programme implementation began’ (Ensor 2002: 289). Gradually, she concluded, ‘the turmoil associated with academic programme planning … subsided’ (2002: 291). The real starting point for this chapter was precisely the ‘turmoil’ mentioned by Ensor, as the chapter sought to research further and take deeper the questions raised by the programme initiative through the lens of academic freedom. The occasion for it arose from a lecture given at the University of the Witwatersrand, at a moment when the university’s own programme

A few months ago, I gave a version of this chapter at a rhetoric conference in Johannesburg. I said that one of the characteristics of any idea that becomes a received idea is that it threatens, when used, to identify the speaker’s position in advance, and so lead to neglect of the substance or content of what is actually said. Received ideas are important because they signal the end of thinking; that is why they are likely to be of some ideological significance; and that is also why, though in his own terms, Flaubert was so fascinated and repelled by them, and hence the interest of his extraordinary project for a Dictionary of Received Ideas (2011) for any rhetorician. What else was Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) if not a critically and politically conscious version of Flaubert’s great Dictionary?4 In South Africa, I argued, academic freedom was in danger of becoming a received idea. One of the signs of this was that even trying to bring up the topic in discussions of higher education policy tended to brand the speaker as reactionary or conservative before any actual arguments were made. Precisely because of this, I suggested, a task of the critical intellectual was to keep on thinking about academic freedom: challenging its status as a received idea by thinking critically, historically, and theoretically about it, the better to make a constructive contribution to current debate and policy. Somewhat to my dismay, my starting point proved all too true. At the end of the presentation, as I later learned, one fellow conférencier turned to a colleague and said, sotto voce, ‘I don’t know why we should be wasting our time on talk of academic freedom. Surely that’s something only conservatives are interested in?’ This chapter is another attempt to suggest that progressive intellectuals can also be interested in academic freedom, and indeed should work to resist its becoming a received idea, either in South Africa or elsewhere.5 Academic freedom is too important to realising the ideals of a participatory democracy to give up without a fight.6 It’s possible that nowhere is the gap between practice and ideal greater than in the case of academic freedom. While few will openly attack, denigrate or call for an end to academic freedom, even fewer still seem willing to grasp the thorn of what it means to implement or enable it in actual institutional practice. The compromise is lip service paid to a practically unrealisable ideal.7 Because of this distance between practice and ideal, talk of academic freedom often sounds strangely spurious: high​minded, but unrealistic; a subject for an edifying discourse – but only in the pejorative sense of the term. An entry on academic freedom in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas would undoubtedly read: ‘Academic freedom: always be willing to support it in principle; but explain that it’s just not practical right now.’ This, in turn, leads to a characteristic use of the term which ironically leads to an emptying out of its content. Academic freedom is deployed apothatically: somehow, even in the act of affirming it, academic freedom is practically undermined. Academic freedom has been a peculiarly vexed and public question in South Africa at the very least since the passage of the Extension of University Education Act 45 on 11 June 1959. Under this Extension, no black person would be allowed to register as a student at a traditionally white university after 1 January 1960 without express permission from the relevant minister. The legal and systematic, as opposed to the cultural and economic, racial segregation of South African universities was now legally in place, and continued to be so up until 1988, when the Nationalist Party government of FW de Klerk effectively revoked it in the first of a series of liberalising measures which culminated in the unbanning of all political

organisations and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. It seemed that the basic conditions for the enjoyment of academic freedom (racially unrestricted access to institutions of higher education for both staff and students) had at last been met; that all South Africans – at least in principle – could now enjoy the benefits of academic freedom. In principle, yes; in practice, no. The existing figures for university entry continue to show a massive disproportion between white and black access, due in large part to the still massive differentials in primary and secondary education, and the basic lack of scholarship funding in a general economic situation where most families are unable to support the costs of university education for their children. By 1993, while around twenty per cent of the 20–24​year​old age group were attending some form of post​matriculation education, around seventy per cent of these were white students, and only twelve per cent African students, and this despite a general increase of black student attendance of around fourteen per cent per year between 1986 and 1993 (DoE 1997: 14). As in each and every aspect of South African life, though the formal structure of apartheid has been dismantled, its substance, in the form of the very different life opportunities offered to different racial groups, remains, and government policy admits there is little chance of significantly altering access while it pursues current economic policy.8 By 1988, the South African university system, internally divided and differentially administered, comprised five Afrikaans​ and four English​medium campuses, ten black universities and two distance​learning institutions. South Africa was free at last; didn’t that freedom necessarily include academic freedom? Wasn’t it a given that the new democratic government – which was coming at last – would work to enhance academic freedom, and to reverse the depredations it had suffered under the apartheid regime? I’m afraid that the short answer is no. Despite the ANC government’s laudable intentions for a transformation of the higher education system – one which would eradicate all traces of apartheid division, promoting access, redress and the critical literacy necessary to a participatory democracy – current policy, in the name of practicality, threatens to strengthen rather than relieve the authoritarian tendencies of previous higher education policy. Current policy has less to do in practice with the imperatives of democratic transformation, and more with the imposition of current neo​liberal dogma. In this still evolving situation, there is a necessary forgetting of the oppositional role which the call for academic freedom has historically played in South Africa. One symptom of this is the representation of academic freedom in a recent essay by two academics who currently occupy important positions in the higher education establishment.9 Writing in advance of the 1994 elections, Teboho Moja and Nico Cloete, at that time national president and general secretary of the Union of Democratic Staff Associations, prepared a report for the invaluable World University survey on the state of academic freedom. Their essay, Chapter 4 of the survey, presents a brief but detailed historical account of the structures of higher education in South Africa, records the brute facts of the massive racial differentials in access to it, and details the record of direct state interventions on university campuses beyond the political thaw of 1988 and into the early 1990s (Daniel et al. 1995). At the same time, it looks forward to the promised transformation of the system as a whole, a transformation which will need to incorporate ‘an increased demand for access to higher education; for a reallocation of funds from the better endowed white universities to the

historically black universities; affirmative action for blacks and women; and active participation in the Reconstruction and Development Programme’ (Daniel et al. 1995: 62). The authors welcome the commitment to academic freedom present in the draft of South Africa’s new human rights​based Constitution, but warn that the ‘new South Africa will generate different struggles around higher education’ (1995: 62), suggesting that it was ‘not difficult to predict that the main contestations [regarding academic freedom] will be in the areas of autonomy and accountability’ (1995: 63). Just how ‘different’ are the struggles around academic freedom, university autonomy and accountability in the ‘new’ South Africa? Duly considered, the detail of the historical record suggests that the question of the relations between academic freedom, accountability and institutional autonomy has been at the very centre of cultural, political and intellectual contestation in South Africa since at least 1958. In reality, there is a significant – and deeply disappointing – continuity between the restrictive definitions of academic freedom offered in both pre​ and post​apartheid society. Conceptually, this impoverished definition of academic freedom is incommensurate with the task of the university in achieving a critical and participatory democracy; and in practice, it has allowed the higher education system to be increasingly defined around a highly restrictive neo​liberal agenda. The fact of this disturbing continuity is occluded in the Moja and Cloete account. Decisive in this regard is their treatment of the Main Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Universities, published in 1974 after six years of meetings and deliberations, and usually referred to as the Van Wyk de Vries report (DoE 1974). Moja and Cloete present a highly selective reading of the report, and a consequently distorted view of the struggle over academic freedom in apartheid South Africa. The dominant impression given by their essay is that the Commission report did nothing but put forward a trivialising definition of academic freedom, one which ignored the issues of racial segregation and discrimination in favour of an idea of academic freedom so reduced and conformist as to be useless, an image of the university so totally incorporated by the state as to lack any effective autonomy. According to their analysis, the recommendations of this ‘important’ Commission ‘provided the basis for considerable autonomy and freedom, so long as the university did not jeopardize this freedom by engaging in “political ideology and public action that would bring it into conflict with society or the state”’ (Daniel et al. 1995: 51). Furthermore, ‘the Commission argued for freedom to teach and research “and to be free from discriminatory treatment on grounds of sex or convictions or any other impermissible grounds”’ (1995: 51) – though these did not include the key question of race. This ‘silence about discrimination on grounds of race’, they conclude, was, ‘in the South African context … deafening’ (1995: 51). Support of academic freedom, it is implied, was nothing but a sham, a fraud, at best a labour of self​deception. This is one way of reading the report, and is correct up to a point; but it’s important to recognise just how selective a reading it is. The summary presents the report as it would have liked to see itself, but at the price of ignoring the constitutive difficulty that academic freedom posed to the Commission. Read more attentively, the central fact of the report is that it failed to find the consensus on academic freedom it wanted. To ignore this is to distort the precisely constituted conflictuality of the actual historical record.

For this conflict is fully present in the report itself, where the idea of academic freedom is at once absolutely central to the Commission’s report and absolutely controversial. ‘[E]veryone is agreed that universities should have academic freedom’ (DoE 1974: 27): the difficulty the Commission faces (and then turns away from) is that no agreement exists on its definition. On one level, the report is quite explicit: ‘The Commission feels that it is of great importance to reach unanimity on the concepts universality and nature of the university in South Africa, since conflicting views would make any further consideration of the universities and their development futile’ (DoE 1974: 27). Futile because the very task of the Commission is to give some meaning to academic freedom ‘on the strength of the realities of the situation in South Africa and to ensure that the respective language groups will be free to determine the character and direction of the university in the light of their cultural backgrounds and principles’ (1974: 27); this in accordance with the apartheid ideology which, like any ideology, sees itself as merely reflecting ‘the realities of the situation’ without the refraction which the bias of others introduces. The English​medium universities must be suffering from a ‘false assumption’, since the logic of separate but equal development for different cultures would otherwise ensure that the English universities did have a right to enjoy their own definition of academic freedom, however different it was from the Afrikaner definition. A great deal of the ideological work of the report lies in its rhetorical labour to represent just exactly why the English campuses do not really have a different concept of academic freedom, but a mistaken idea of it. It is just this ideological work – of argument, representation, rhetoric – that is not present in Moja and Cloete’s bald paraphrase, but in which the historical importance of the document resides. Paraphrasing the findings of the Commission without examining how the Commission arrived at them amounts to colluding with the report’s desire to forget what the English universities insisted on remembering: the classical idea of academic freedom. How can Moja and Cloete not even mention the most striking feature of the report, that it could not achieve its own call for ‘unanimity’, speaking with one voice, and so, in its own terms, that it risked being ‘futile’? For the depth of conflict over academic freedom is apparent in the simple fact that a dissident voice insisted on presenting, as a supplement to it, his own minority report: ‘In the main report … Chapters III and IV deal respectively with the university – its nature and function – and with the relation between the university and the state. In respect of these two chapters I find that my views and analyses of these matters are very different …’ (DoE 1974: 520). In this way, with the utmost academic formality and politeness, did Professor GR Bozzoli signal his rejection of the report’s final definitions of academic freedom. For him, the report amounted to little more than ‘an attack on the English language universities … and constitute[s] a recommendation to bring all the universities into line with state policies’ (1974: 521). Thus, although the report recommends that the university must have the freedom to determine its own character and direction, this is expected to take place within the limits of the findings of the Commission and one of the findings is that ‘A unique characteristic of university existence in South Africa is that it is founded upon a social order based upon the principle of multinational separate development’. (1974: 521)

Throughout the document, though nowhere confronted directly as such, is the question of ‘separate development’, of the state imposition of apartheid policies on institutions of higher education. The report ties itself in knots as it seeks to chide the English​medium universities for using a politicised definition of academic freedom, while the bias of their own definition must be taken as providing a neutral perspective. If the English ideas on academic freedom were to be upheld, then the community of scholars is autonomous, the limits of its autonomy being determined by the nature of the university and therefore inter alia by the said international ideals and traditions. The university therefore exists on a supranational platform with an independence free from any national bond, and any interference with its autonomy by the State, society or community is improper interference. (DoE 1974: 26) The Commission ‘has no doubt that [this] view of the nature of the university’ is ‘untenable. If the theory is tested against reality it is clear that it is based on a fallacy and once the faulty reasoning has been placed in the correct perspective the whole theory collapses’ (DoE 1974: 26–27). No doubt. When tested against reality – the reality offered by apartheid ideology – obviously the English view can only be a fallacy. The correct perspective is the Afrikaner perspective in which the emphasis falls, in somewhat Hegelian fashion, on ‘the university’s coherence with the nation and, in a narrower sense, its interwovenness with a particular community’ (1974: 19).10 ‘It was stressed by witnesses,’ the report emphasises, as if the testimony of witnesses did not itself need to be interrogated, that by ‘volksgebondenheid’ was by no means meant subordination to the nation or to a kind of twentieth​century national totalitarianism. On the contrary, the freedom of the university is in no way curtailed by its bond with the nation … The argument that a national bond forces the university to conform to national policy or some political school of thought and that this curtails its freedom is based on the fallacy that the university stands beyond and above other spheres. (DoE 1974: 34) It might be difficult to find a better example of negation at work. As the commissioners deny that their policy ‘forces the university to conform to national policy’, they rebuke the English universities for being political because they wish to refuse the dictates of government policy! Paragraph 4.2 of the report summarises the views of the English universities in the following terms: ‘as an autonomous community of teachers and students dedicated to the search for or service of truth’ (DoE 1974: 18). A corollary of this is that ‘the university is seen as an institution based on certain universally acknowledged ideals and traditions which are part of the free world today’ and this ‘international common element … may not be interfered with by State or society in the national context’ (1974: 18). As the commissioners rightly conclude: This line of reasoning is rounded off with the assertion that the above​mentioned autonomy gives the freedom to decide in its own right who shall be admitted as a student, who shall teach and who shall be taught, on the principle that race and colour are irrelevant in this regard. If the State, society or the community was to interfere, it would be improper

interference with its autonomy. (DoE 1974: 26) At this point, for the Afrikaners, ‘the whole theory collapses’ (DoE 1974: 27), and then and only then do we come to the view summarised by Moja and Cloete: the apartheid state ‘provided the basis for considerable autonomy and freedom, so long as the university did not jeopardize this freedom by engaging in “political ideology and public action that would bring it into conflict with society or the state”’ (Daniel et al. 1995: 51). Yes, the summary is correct; but how much of the history of conflict is elided by it! One way of bringing this marginalised history back into focus would be to examine the rich archive of academic freedom debate represented by the TB Davie Memorial lectures at UCT. This series of lectures – ‘the annual commemoration of a defeat’ as one lecturer put it – began in 1959 to honour the memory of Thomas Benjamin Davie (1895–1955), vice​chancellor of UCT from 1948 until his death in 1955 (Birley 1965: 1). Lecturers have included academics, politicians, and eminent public intellectuals both local and international, among them ZK Matthews, René Dumont, Juliet Mitchell, Harry Oppenheimer, Robert Kennedy, Raymond Suttner, and, after 1988, Walter Sisulu, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Noam Chomsky.11 This is not the place for anything like a full discussion of this rich material, but it is worthwhile examining just how much the account of academic freedom in the report owes to Davie’s original arguments on academic freedom in the early 1950s, and how these same arguments came to embody the accepted idea of academic freedom for those who resisted the Afrikaner definitions. Appointed to the vice​chancellorship of UCT just as the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, TB Davie, despite the painful and crippling effects of acute arthritis, made use of his position to publicise and articulate a defence of academic freedom and university autonomy in the face of the new government’s evident plans to curtail it, and to enforce apartheid on university campuses. Davie’s writings – themselves a careful distillation of a long tradition – give a specific turn to the orthodox arguments in order to use them against the imposition of apartheid ideology, placing a great deal of emphasis on the constitutive interdependency of academic freedom and institutional autonomy since it was this interdependency that was most challenged by government policy. For the next thirty years or so, Davie’s work provided the reference point for debate on academic freedom, though Moja and Cloete write as if this fierce debate had simply never existed. Davie first outlined what were to become the standard South African criteria for academic freedom as early as 1950, on the occasion of a graduation ceremony at the University of the Witwatersrand. For Davie, academic freedom meant ‘our freedom from external interference in (a) who shall teach, (b) what we teach, (c) how we teach, and (d) whom we teach’ (Van de Sandt Centlivres 1959: 5). More fully, what these principles imply is that we desire at all times (a) to be permitted to appoint our staff on the grounds of their fitness by scholarship and experience for the research and teaching for which they are needed, (b) that the staff duly appointed shall teach the truth as they see it and not as it be demanded by others for the purposes of sectional, political, religious, or ideological dogmas or beliefs, (c) that the methods of teaching shall not be subject to interference

aimed at achieving standardisation at the expense of originality or orthodoxy at the cost of independence, and, lastly, (d) that our lecture theatres and laboratories shall be open to all who, seeking higher knowledge, can show that they are intellectually capable of benefiting by admission to our teaching and are morally worthy of entry into the close intimacy of the great brotherhood which constitutes the wholeness of a university. (Van de Sandt Centlivres 1959: 5) Here, the already traditional constituents of academic freedom (including, unfortunately, its traditional blindness to gender discrimination) are given a particular twist in the face of burgeoning apartheid ideology: by placing an emphasis on moral as well as intellectual worth as criteria for admission, Davie spoke out against racial segregation by implicitly rejecting the different ‘moral’ capacities of the different races; and by stressing that staff shall ‘teach the truth as they see it’ and not according to imposed ‘sectional, political, religious, or ideological dogmas or beliefs’. In a later paper, delivered in 1954 when the government formed a Commission of Enquiry on Separate Training Facilities for non​Europeans at Universities, Davie argued that the function of a university in a multiracial society was [t]o serve the community in the true sense of a university, i.e., as a centre for the preservation, the advance, and the dissemination of learning for its own sake and without regard to usefulness, to all who are academically qualified for admission, irrespective of race, colour, or creed. (Van de Sandt Centlivres 1959: 10) For some thirty years, Davie’s principles were held to and maintained as the working definition of academic freedom: as Robert Thouless reiterated in the 1964 lecture, ‘academic freedom meant freedom from external interference in who shall teach, what they teach, how they teach, and whom they teach’ (1964: 2). Up until the late 1980s, the general idea of academic freedom was defined in Davie’s terms. Yet no mention of this oppositional and alternative discourse on academic freedom is made in Moja and Cloete’s account. The whole history of this alternative definition of academic freedom is ignored. What effects follow from this extraordinary historical forgetting? A part of the answer is perhaps to be found in the particular definitions of academic freedom to be offered by another government commission, this time the National Commission on Higher Education of 1996, and its report, A Framework for Transformation (NCHE 1996). For these commissioners, too, in 1996 just as in 1974, academic freedom and autonomy ‘are at the heart of the debate about governance in higher education’ (NCHE 1996: 172). These commissioners distinguish between three ‘incompatible’ positions on academic freedom and university autonomy. The first ‘privileges the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (academicism)’ and ‘asserts the autonomy of higher education institutions against any form of state interference’ (1996: 173) – as we have seen, just the position maintained by the English campuses under apartheid; the second, ‘which privileges knowledge in the service of socioeconomic development’ and recommends that the university ‘should therefore accept the hegemony of government’ (1996: 173); and the third, where ‘higher education is seen as a key agent of social change and mobility that must play an important role in promoting equity’

(1996: 173). Conceptually, at least, there are really only two views at odds with one another here: the first, that maintained by the English universities in their opposition to apartheid policy, but which is here described as ‘academicism’ in a telling aside, and which asserts ‘the autonomy of higher education institutions against any form of state interference’; and the second, which maintains the need for ‘the hegemony of government’, whether for purposes of socioeconomic development or social change, mobility and equity. The real gain from any act of historical forgetting is what it makes possible in the present. It now becomes entirely reasonable to characterise any idea of academic freedom as involving a necessary degree of autonomy from the state as ‘academicism’, or rather ‘(“academicism”)’ not, I think, in the dictionary sense which describes the style of a particular school of painting, but in a new pejorative sense, and one so violent it needs to be partially repressed by being confined, literally bracketed off from the description as a whole lest it be questioned too carefully. Hardly surprising since, as we have seen, this characterisation represents a disgraceful slur on the actual deployment of the traditional arguments for academic freedom in the South African context. Framed and labelled in this way, it seems that the traditional idea of academic freedom is inappropriate for, certainly not wanted in, the new South Africa. Given this enfeebled definition of academic freedom, so contrary to the actual record of its deployment, the final recommendations made by the 1996 report turn out to be little different from those made in 1974. What is affirmed in principle is next denied in practice. Thus the Commission proposes that the principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy be maintained as key conditions for a vibrant higher education system. Its proposals on co​operative governance therefore preclude any form of state control over, or arbitrary interference in the affairs of institutions. However, co​operative governance does not mean government indifference to higher education. On the contrary, it rests on the assumption that both government and higher education institutions are committed to the same societal goals. (NCHE 1996: 194) The ‘however’ signals that what follows is in practice an effective erasure of the content of academic freedom, previously acknowledged as a principle. Of course, resting on that assumption (that both government and higher education institutions are committed to the same societal goals) is only a prelude to a more overt denial of academic freedom in practice. And, in a warning note, the report notes that ‘the new developments will have an impact on the scope of institutional autonomy in the sense that they will necessitate a culture of co​operation and will lead to increased accountability’ (NCHE 1996: 195). The danger signals are only confirmed when the key recommendation, Proposal 4 (Academic freedom, autonomy and accountability), is made. This first affirms support for the principle of academic freedom, and reads: The Commission recommends that all authorities recognise the right to academic freedom for all individuals engaged in responsible academic work, and the right to autonomy for higher education institutions in fulfilling their educational and academic rules … (NCHE

1996: 196–197) – and then, of course, continues by qualifying the principle in such a way that it no longer stands, but turns out to be contained within and subordinate to a more primary principle, that is, academic freedom takes place within the context of the increased accountability implied by the principle and the system of co​operative governance. (NCHE 1996: 197) In other words, there is on the face of it an unlikely similarity between the definitions of academic freedom offered by the Nationalist Party and the ANC! Both wish to restrict the idea of academic freedom to that of scholarly freedom, and, furthermore, to insist that university autonomy has very little to do with academic freedom, when the matter is considered from the right point of view.12 Some perhaps unconscious uneasiness with this similarity is likely to come through somewhere. I choose as an example a recent paper by a foreign consultant, Graeme Moodie, where some discomfort is apparent even as it is wished away. In his essay ‘Academic freedom and transformation’, Moodie argues that it is high time for ‘indiscriminate reference to academic freedom’ to stop (1998: 16). Writing within, and providing substantial support for, the current moves to narrow down definitions of academic freedom in South Africa, Moodie suggests that, in common usage, academic freedom is little more than a ‘woolly blanket term’ (1998: 10). It is time that this blanket is unravelled and its three interwoven threads separated out. These are, first, ‘scholarly freedom’ (‘the claim to freedom for individual academics in their teaching and research’); second, ‘academic rule’ (concerning the decision​making powers of academics as professional groups); and third, ‘institutional autonomy’ (the university’s freedom from external interference). Moodie makes no bones about stating that the point of this separation is to allow robust government intervention in university autonomy, but then, precisely at this point, a certain unease begins to surface. The main claim is that while state intervention in higher education is a bad thing when an evil government is in power, intervention is good when a good government is in power. ‘It is one thing,’ writes Moodie (1998: 15–16), arbitrarily to impose a limited curriculum, to restrict the topics on which academic staff can express an opinion (even within the classroom), and to subordinate all important decision​making to the policies of government – as happened when the historically black universities were established in 1959; but it is quite another to insist that every institution conform to a new overall plan for higher education, that resources be re​allocated and funds directed in accordance with a long​term strategy for national (or provincial) development and social reform, and that the systems of internal government provide some space for non​academic input (to name but some of the crucial components of any adequate transformation of South Africa’s educational system). Does ‘arbitrarily’ really make a difference here? Is there any formal, logical, or legal

difference between subordinating ‘all important decision​making to the policies of government’, and insisting that ‘every institution conform to a new overall plan for higher education’? While it is obvious that there are significant differences in the content of higher education policy between the ANC and the apartheid state, it is clear that, on the level of the formal regulation of institutional autonomy, the ANC is seeking to achieve a far greater centralised control of the universities than any apartheid government dared to dream. In similar fashion, Moodie suggests, ‘let it suffice to distinguish between the imposition of an orthodoxy or party line … and the acceptable role of governments and others in establishing research agendas and the subject areas in which teaching resources should be concentrated’ (1998: 13). That he feels the need to then adjust some of this complacency is hardly surprising. The wishful​thinking subjunctive of ‘let it suffice’ is qualified by the admission that ‘it is also important to distinguish between a legitimate government power and the assumption that those powers will always be wisely exercised’, and, additionally, ‘to argue that governments have a role in this area is not to say that they should be exempt from criticism, or should not heed the advice and interests of scholars’ (1998: 13).13 The upshot of it all is that, despite what Moodie would like us to assume, there are no easy lines to draw in advance regarding the ‘acceptable roles’ of government interference in university autonomy, and unacceptable ones. Examined carefully, his writing suggests that however eager he is to repudiate the traditional arguments for academic freedom and institutional autonomy, he is unable to refute them, at least in the strict logical sense of the term. A good rule​of​thumb test for any legislation like this put forward by the ANC and endorsed by Moodie is, of course, to ask those in power whether they would want to grant to opponents the same degree of power as they would like for themselves. If the answer is no, then – whatever the content of your good intentions – you are not likely to be pursuing a fully democratic policy and, in this particular case, you are likely to be either short​changing or doing some damage to academic freedom. What exactly have the consequences been, so far, of doing what Moodie so carelessly justifies, and allowing the government to intrude significantly on university autonomy? In an essay originally written in 1996, I noted the existence of two competing, and possibly incommensurable, discourses in the Framework for Transformation document, arguing that these were ‘certainly in tension with each other, and may in the end prove practically, if not logically, contradictory’ (Higgins 1998: 45). On the one hand, the report claims that it is the task of higher education to support a healthy public opinion and vibrant public debate by developing a culture of critical discourse in society, and by nurturing those intellectual and moral qualities which are preconditions for independent and critical thinking, maturity of judgement, social responsibility and commitment to the public good. (NCHE 1996: 60) This emphasis on the critical component of higher education, and its relation to the functioning of democracy through open and critical debate, is mentioned several times in the report as a whole. At the same time, much of it is couched in the discourse which Raymond Williams had long ago identified as that of the ‘industrial trainers’, that is, those who defined education ‘in

terms of future adult work, with the parallel clause of teaching the required social character – habits of regularity, “self​discipline”, obedience, and trained efforts’ (Williams 1975: 162). In this neo​liberal discourse, the main task of higher education is seen as providing the labour market, ‘in a knowledge​driven and knowledge​dependent society’, with the high level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern or modernising economy. Higher education is in other words expected to teach and train people with a view to fulfilling specialised social functions or to occupy learned professions and other vocations in administration, trade and industry. (NCHE 1996: 68) In this kind of formulation, it is striking – though depressingly familiar to any reader of Williams – how ‘society’ and the ‘needs of society’ become, in the end, code or cover words for the needs of the economy. This is apparent, just to give one instance, in the following recommendations from the report, with their casual reification of ‘human talent and potential’ into ‘human resource development’, and finally into the ‘provision of person​power for the changing labour market’: It should be clear that the features of the South African economy listed above present direct challenges to higher education, the first and foremost being human resource development; that is, the mobilisation of human talent and potential through the training and provision of person​power for the changing labour market. (NCHE 1996: 54) That this is completely at odds with the very different definition of ‘human resource development’ implicit in the previous definition of the task of higher education – to ‘support a healthy public opinion and vibrant public debate by developing a culture of critical discourse in society’, and ‘by nurturing those intellectual and moral qualities which are preconditions for independent and critical thinking’ – is clear. What has happened to this tension? Has this evident contradiction between two discourses been resolved? Most recent commentators agree that in a sense it has, noting that the main ideological draft of recent legislation has less to do with democratic transformation than with neo​liberal reform.14 Under the cover of a rhetoric of transformation, the reality of a redefinition of the university as the ‘market university’ is rapidly taking place. Even a cursory glance at the 1997 White Paper on Higher Education tends to support this pessimistic analysis. For while academic freedom is present in the White Paper, it is present only as a received idea to which it is necessary to pay lip service before moving on to practical matters (DoE 1997). Section 1.23, ‘Academic freedom’, reads: The principle of academic freedom implies the absence of outside interference, censure or obstacles in the pursuit and practice of academic work. It is a precondition for critical, experimental and creative thought and therefore for the advancement of intellectual inquiry and knowledge. Academic freedom and scientific inquiry are fundamental rights protected by the Constitution. (DoE 1997: 7)

But there is already much logical and rhetorical confusion here. While the paragraph correctly states that it ‘is a precondition [in traditional understandings of academic freedom] for critical, experimental and creative thought and therefore for the advancement of intellectual inquiry and knowledge’, the sentence is framed in such a way as to prepare for its denegation or qualification. If academic freedom ‘implies’ the absence of outside interference, then that implication can always be contested. In strictly logical terms, a ‘precondition’ can never be merely an implication. Similarly, there is some fudging over the issue of institutional autonomy. Section 1.24 offers a traditional definition, only to then describe the conditions for ignoring it. Institutional autonomy ‘refers to a high degree of self​regulation and administrative independence with respect to student admissions, curriculum, methods of teaching and assessment, research, establishment of academic regulations and the internal management of resources’ (DoE 1997: 7). At the same time, it is stressed that ‘there is no moral basis for using the principle of institutional autonomy as a pretext for resisting democratic change or in defence of mismanagement’. One could just as well ask, remembering the history of apartheid, whether there could be a ‘moral’ basis for using ‘institutional autonomy’ for resisting undemocratic change (now, no longer apartheid, but the imposition of short​sighted neo​liberal policy), or in attacking national mismanagement. Institutional autonomy, the commissioners rightly argue, is ‘inextricably linked to the demands of public accountability’ (1997: 7) (indeed, as section 1.25 points out, is subordinated to the demands of public accountability). The important point, of course, is who gets to define what constitutes public accountability. It is precisely this status of the university, the nature of its affiliation to state and society, which has always been at the centre of debates on academic freedom and university autonomy in the modern world.15 ‘The question is not whether there should be accountability,’ as Conrad Russell says, but ‘what forms accountability should take’ (1993: 48). In the terms offered by the White Paper, ‘public accountability’ is primarily to be read – as it is or has been in Malawi, the Sudan, Iran, indeed, in all the countries mentioned and criticised in the World University Service report – as accountability to the state, and to its definition of policy goals and priorities.16 This dismal record is hardly an encouraging one. Always at stake in the idea of public accountability is the question of the troubling position of the university, its unsettled and unsettling relation to the community and society to which it belongs, but at an always contested distance. At stake is the question raised in 1974 as in the 1990s: does the accountability that the university owes to its society one owed primarily to the state, so that the university is best understood as an instrument of state policy; or is the social function of the university best grounded in what it actually does? One of the most fully argued cases for the latter has come from the British philosopher, Conrad Russell, in a troubled response to the Thatcher government’s 1988 Education Reform Bill. ‘Accountability,’ notes Russell, ‘must not be extended to the point where it interferes with the proper discharge of the service for which the money was granted’ (1993: 11). This service is that traditionally associated with academic freedom: the university is the one place in society whose function is the pursuit of truth, not for direct commercial advantage or in the service of a political ideology, but for its own sake, and in the firm belief that no society (and certainly no state bureaucracy) knows in advance what knowledge will come in useful.

Academic freedom in the university is a humble reminder of blindness and short​sightedness, the simple fact that so many crucial inventions have been discovered by accident and not design, or by the turning of an apparently failed or useless research project to another direction. Viagra, penicillin, radium, radar are all examples worth considering. Academic research, writes Russell, is a form of gambling since, properly speaking, ‘the researcher does not know what he [sic] is going to find out’ (1993: 29), nor what use others might make of his discoveries. Would the South African research foundation (of which more later) be willing to fund the work of a philosophical loser, who had written nothing for several years and couldn’t even formulate quite what problem to explore? Unlikely. In this case, we might never have had Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, a work said to have made possible the ‘development of the digital computer’, not that that was what Russell père had at all in mind (1993: 24). More centrally, we can characterise the case which Russell makes for academic freedom as a culturalist one. Russell sees the social benefits of academic freedom not only in terms of research output, but in the classical terms of Bildung or formation. If universities are understood as institutions whose main social function is to pursue truth, then one of the main aspects of their social utility is the training of graduates who pursue truth, in whatever their discipline, and in whatever job or profession they go on to after university. The real value of the university lies in part with the teaching it does and the graduates it produces: graduates who ‘must be capable of wanting to pursue knowledge for its own sake’ (Russell 1993: 27) if they are to be socially useful. Russell instances the value of those who ‘later become civil servants’ (1993: 27). If they are to be good civil servants, then they must have had instilled in them ‘the intellectual discipline necessary to tell the Minister that what he wants to do cannot be done’. Similarly, an engineer, one ‘who will ignore safety regulations in order to win the favour of his superiors is not a good engineer’ (1993: 27). These are the basic skills and disciplines associated with the ‘critical citizenship’ mentioned in the White Paper, but never really followed through in its policy detail. Thus, while the White Paper speaks of the aims of higher education as including the ‘socialisation of enlightened, responsive and constructively critical citizens’, what counts most in the end is to ‘address the development needs of society and provide the labour market, in a knowledge​driven and knowledge​dependent society, with the ever​changing high​level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern economy’ (DoE 1997: 1). This comes through most forcefully in the actual language and recommendations of the recent Bill for the establishment of a National Research Foundation. Briefly, the Bill is a narrowly economist document, blind to all cultural aspects of national development.17 Not only is it narrowly economist in conception, but it is specifically neo​liberal in outlook and totally ignores the contribution to national development made by all academic subjects other than those understood under the rubric of science and technology. I quote: It is generally accepted that the capacity of a country in science and technology is directly related to its potential for development and progress and for promoting the quality of life of its people.

While this may be generally accepted, it is only partially true. First of all, it is essential to realise just how much basic literacy – the ability to read and write – contributes, and is indeed prior to any particular training in ‘science and technology’. In order to be able to read the textbooks, or understand the lectures that give you a training in any field of science or technology, you must be literate. I mention this simple fact in order to stress how we tend to take literacy for granted; but my main point concerns the advanced or critical literacy associated with university education, and its absolutely essential contribution to ‘development and progress and for promoting the quality of life of [South Africa’s] people’. It is by now widely accepted that one of the greatest challenges facing any economy in the twenty​first century is the worldwide information explosion. For business and government to cope with the demands of the twenty​first century, we are going to need a citizenship which is highly skilled and competent in assessing, interpreting and communicating extraordinarily vast amounts of information. No parliamentarian needs to be told how important is the ability to read documentation quickly, to précis it accurately, to assess the information and arguments presented, and then to be able to communicate them to others. These skills – the skills of advanced literacy – are likely to be more broadly useful than expertise in any particular branch of scientific or technological enquiry. In addition, they form the backbone of any conception of what a participatory democracy might mean, the very substance of Williams’s conception of a ‘long revolution’.18 The single and most useful skills for any citizen must therefore be those associated with advanced literacy, understood as the extension of the basic skills of reading and writing into the more advanced skills of précis, analysis, interpretation, assessment and communication. The academic disciplines associated with science and technology, and the specific knowledges and techniques they teach, are not the ones best equipped to deal with the teaching and acquisition of the skills of advanced literacy. These are best taught where they have always been taught, through and across various individual disciplines, but with a firm common foundation in reading, writing, and analysis: in the disciplines of the Human and Social Sciences. It still remains to be seen what form actual implementation of the Bill is to take, but from the distressing record of the increasing dilution of the democratic aspects of higher education policy, and the increasing commitment to forms of neo​liberal pragmatism, it doesn’t look promising. The ANC government seems bent on repeating the damage to academic freedom and university autonomy characteristic of much recent African experience.19 It seems appropriate to end this chapter with a historical reminder. In 1986, TB Davie Memorial lecturer Professor HM Coovadia, professor of Paediatrics at the University of Natal, was one of the first to challenge the accepted ideas on academic freedom associated with TB Davie. ‘There is little point,’ he began impatiently, ‘in cataloguing the serious dangers posed by apartheid to academic freedom and the Universities. These are well​known and the struggle today is on a different plane’ (Coovadia 1986: 2). Instead, he offered to outline a new role for the university ‘in helping establish democracy and reversing the backlog of inequalities suffered by black people … looking at the ways our ivory towers can be integrated into people’s struggles’ (1986: 2). Broadly speaking, Coovadia favoured what he termed the ‘utilitarian’ model, developed at the recent Accra Workshop on African Universities, in which

‘the purposes of institutes of higher learning are closely linked to social goals through the use of knowledge for change’ (1986: 13) – the model in fact favoured by recent government policy, at least in part. Coovadia was one of the first to express a shift towards an instrumental definition of the university, and in so doing, to shift the idea of academic freedom from an accepted to a received idea. But at the same time, it was noticeable that Coovadia also had some warnings regarding the instrumentalisation of the universities. He also warned that it was ‘the task of the Universities to prevent capital and state from hijacking black education for vocational and technical purposes. Society has entrusted educators to protect the liberating functions of education which encourage critical thinking, promote self​learning, impart value systems and expand the horizons of knowledge’ (Coovadia 1986: 23–24). When current government policy is so explicitly devoted to vocational and technical education, it is time for South African academics to argue against the received ideas of academic freedom, and to reaffirm the need for the measure of institutional autonomy necessary to secure the institutional practice of academic freedom.20

NOTES 1 See especially the following editions of Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture: 3(1–2) (1991), which features TB Davie lectures by Eric R Woolf, Walter Sisulu and Edward W Said; and 5(1–2) (1995), featuring Gayatri Spivak’s lecture, with responses to it and Edward Said’s 1991 lecture by Paul Taylor, Johan Muller, Lesley Swartz and John Higgins. See also Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies: 8(1) (1999), with lectures by Alan Ryan, and Martin Legassick (1979/1999), and the related essay by Peter Horn; 9(1) with essays by Cleopas Thosago, Andre du Toit, Mamphela Ramphele, and JM Coetzee; and 11(2) with a TB Davie lecture by Kader Asmal, and a related essay by Shane Moran. 2 It’s also disturbing and somewhat ironic to note that the UCT journal Social Dynamics, which published Du Toit’s ill​considered and somewhat ad hominem attack, refused the traditional right of reply which forms part of the fabric of academic freedom. In the end, this was published as ‘From academic analysis to apparatchik thinking: A reply to André du Toit’ in Higgins (2003). 3 Responses to the chapter can also be found in the important series of reports commissioned by the Council on Higher Education, and in its own report. See Bentley et al. (2006); Friedman and Edigheji (2006); Ruth (2006); and CHE (2008). 4 See ‘Transformation versus neo​liberalism: Academic freedom as received idea in the new South Africa’, unpublished paper for the SA Society for Rhetoric Conference, Johannesburg, September 1998. Barthes described the general aim of Mythologies in the following terms: ‘Le départ de cette réflexion était le plus souvent un sentiment d’impatience devant le “naturel” dont la presse, l’art, le sens commun affublent sans cesse une réalité qui, pour être celle dans laquelle nous vivons, n’en est pas moins parfaitement historique … je voulais ressaisir dans l’exposition décorative de ce-qui-va-de soi, l’abus idéologique qui, à mon sens, s’y trouve caché’ (Barthes 1970: 9). Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1983) may also be positively described in these terms. For a fascinating discussion of the role of received ideas in Flaubert, see Christopher Prendergast (1988), especially pages 180–211. See also Nietzsche’s discussion, in 1872, of the dangers of ‘selbverständliches’ ideas in his The Future of our Educational Institutions (1909: 11, 48). 5 I examine two recent studies, Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996) and Louis Menand’s The Future of Academic Freedom (1996), in a review essay, ‘Academic freedom and the idea of the university’ (Higgins 2000). 6 For two of the most powerful recent arguments for the continued importance of academic freedom, see Ronald Dworkin, ‘We need a new interpretation of academic freedom’, where he argues academic freedom plays a role ‘not just in the lives of the few people it protects, but in the lives of the community more generally’ (Menand 1996: 187): it can help in building a ‘culture of independence’ and in the ‘defence against a culture of conformity’ (Menand 1996: 189); and Edward W Said, ‘Identity, authority and freedom: The potentate and the traveller’, who insists that if ‘the academy is to be a place for the realization not of the nation but of the intellect – and that I think is the academy’s reasons for being – then the intellect must not be held in thrall to the authority of the national identity’ (Menand 1996: 223). Both essays are included in the Menand collection cited above, though Said’s lecture was first published as a TB Davie Memorial lecture at UCT, in Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 3(1–2) (1991), though no acknowledgement of either of these circumstances is made.

7 See, for instance, the interesting case of Martin Legassick’s TB Davie Memorial lecture which was written to be delivered at UCT in 1979. Legassick was not given a permit to enter the country, and, following legal advice, UCT refused to have someone else to speak the lecture. The lecture – ‘Academic freedom and the workers’ struggle’ – was finally published in 1999, the year in which UCT formally apologised to Legassick over their earlier refusal to defend their academic freedom lecturer’s own academic freedom. See Legassick (1999: 67–80). 8 See DoE (1997: 14): ‘What is not clear, however, is what increases in participation rates for black students, and overall, are possible within the foreseeable future in the context of the government’s macro​economic framework and fiscal policies.’ 9 Dr Teboho Moja is currently senior advisor to the minister of Education, while Dr Nico Cloete is director of the newly formed Centre for Higher Education Transformation. 10 Similarly, the basic thrust of Marx’s criticisms of Hegel are perhaps appropriate to the report’s stance on the relation between state, civil society and the university. As Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843), ‘Thus empirical reality is accepted as it is; it is even declared to be rational. However, it is not rational by virtue of its own reason but because empirical fact in its empirical existence has a meaning other than itself. The fact which serves as a starting​point is not seen as such but as a mystical result. The real becomes a mere phenomenon, but the Idea has no content over and above this phenomenon’ (Marx 1975: 63). In similar fashion, the real social and political contradictoriness of the idea of the university under apartheid rule is not ‘seen as such’ but rather wished away, and a ‘mystical’ idea of the university asserted in its place. 11 Recent lectures have been published in the South African journal Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture, notably in 3(1–2) (1990), lectures by Walter Sisulu, Eric R Woolf and Edward Said; 5(1–2) (1995), Gayatri C Spivak’s lecture, with related essays and responses to Said’s and her work by Paul Taylor, Johan Muller, Lesley Swartz and John Higgins; 7(1) (1997), Noam Chomsky; 8(1) (1999), Alan Ryan, Martin Legassik. 12 In this respect, the most disturbing aspect of recent policy may prove to be the formation of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) which will have the administrative power to decide on the formal content of academic programmes. As the White Paper warns, the ‘incorporation of academic qualifications within a national framework is not a straightforward matter and, quite properly, it has been the subject of intense debate … The Minister is confident that other issues of concern … can be resolved within the relevant SAQA structures’ (DoE 1997: 21). 13 For a similar faith in government good intentions, and consequent blindness to the actual implications of government policy, see Shane Moran’s bland comment that ‘given the democratic advances and the existence of a state that can now claim legitimacy, [the White Paper] curtails the Kampala Declaration’s commitment to institutional autonomy in the face of potentially authoritarian state power’ (1998: 216). Moran appears strangely blind to the dominant neo​liberal instrumentalism of much of the White Paper. For the Kampala Declaration, see Russell (1993). Gayatri C Spivak gave a prescient warning of this mindset in her TB Davie Memorial lecture of 1992: ‘[I]f there is one lesson that the postcolonial world has learned in the last half​century, it is that the euphoria of crisis does not last (and is perhaps never shared ‘purely’ by all concerned). It is no doubt with some sense of this that Derrida cites the philosopher’s ground level description of academic freedom. This is what it can amount to; it can be in the service of the state. Although at the birthtime of the new nation, it is hard to imagine for some that loyalty to the state may bind freedom badly, it is never too soon to remind oneself of it’ (Spivak 1995: 129). 14 See especially Liesl Orr, who writes that despite ‘the enormity of the need for redress, the latest policy proposals … tend to give more emphasis to the “demands” of “international competitiveness”, conceptualising human resource development in a narrow “economistic” way’ (Orr 1997: 62); George Subotzky, who suggests that the ‘recently released White Paper on Higher Education … indicates a clear tipping of the balance towards globalisation concerns … It appears that the Higher Education Branch of the Department of Education … engaged the services of international consultants who are sympathetic to the tenets of globalisation … This effectively … allowed the free hand of external consultants to incorporate recognisably neo​liberal elements into the White Paper’ (Subotzky 1997: 108–109); and Eve Bertelsen, who argues that ‘while the rhetoric of “transformation” remains plausibly democratic, the change that this language is used to legitimate is essentially market​driven’ (1998: 150). 15 As Derrida puts it, in an essay which in many ways reads like a defence of traditional academic freedoms: ‘For more than eight hundred years,’ he writes, ‘“university” has been the name given by a society to a sort of supplementary body that at one and the same time it wanted to project outside itself and to keep jealously to itself, to emancipate and control’ (1983: 19, translation modified). Neither fully inside, nor completely outside, the ‘supplementary’ body which is the university gives a society the chance and institutional occasion for ‘reflection’ in two senses: reflecting or representing the society itself through the corporate body of its members, but also a ‘dissociation’ from that stable reflection, reflection as the act of a critical thinking which is ‘heterogeneous with what it reflects’ (Derrida 1983: 19). One of the political weaknesses of the late Bill Readings’s provocative account, The University in Ruins (1996), is that it neglects the fact that there is nothing substantially new about demands for the university to serve commercial interests: that is what the struggle around academic freedom has always tended to come down to. For a useful survey of the concrete struggles absent from Readings’s overly textualist account, see Stephen D’Irsay’s monumental two​volume study, Histoire des Universités (1933, 1935). My criticisms of Readings are developed further in ‘Academic freedom and the idea of the university’ (Higgins 2000). 16 What is striking is the unanimity of the record. Reporting on the generally disastrous situation in Malawi, Richard Carver

notes that while ‘state interference in academic life is covert and difficult to pinpoint … Malawian academics know what they can and cannot say, what they can and cannot research; and, for the most part, they do not breach these hidden constraints’ (in Daniel et al. 1995: 42); Abdelhadi Al​Zubeir Hamad writes that the ‘principles of university autonomy and academic freedom … do not have a place within the Islamically oriented “education revolution” in Sudan’ (1995: 78); while in Iran, as Shahrzad Mojab concludes, both ‘the Islamic and monarchist regimes adopted a similar policy with regard to the administration of the universities. The main similarities are: (i) the universities function as state organs run by an administrative structure appointed from above and incorporating a system of open police control; (ii) measures exist to ensure the institutions’ political and ideological loyalty; and (iii) the universities function as an instrument of state​building and nation​building, that is, consolidating and maintaining state power and providing skilled labour for the economy’ (1995: 147). While South African policy has clearly not gone to the extremes represented by (i) and (ii), (iii) is clearly the desire of current policy, as indicated in the statement ‘institutions should demonstrate how they have met national policy goals and priorities’ (DoE 1997: 7). 17 The following remarks are taken from my submission to the Portfolio Committee on the Bill for a National Research Foundation. A more theoretically sophisticated case for critical literacy is made in Higgins (1995, 1999), and in Chapter 3 below. 18 I argue the specific relevance of Williams’s conception to the South African experience in Higgins (1998). 19 In this respect, see generally Diouf and Mamdani (1994), and particularly Joe Oloka​Onyanya’s essay, ‘The Kampala symposium on academic freedom and social responsibility’, where he comments, ‘As structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) dictate belt​tightening measures that inordinately focus on higher education as a “luxury”, and emphasize the strengthening of vocational training and the “relevant” as opposed to the “esoteric” as well as various mechanisms to “share costs”, academic freedom has been transformed into a “commodity” that has also been deemed of marginal value’ (1994: 340). It is noteworthy that neither the Framework for Transformation document nor the Programme for Higher Education Transformation report mentions either the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social responsibility (1990) or the Lima Declaration on Academic Freedom and Autonomy of Institutions of Higher Education (1988), both of which stress (respectively) that ‘Institutions of higher education shall be autonomous of the State or any other public authority in conducting their affairs, including administration, and setting up their academic, teaching, research and other related programmes’ (Article 10), and ‘States are under an obligation not to interfere with the autonomy of institutions of higher education’ (Article 18). 20 I say the institutional practice as a way of pointing to an important issue I haven’t had time to discuss here: the constitutional place of academic freedom in South Africa. Despite the recommendations of UCT’s AFC and others, academic freedom was refused a separate and distinct place in the new Constitution. Instead it figures, separated from the issue of university autonomy, as one of the freedoms of expression, section 16.1d ‘Academic freedom and freedom of research activity’. Since academic freedom can hardly be practised outside the institution of the university, and no mention is made of the academic freedom of the institution, this is hardly the strongest line of defence. I discuss some of the negotiations around this in Higgins (1997).

REFERENCES Barthes, R. [1957] 1972. Mythologies. Translated by A Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, R. 1970. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bentley, K. Habib, A and Morrow, S. 2006. Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and the Corporatised University in Contemporary South Africa. Report commissioned by the Council on Higher Education. Pretoria. Bertelsen, E. 1998. The real transformation: The marketisation of higher education. Social Dynamics 24(2): 150. Birley, R. 1965. The Shaking Off of Burdens. The seventh TB Davie Memorial lecture, delivered at the University of Cape Town on 19 August. Available at http://www.uct.ac.za/news/lectures/tbdavie/past lectures/all/. CHE (Council on Higher Education). 2008. Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and Public Accountability in South African Higher Education. Pretoria. Coovadia, HM. 1986. From Ivory Tower to a People’s University. The twenty​seventh TB Davie Memorial lecture, delivered at the University of Cape Town. Available at http://www.uct.ac.za/news/lectures/tbdavie/past lectures/all/. Daniel, J, Hartley, N, Lador, Y, Novak, M and De Vlaming, F (eds). 1995. Academic Freedom 3: Education and Human Rights. London: Zed Books on behalf of World University Service. Derrida, J. 1983. The principle of reason: The university in the eyes of its pupils. Diacritics 13(3): 19. Diouf, M and Mamdani, M (eds). 1994. Academic Freedom in Africa. Senegal/London: CODESRIA/ABC. D’Irsay, S. 1933. Histoire des Universités. Volume 1. Paris: Editions August Picard. D’Irsay, S. 1935. Histoire des Universités. Volume 2. Paris: Editions August Picard. DoE (Department of Education). 1974. Main Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Universities. Pretoria. DoE (Department of Education). 1997. Education White Paper 3. A Programme for the Transformation of Higher

Education. General Notice 1196 of 1997. Pretoria. Du Toit, A. 2000. From autonomy to accountability: Academic freedom under threat in South Africa? Social Dynamics 26(1): 76–133. Ensor, P. 2002. Curriculum. In N Cloete, R Fehnel, P Maasen, T Moja, H Perold and T Gibbon (eds) Transformation in Higher Education: Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa. Cape Town: Juta. Flaubert, G. [1913] 2011. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Translated by G Norminton. Surrey: Oneworld Classics. Friedman, S and Edigheji, O. 2006. Eternal (and Internal) Tensions? Conceptualising Public Accountability in South African Higher Education. Report commissioned by the Council on Higher Education. Pretoria. Higgins, J. 1995. Critical literacy or the canon? Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 5(1–2): 179–190. Higgins, J. 1997. De la liberté académique. Rue Descartes 17: 75–86. Higgins, J. 1998. The legacy of Raymond Williams. English Academy Review 14: 30–48. Higgins, J. 1999. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London and New York: Routledge. Higgins, J. 2003. From academic analysis to apparatchik thinking: A reply to André du Toit. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 12(2): 191–197. Jansen, J. 2004. Accounting for Autonomy: How Higher Education Lost its Innocence. The forty​first TB Davie Memorial lecture. Available at http://www.uct.ac.za/news/lectures/tbdavie/past lectures/all/. Legassick, M. 1999. Academic freedom and the workers’ struggle. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 8(1): 67–80. Marx, K. 1975. Early Writings. Translated by R Livingstone and G Benton. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Menand, L (ed.). 1996. The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Moodie, GC. 1998. Academic freedom and the transformation of higher education. English Academy Review 14: 16. Moran, S. 1998. Academic exchanges. Alternation 5(1): 216. NCHE (National Commission on Higher Education), 1996. A Framework for Transformation. Pretoria. Nietzsche, F. 1909. The Future of our Educational Institutions. Translated by JM Kennedy. Edinburgh and London: TN Foulis. Orr, L. 1997. Globalisation and the universities: Towards the ‘market university’. Social Dynamics 23(1): 62. Prendergast, C. 1988. The Order of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Readings, B. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Russell, C. 1993. Academic Freedom. London: Routledge. Ruth, J. 2006. Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and Public Accountability in Higher Education: A Framework for Analysis of the ‘State–Sector’ Relationship in a Democratic South Africa. Report commissioned by the Council on Higher Education. Pretoria. Said, EW. 1991. Identity, authority and freedom: The potentate and the traveler. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 3(1– 2): 67–81. Spivak, GC. 1995. Academic freedom. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 5(1–2): 117–156. Subotzky, G. 1997. Pursuing both global competitiveness and national redistributive development: Implications and opportunities for South Africa’s black universities. Social Dynamics 23(1): 108–109. Thouless, RH. 1964. Rationality and Prejudice. The sixth TB Davie Memorial lecture, delivered at the University of Cape Town on 13 August. Available at http://www.uct.ac.za/news/lectures/tbdavie/past lectures/all/. Van de Sandt Centlivres, A. 1959. Thomas Benjamin Davie. The first TB Davie Memorial lecture, delivered at the University of Cape Town on 6 May. Available at http://www.uct.ac.za/news/lectures/tbdavie/past_lectures/all/. Williams, R. [1961] 1975. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. 1983. Keywords. London: Flamingo.

3 ‘It’s literacy, stupid!’: Declining the humanities in NRF research policy

This chapter emerged from two separate but related papers. The first was delivered at a National Research Foundation (NRF) workshop for academics in social sciences, law and the humanities, held at the University of Cape Town in 2004, while the second was presented as a keynote address at a conference organised by Ulrike Kistner at the University of South Africa (Unisa) in November 2005. The workshop, ‘Shifting the boundaries of knowledge’, had set itself a worthwhile task: it sought to address the increasingly visible problem of what the Academy of Science of South Africa Consensus Panel report on the humanities has recently described as the ‘huge discrepancy in NRF funding between the Humanities and the SET [science, engineering, technology] disciplines’ (ASSAf 2011: 47). Unfortunately, the attempt to address this problem was compromised from the start by the ways in which the call for participation in the discussion was framed. Why is it, potential participants were asked in the memo – known as the ‘Marcus brief’ – that accompanied the invitation to the workshop, that the social sciences, humanities and law have ‘trailed behind natural sciences in the quest for better understanding of the contemporary world’? Why have humanists and social scientists failed so blatantly to make clear their role ‘in stimulating innovation and technology in a way that addresses human needs and issues’? With its evident bias towards the natural sciences, and immediate identification of innovation with technology, the very terms of the invitation ironically reproduced exactly the excluding focus on applied science that tended to marginalise the social sciences and humanities in the first place, and make their contributions to the social and public good invisible, a theme explored in greater depth in Chapter 5. A significant part of the Unisa conference – ‘From ivory tower to market place: What future for the university in South Africa?’ – set itself to addressing precisely the underlying policy dynamics that structured the 2004 NRF workshop, and my own papers in both fora sought to bring out what seemed to me to be, as it were, quite centrally marginalised in the received ideas organising policy discussion: what anthropologist Jack Goody called the ‘prime technology of the intellect’, literacy (Goody

INTRODUCTION This paper is given in memory of Bill Readings (an old friend and colleague from days in Geneva) who died, tragically young, in a freak airplane accident in 1994. It is intended as a reminder of his impressive work, The University in Ruins (1996), one to which this gathering is surely indebted. At the same time, and since the first parts of Bill’s book appeared in the Oxford Literary Review just a decade ago, I’d also like to take the opportunity to honour the work of that journal, as it brought the neo​liberal assault on higher education into focus at a relatively early stage in its development.1 That the terms of this assault now pass as common sense in higher education policy around the world is, I believe, something to be both deplored and actively resisted.2 It may be that the ending of apartheid in South Africa gives some material ground for successful resistance to this new common sense. Certainly, as I shall discuss below, higher education policy in South Africa since 1994 does appear to be divided between the purely instrumental goals increasingly being defined globally as the be​all and end​all of education, and the broader emancipatory goals which make their formal appearance in local policy, as if the idea of democracy in South Africa has yet to be quite as fully emptied of its participatory elements as elsewhere. The title of my talk, ‘It’s literacy, stupid!’, is intended to convey some of the frustration that the humanities community – all those working in the disciplines of the arts and humanities from art history to philosophy, through classics to modern languages – in South Africa feels in relation to current funding structures at the NRF. At the same time, its textual or intertextual purpose is to refer back to – to revisit and revise – Bill Clinton’s highly successful sound​bite slogan, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’3 Clinton’s point was that the Republican Party was taking for granted something that the Democrats would foreground and pay closer attention to if elected: the performance of the American economy. The economy was central to the lives of ordinary American citizens in ways that Republicans had lost touch with. The Republicans were complacent about the economy, not because they thought it unimportant, but rather because they took its performance – or what they could get out of it for themselves – for granted.4 It is the fact of taking something for granted precisely because it is so fundamental that interests me here, and my argument starts by substituting ‘literacy’ for the ‘economy’ of Clinton’s formulation. For teachers and researchers in the humanities at South African universities now find themselves in a situation in which the fundamental social force of literacy has somehow become invisible, and literacy is ruled hors de calcul by policy makers and their apparatchiks in the structures of higher education. If, in the terminology of orthodox Marxism, it is the economic base that works as the fundamental structuring agent of the social totality, for academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it is the literacy base that acts as the structuring agent of the educational totality. Literacy – and perhaps above all, the advanced forms of literacy made available in the humanities – constitutes the very ground of educational possibility, the substance of both efficient and reflexive communication, as well as a significant element in critical and creative thinking.5 Of course, it is surely not the case that literacy is actually considered unimportant in South Africa. Indeed, there are several government campaigns under way for improving basic

literacy. But what it is sadly true to say is that the social force of literacy – what it does in and for a society – seems to have become invisible as far as policy makers in higher education are concerned, and as far as NRF research support goes. Let me be clear: it’s not that literacy is considered unimportant, in some argued and coherent fashion; it is rather that it is not considered at all. It is, at some level, taken for granted – just as we tend to take for granted the air that we breathe, and just as Clinton believed the Republicans were taking the economy for granted. But before going any further, let me clarify that the literacy in my title is intended to have a narrower sense than the usual one. The aim of this paper is not to address the very serious issues arising from what we might call primary literacy, the acquisition of the ability to read and write at basic levels of communicative competence, literacy as it is or should be taught at primary and secondary school levels. That is a topic better addressed by others, alongside the important question and implications of national language policies (see Alexander 2005). The literacy in my title is shorthand for what I refer to elsewhere as advanced or critical literacy.6 This is a literacy that, to borrow Raymond Williams’s terms, calls the bluff of authority, since it is a condition of all its practical work that it questions sources, closely examines offered authenticities, reads contextually and comparatively, identifies conventions to determine meanings. (1984: 276) It is surely in terms of this ‘call[ing] the bluff of authority’ that the different disciplines in the humanities have something in common with each other, despite the differences in the bodies of knowledge and scholarship they draw upon, and the respective focal points of their mode of enquiry. For each discipline in the humanities tends to privilege one or more of the three essential dimensions of humanist enquiry: the theoretical, the historical, and the textual. Philosophy, for instance, privileges theoretical and conceptual understanding, tending in general to an extraordinarily detailed logical assessment of the arguments of philosophers, though often at the expense of the historical understanding of embodied argument; history, in turn, places its emphasis on the subtleties of historical and contextual understanding, though sometimes at the expense of detailed theoretical and textual analysis; while the great disciplines of language and literary studies, in their precise and potent attention, tended in their foundational moments to ignore historical and theoretical questions.7 Each discipline pays attention, with its specific gravity of emphasis, to the depth, complexity and richness of human sense making, but for each discipline it is that sense making – the understanding and representation of the world, the understanding through representation of the world – that is central. In terms of skills rather than contents, the different disciplines in the humanities place different emphases on the arts of decoding or interpreting human communications in historical, theoretical, and textual terms. Yet it may well be that the real impact of the great wave of theory that hit the humanities in the seventies has meant – even in and through the polarisations it created – far greater attention to the common ground beneath the often opposing standpoints of theory, history and textuality. Critical literacy is the name I give to the general project, standing as it were behind or within the different disciplines as their common ground. I believe

that this common ground forms the best basis for a defence of the humanities in the situation of their active decline – by which I mean the decline imposed by higher education policy in general, and in terms of NRF support policy in particular. This may sound somewhat abstract, so I want to try here to give this idea of critical literacy some definition through the practical consideration of a particular example. What is critical literacy like in practice? What can it yield? What can it add to our understanding of, and practice in, the world? Not surprisingly, given the nature of this paper, the example I wish to use, and whose analysis will provide a guiding thread for my remarks today, is a single statement regarding the role and function of the NRF. I select it because it is in a simple and obvious sense a founding formulation, and one that contains or expresses that ‘declining of the humanities’ that forms the theme of this paper. My aim is through a process of critical analysis to get through to the received ideas that are (in my view at least) distorting the mission of the NRF, and leading to a consequent attitude of disdain towards the humanities in general. I choose a founding formulation in a quite literal sense.8 The statement is taken from the Bill for the Establishment of a National Research Foundation promulgated in 1997. The importance of a founding formulation is to be understood rather like taking the first step with your partner in a formal dance routine: if you get the first step wrong, it is difficult to ever recover your balance. The formulation reads as follows: It is generally accepted that the capacity of a country in science and technology is directly related to its potential for development and progress and for promoting the quality of life of its people. As we shall see, an active reading of this statement – one that ‘calls the bluff’ of its authoritativeness – necessarily engages the three dimensions of textuality, theory and history that together constitute the practice of critical literacy, of a critical literacy in action.

TEXTUAL MATTERS First, the textual level. On the closer examination that textual analysis allows, a whole range of questions begins to undermine or unthread what on the surface and at first reading may appear (and that’s the point of all representation) a relatively unproblematic statement. The textual surface becomes a screen that conceals – but the wager of textual analysis is that the subsequent contours and unevenness of the textual surface then draw attention to – the problems and contradictions animating that surface. At every moment – in such formulations as this one from the NRF founding statement – what is absent can still be perceived as a pressure that makes the apparently solid surface of the statement shimmer and, on close analysis, lose its apparent substantiality. The textual matters because of its inescapable interweaving of presence and absence, of representation and elision. For the textual analyst, adverbs are always important.9 To write that something is ‘generally

accepted’ has a very different dynamic to the idea that something is unanimously accepted. For the adverb ‘generally’ works in reality to signal though elide the existence of a body of particular opinion that does not share the general view, even though that particular opinion may not be represented in the presentation of what is ‘generally accepted’. The phrase – though wishing to give the impression of consensus – in fact points to or indicates an underlying concern about a lack of unanimity around the central assertion, the concern that generates the use of ‘generally’. On closer reading, in other words, the suspicion is raised that for something to be generally accepted means that what is generally accepted by some is specifically rejected by others, though these others are absented and silenced in and by the formulation. The point of such nit​picking at the textual level – even operating through the analysis of just this one phrase – is that it then opens up the given text to extra​textual considerations, in this case, asking just what disagreements are being covered over in the phrase ‘generally accepted’. The phrase points in fact to the existence of some central contradictions that were at work in the formation of higher education policy in the post​1994 period. These came through in what was generally regarded as the uneasy marriage of two vocabularies and ideas of the social uses of higher education. The clash was between a narrowly instrumental view – emphasising the ‘potential for development and progress’ in terms of the economy – and the broader culturalist view, which emphasised the need for building critical intellectual skills, particularly in a society still marked by the divisions of decades of apartheid.10 In the instrumentalist view – the view that on balance and in practice tends to dominate the implementation of policy – higher education needs (in the words of the 1997 Programme for Higher Education Transformation) to ‘address the development needs of society and provide the labour market, in a knowledge​driven and knowledge​dependent society, with the ever​changing high​level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern economy’ (DoE 1997: 1). From this perspective, education and higher education need to be carefully controlled and directed, and tailored to the dynamics of the economy. Education is seen as playing a largely instrumental role, one subordinated to the state’s interpretation of economic needs. Yet, at the same time – and differing in this from the dominant neo​liberal view of higher education across most of the world – South African policy also placed significant emphasis on the importance of critical and analytical skills to a healthy society.11 This comes through in higher education policy as a repeated acknowledgement of the values of ‘critical citizenship’, described in the Programme as ‘the socialization of enlightened, responsive and constructively critical citizens’ (DoE 1997: 1). As I argue elsewhere, the Programme as a whole simply juxtaposes these two elements without acknowledging that there might be a strain or tension between them, much less admitting that they may well be incommensurate (see Higgins 2000). How have these strains worked through in practice? In a recent survey of the implementation of this policy, Gibbon and Kabaki note that ‘by 1998, the emphasis had decisively shifted from demands for democratization to demands for efficiency and effectiveness’ (Gibbon and Kabaki 2002: 217). All in all, they conclude that the ‘democratic phase’ has been superseded by the ‘managerial phase’ (2002: 216). It is the consequent emphasis on the instrumental definition of higher educational goals that then leads to a focus on science and technology that marginalises the humanities and makes for the virtual invisibility of literacy and high literacy that we have seen.12

What is missing from the rhetorical consensus generated by the NRF’s ‘generally accepted’ is then precisely the voicing of the cultural that would insist on the cultural as a constitutive force in any reasonable account of social development and progress. What is absent from or made invisible by this formulation is of course the role and function of literacy in helping to constitute and sustain the workings and exchanges of any complex society. At this point, textual analysis calls for some consideration – necessarily both historical and theoretical – of the role and function of literacies in the formation and development of complex societies. Any such consideration suggests the real strangeness and short​sightedness of this taking​for​granted of literacy in any higher education policy concerned with the promotion of social and economic development. For, even at the most basic level, is it not overwhelmingly obvious that the general ability to read and write is the sine qua non of any form of education, and even education in any particular branch of ‘science and technology’? Indeed, it should not be forgotten that the invention of writing – the currency of literacy – deserves credit as one of the primary technological inventions of the human species, perhaps surpassing in its far​reaching effects that of any other single invention. Writing, in cultural historian Jack Goody’s words, is the ‘technology of the intellect’ par excellence (1986: 167).

THE SOCIAL FORCE OF LITERACY Goody’s The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society is just one of a whole block of work that argues for recognition of the constitutive force of writing on the emergence of modern societies.13 In a striking study that succinctly examines comparative European and African data from ancient Egypt to the present day, Goody argues that ‘whatever form one chooses [and the study deals with religion, the economy, law and the state] organization and behaviour are significantly influenced by the use of writing’ (1986: 119–120). Writing, for Goody, is a ‘technology of the intellect’, a primal technology in the sense that it both enables and compels new forms of social cooperation and productivity. For Goody, the fact that the emergence of the single state and an overall pantheon of gods in pre​Christian Egypt coincides with the appearance of writing is no accident. Only the forms of social collaboration and documentation that writing allows permit such unitary formations, bringing together large groups of people into a single state and faith, as well as an organised system of economic exchange (Goody 1986: 65). Writing also provides the central force and substance of the administrative, that constitutive element in state formation so privileged in Max Weber’s account of modern society. All in all, as Goody emphasises (and interestingly in line with some of Michel Foucault’s analyses14), the increase in knowledge by the state represented an increase in the power to govern; as in both India and Africa knowledge meant governability; and both entailed the extensive use of the written word. (1986: 116) In conclusion, Goody argues for fuller recognition of the social force of literacy, and how it took ‘some 5000 years to expand the ability to read and write throughout the social system, to

make it an instrument of democracy, of popular power, of the masses’ (1986: 121).15 At the very least, we can say that an awareness of this long history of the social force of literacy appears to be entirely absent from the NRF’s perspectives on the humanities.16 If the theoretical place of literacy is – as Goody suggests – so important as the ‘technology of the intellect’, what can account for its absence in policy and research support initiatives? How can such monumental blindness or oversight be possible? Some explanation may be found through an engagement with the historical dimension of these arguments, in an analysis of the received ideas and formulations which appear to be behind or at work in NRF thinking. My suggestion here is that much of current South African policy regarding the humanities appears to be in thrall to a phrase, and that phrase is CP Snow’s coinage in the late 1950s, the ‘two cultures’.17

THE HISTORY OF A RECEIVED IDEA Let’s begin with a quotation or call to order from a scholarly book called Crisis in the Humanities (Plumb (ed) 1965). The humanities, writes the editor, need very urgently to ‘adapt themselves to the needs of a society dominated by science and technology’ (cited in Collini 2000: xlii). Familiar enough? The quotation might well serve as the mot d’ordre of our own gathering, or of very many discussions of higher education policy in present​day South Africa. Yet the quotation comes from a book published all of forty years ago, and edited by the historian JH Plumb from the papers presented at a conference of the same name. The conference was called in response to, and in amplification of, a lecture given in Cambridge on 7 May 1959, where novelist, former scientist and political administrator CP Snow launched a phrase and an argument that continues to resound today: ‘Two cultures’. The lecture seemed to identify a crisis around directions in higher education and research that we are repeating, in the full sense of the phrase that those who don’t know their history are always in danger of repeating it. The common pressure is that behind the desire to change and adapt the structures of education and higher education in such a way as to recognise the fact that future economic power and development is largely in the hands of science and technology. Snow was very worried, in his own time, by the fact that Britain was in danger of falling behind in the struggle to develop the economy through science and technology, and that the education system was doing little to train the scientists and technologists who would be the source of future economic development and social well​being. ‘Our population is small,’ he writes, ‘by the side of either the USA or the USSR. Roughly if we compare like with like, and put scientists and engineers together, we are training at a professional level per head of the population one Englishman to every one and half Americans to every two and a half Russians’ (Snow 2000: 36). As with policy makers in South Africa today, Snow was motivated by a powerful sense of urgency regarding the shape and structure of education and higher education in the country. Like much contemporary thinking, Snow saw education in science and technology as providing the key to the economic development and well​being of the nation, and, somewhat like our own discussions, urged the need for a conversation between two cultures – the scientific and the

humanist – which had so given up the habit of conversation that the gap between them seemed to threaten to become unbridgeable. ‘Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense, as well as in the most practical,’ he writes. ‘When the two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom’ (Snow 2000: 50), he urges, and we might take that as the starting point for our discussions. But, despite all his emphasis on the need for conversation and exchange, even a cursory reading shows how Snow now represented the two sides in this potential conversation in ways that made true conversation – an exchange and discussion between equals – all but impossible. Consciously or unconsciously, he revealed himself a prey to his own received ideas in ways that precluded a truly critical frame of mind. In brief, for Snow, science good while humanities bad. Snow’s scientists have a lot to pat themselves on the back for, while humanists would be better off staying entirely silent in the conversation. Scientists are represented as natural optimists, and this is the product of their almost always successful problem​solving and the natural linkage between theory and practice. Scientists are less complacent than other social groups, and in the face of social problems they ‘are inclined to be impatient to see if something can be done; and inclined to think that it can be done, until it’s proved otherwise. That is their real optimism, and it’s an optimism that the rest of us badly need’ (Snow 2000: 7). All in all, scientists have their own culture, their characteristic ways of thinking, analysing and acting, and scientific culture ‘contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons’ arguments – even though the scientists do cheerfully use words in senses which literary persons don’t recognize, the senses are exact ones …’ (2000: 12). And – of particular though belated interest to South Africa – scientists ‘are [even] freer than most people from racial feeling; their own culture is in its human relations a democratic one’ (2000: 48). On the other side stand – or perhaps ‘squirm’ would be a better descriptive term, from this point of view – the humanists and intellectuals, with the ‘literary intellectuals’ coming under particular attack. For Snow, as one section heading has it, intellectuals are ‘natural Luddites’, looking back to a Golden Age before industry with longing, and ignoring the bitter realities of a world without science. Discretely, in an interesting rhetorical tactic which seeks to preserve the reader’s sense of Snow’s lack of bias, the most savage characterisation is delegated to an unknown fellow scientist, a ‘scientist of distinction’, who simply asks (and Snow gives no counter​response, stating that he won’t attempt to ‘defend the indefensible’ [Snow 2000: 7]): ‘[W]eren’t they [the literary intellectuals] not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?’ (2000: 7). Damaging words, and perhaps especially so in the immediate post​war period. But despite Snow’s attempts at maintaining some sort of balance, his hostility and aggression towards humanist culture comes through very strongly indeed: ‘the highly​educated members of the non​scientific culture couldn’t cope with the simplest concepts of pure science: it is unexpected, but they would be even less happy with applied science’ (2000: 30); ‘I would bet that out of men getting firsts in arts subjects at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organization which it [button making] needs’ (2000: 30). The famous equation of having read a Shakespeare play or Dickens novel with knowing and understanding

the second law of thermodynamics just about sums it up: a more or less total contempt for the professional knowledge and understanding of non​scientific disciplines. As Lionel Trilling politely remarked, commenting from the cultural distance of New York, on the heat that characterised the Cambridge debate between Snow and Leavis, Snow’s writing revealed an ‘extreme antagonism’ towards literature, despite his claims (which help to authorise his lecture as a whole) to have a foot in both camps (Trilling 1967: 138). All in all, as Snow had put it even more directly in an article published prior to Two Cultures, scientists enjoy a ‘greater “moral health” than “literary intellectuals”’ (cited in Collini 2000: xxvi). From opposing positions like this – the essence of the science or humanities stance – the only dialogue possible is a dialogue des sourds, a dialogue of the deaf. The point of this brief discussion of the damaging dynamics of Snow’s presentation of the ‘two cultures’ is to ask whether or not there exists a similarly (parallel, but not exact) damaging set of oppositions and assumptions at work in our contemporary thinking about ‘science or humanities’ here in South Africa. Is such antagonistic opposition what characterises the current state of things? My suspicion is that this damaging stereotype of ‘two cultures’ may, like all received ideas, run very deep indeed, and form part and parcel of the common sense or pre​conceptual thinking informing current discussion, specifically in the NRF and more generally in South African policy.18 Obviously, much has changed in the state of knowledge and practice since the time of Snow’s lecture. Yet it is the presumption of this paper that one thing that hasn’t changed is the vocabulary – and with that the built​in common sense which informs and indeed precludes discussion. Why say this? Because of the resurgence of the ‘two cultures’ vocabulary in recent discussions and debates centred on some genuine changes and advances in scholarly knowledge and informed public opinion since Snow’s time. While this is not the place or occasion to rehearse the detail of the Sokal Affair,19 it is perhaps worthwhile to at least point to a number of books which attempt to unwrite some of the changes and developments that have taken place in Snow’s ‘two cultures’ argument, largely under the impetus of Thomas Kuhn’s remarkable study, also published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a study which did much to, as it were, level the playing field between science and the humanities. A spate of recent studies seem to wish to return us to Snow’s time, and to be heavily invested in the kind of narcissistic self​image of the scientist indulged in with such complaisance by Snow himself (see Gross and Levitt [1997]; Weinberg [1994]; Sokal and Bricmont [1998]). Stefan Collini, in his fine Introduction to the latest edition of Snow’s Two Cultures, has summarised much of the distance between Snow and ourselves. He points out that ‘the history and philosophy of science was a fairly modest enterprize in Snow’s time, but it has been a major academic growth area in recent decades’ (2000: xlviii). He notes how, ‘In practice, much of what is commonly regarded as science has to be understood at the end of [the] twentieth century less as disinterested enquiry and more as a part of the commercial strategies of drug companies, aerospace industries, and the like’ (2000: lxv– vi). And again, ‘the experience of recent decades has suggested that improving the standards of living in third​world

countries rests more on understanding the very complex operation of political and cultural forces at work than on understanding the science involved in the latest technological advance’ (2000: lxix). In conclusion, he writes, ‘it has not become more obvious since Snow wrote that … an education in physics or chemistry is a better preparation for handling the world’s problems than an education in history or philosophy’ (2000: lxix–xx). All in all, the ‘notion of the “two cultures” [may be] at best, an irrelevant anachronism’ (2000: liv). Yet, as we have tried to show, an irrelevant anachronism that may still manage – in the guise of a received idea – to influence our contemporary analyses and discussions. My feeling is that only something as large but invisible as a significant preconception or received idea can be behind such a blind spot in current policy.

CONCLUSION These are just a few of the textual, theoretical and historical considerations that arise from a careful reading of the NRF’s founding statement. In conclusion, it is perhaps worth amplifying the central theme of this paper: the constitutive importance of literacy and advanced literacy for the functioning of modern and contemporary societies. I turn to Ernest Gellner’s important formulations to help frame and present my concluding remarks. ‘The major part of training in industrial society is generic training,’ he argued, generic training, not specifically connected with the highly specialized professional activity of the person in question, and preceding it. Industrial society may by most criteria be the most highly specialized society ever; but its education system is unquestionably the least specialized, the most universally standardized, that has ever existed. (Gellner 1997: 60) And, at the centre of this education is literacy, both in its basic and advanced forms. For the ‘paradigm of work’, observed Gellner, ‘is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing’ (1997: 64). Work, in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with other people … For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably precise communication becomes generally, pervasively used and important. (Gellner 1997: 64) ‘Explicit and reasonably precise communication.’ Perhaps now, some twenty years after Gellner’s original arguments and at a moment when the information economy is more visible than ever, this emphasis on the social force of communication is all the more true. Certainly, for contemporary political thinkers such as Hardt and Negri, forms of communication stand as a constitutive element of the ‘biopolitical’ in their provocative analysis of emerging global society.20 And surely it is by now widely accepted that one of the greatest challenges facing any economy in the twenty​first century is the worldwide information explosion. For business and government to cope with these demands, we will need citizens who are highly skilled and

competent in not just paraphrasing and passing on, but in assessing and interpreting vast quantities of information. No parliamentarian, no business person, no administrator, needs to be told just how important it is not only to read documentation quickly and to summarise it accurately, but also to assess the information and arguments presented, and then to be able to communicate these to others, with appropriate comments. Similarly, no one who practises these skills needs to be told how much value they add (to use the current phrase, itself worthy of analysis). The skills needed to achieve this are those of a critical literacy. The capacity of a country in its critical literacy skills is as directly related to its potential for development and progress as its capacity in science and technology. All in all, NRF policy with regard to research funding in the humanities has as its perhaps unintentional effects the declining rather than the supporting of the humanities. I make an awkward play on the word ‘declining’ for two reasons. The first is to refer to the simple fact that most requests for research support from the NRF for the humanities are routinely declined, to such an extent that many colleagues now refuse to take the time necessary to seek NRF support. The NRF does not have the support of the humanities community in South Africa because the humanities community does not feel it has the support of the NRF. The second refers to the funding that may be available in terms of the current policies of selective research support, organised around the exclusionary modes (quite contrary to the substance of academic freedom) of key themes and areas. Such selective policy must in the long term lead to the decline of the humanities as selective support ultimately leads to the erosion of disciplinary reproduction. In a situation in which only certain aspects of a discipline may attract funding, the discipline as a whole will inevitably crumble. Current NRF policy towards the humanities takes on the form of a declining of the humanities, in all senses of the term. To which this paper responds, troping Bill Clinton’s favoured slogan, ‘It’s literacy, stupid!’

NOTES 1 See Readings (1996) and Oxford Literary Review 17(1–2) (1995). 2 In that sense, this paper endorses Miyoshi’s recognition that ‘administrators seem eager to write off the humanities’ and his call for ‘a new interventional project with which to combat the corporatization of the university and the mind’ (Miyoshi 2000: 50). For a useful survey of policy in the United States, see Miyoshi (1999, 2000). 3 The slogan was first recommended by Bill Clinton’s aide, James Carville, and figured as one of three focus points on a chalkboard in the 1992 campaign headquarters. 4 The growing awareness of the Republican Party’s state of denial with regard to the economy forms a repeated theme in Clinton’s account of the formation of his key policies. See Clinton (2005). 5 For a useful general survey, see Barton (1994), while for some interesting and valuable counters to an overemphasis on traditional forms of literacy, see Street (1993) and, with special reference to South Africa, Prinsloo and Breier (1996). 6 See, for instance, Freire (1970). My own sense of the term is specifically developed around the three dimensions of interpretation: the textual, the historical and the theoretical. See, in particular, Higgins (1992). 7 See, with particular regard to the tensions between the analytic and the contextual assessments of political philosophy, the work of writers such as Skinner (2002) and Forbes (1975); for a classic statement of the usual blindness of historians to textual matters, see White (1973); while for classic statements of the blindness of several generations of literary critics to historical and theoretical questions, see, for instance, Williams (1975) and Said (1983). 8 For a useful and provocative examination of the structure of founding statements in general, see Derrida (1984). 9 Not only adverbs, of course. Further critical attention could also be fruitfully paid to the question of the causal direction of the direct relation between science and technology and progress and development (does progress and development enable

investment in science and technology, or does investment in science and technology enable progress and development? – somewhere, the whole question of the prior ‘primitive accumulation’ of cultural capital disappears from view, as if the playing fields between first​ and third​world countries were equal); to the question of how much sense it makes for the relations between science and technology and development and progress to be treated as if they were factors that work in isolation from, say, questions of biopolitics (the health of a country’s citizens and workforce), and politics tout court (the political stability of a country, its levels of corruption and nepotism); and the questions raised by the use of ‘and’ in ‘science and technology’ (is it exclusive, i.e. restricting the field to only those branches of science and technology which work in direct relation to each other, or inclusive, open to all sciences and all technologies – including, according to the definitions of science and technology, the humanities and literacy, the ‘technology of the intellect’?). 10 For brief discussion of this, see Higgins (1998) and, with much greater detail, Gumport (2000). 11 For some usefully brief surveys of global trends in this regard, see, for instance, Maasen and Cloete, who note – in somewhat guarded terms – that ‘the traditional pact between society and higher education has become problematic’ (2002: 16). 12 Thus, for example, the annual Human Sciences Research Council survey of government policy for 2005/06 has a chapter ‘The state of mathematics and science education: Schools are not equal’ (Reddy 2006). As Reddy puts it, ‘Mathematics and science are key areas of knowledge and competence for the development of an individual and the social and economic development of South Africa in a globalising world’ (2006: 392). Neither the chapter nor the volume as a whole had any indexed reference to literacy. 13 Barton sums up the argument succinctly as ‘Literacy arose with the coming of urbanization and more complex forms of social organization’ (1994: 116). See, for instance, Goody and Watt (1968), McLuhan (1962), Havelock (1982), Ong (1982) and Olson (1988). 14 See, for instance, Foucault’s definition of his later work as characterised by an interest in ‘governmentality’, ‘the formation of a whole series of specific government apparatuses, and … the development of a whole complex of knowledges’ (Foucault 2002: 220). 15 Compare Raymond Williams’s statement that ‘the struggle for literacy was as real a social struggle as any struggle for subsistence or food or shelter’ (1989: 154) and, for further discussion, Higgins (1999: 174–177). 16 For a useful general survey, see Pattison (1982). 17 The following section draws on material developed for the NRF workshop. 18 For it is certainly correct to say, in terms of more global discussions, that the antagonistic opposition has returned with a vengeance in recent responses to the efforts made since Snow’s time – that is, post​Kuhn through Harding (1993), Latour (2000) and Haraway (1992) – to bridge the gaps between the ‘two cultures’ of science and the humanities. As one wounded anthropologist put it, in the wake of the Sokal Affair, ‘Scientists always stomp around meetings talking about “bridging the two​culture gap”, but when scores of people from outside the sciences begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in horror’ (Latour 2000: 17). 19 For more on this, see http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sokal affair.html. 20 Hardt and Negri present this in terms of a new vocabulary of ‘biopolitical production’. See for instance their statement that ‘we will quickly find today in many respects economic production is at the same time cultural and political. We will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates “immaterial goods” such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. In such immaterial labour, production spills over beyond the bounds of the economy traditionally conceived to engage culture, society and politics directly. What is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production “biopolitical” to highlight how general its products are and how directly it engages social life in its entirety’ (Hardt and Negri 2005: 94).

REFERENCES Alexander, N. 2005. The role of African universities in the institutionalisation of African languages. Journal of Higher Education in Africa 5(1): 29–44. ASSAF (Academy of Science of South Africa). 2011. Consensus Panel Report on the State of the Humanities: Status, Prospects, Strategies. Pretoria: Academy of Science. Barton, D. 1994. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of the Written Word. Oxford: Blackwell. Clinton, B. 2005. My Life. London: Arrow Books. Collini, S. 2000. Introduction. In CP Snow The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DoE (Department of Education). 1997. Education White Paper 3. A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education. General Notice 1196 of 1997. Pretoria. Derrida, J. 1984. Otobiographies: L’Enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom proper. Paris: Galilée. Forbes, D. 1975. Hume’s Philosophical Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. 2002. Power: Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 3. Translated by R Hurley et al. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Gellner, E. 1997. Nationalism as a product of industrial society. In M Guibernau and J Rex (eds) The Ethnicity Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibbon, T and Kabaki, J. 2002. Staff. In N Cloete et al. (eds) Transformation in Higher Education: Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa. Landsdowne, Cape Town: Juta. Goody, J. 1986. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J and Watt, I. 1968. The consequences of literacy. In J Goody (ed.) Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gross, PR and Levitt, N. 1997. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gumport, P. 2000. Academic restructuring: Organizational change and institutional imperatives. Higher Education 39: 67–91. Haraway, D. 1992. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London and New York: Verso. Harding, S (ed.). 1993. The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hardt, M and Negri, A. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Havelock, EA. 1982. The Literate Revolution in Ancient Greece and its Cultural Consequences. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Higgins, J. 1998. The legacy of Raymond Williams. English Academy Review 14: 30–48. Higgins, J. 1999. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London and New York: Routledge. Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 2000. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maasen, P and Cloete, N. 2002. Global reform trends in higher education. In N Cloete et al. (eds) Transformation in Higher Education: Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa. Landsdowne, Cape Town: Juta. MacLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenburg Galaxy. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Miyoshi, M. 1999. ‘Globalization’, culture and the university. In F Jameson and M Miyoshi (ed.) The Cultures of Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Miyoshi, M. 2000. Ivory tower in escrow. boundary 2 27(1): 7–50. Olson, D. 1988. Mind and media: The epistemic functions of literacy. Journal of Communications 38(3): 254–279. Ong, WJ. 1982. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen. Pattison, R. 1982. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plumb, JH (ed.). 1965. Crisis in the Humanities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Prinsloo, M and Breier, M (eds). 1996. The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa. Cape Town: SACHED. Readings, B. 1996. The University in Ruins. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Reddy, V. 2006. The state of mathematics and science education: Schools are not equal. In S Buhlungu et al. (eds) State of the Nation: South Africa 2005–2006. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Said, EW. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Faber. Skinner, Q. 2002. Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snow, CP. 2000. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sokal, A and Bricmont, E. 1998. Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile. Street, B (ed.). 1993. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trilling, L. 1967. Beyond Culture. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Weinberg, S. 1994. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Vintage. White, H. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, R. 1975. The Country and the City. St Alban’s: Paladin. Williams, R. 1984. Writing, speech and the ‘classical’. In J Higgins (ed.) The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, R. 1989. What I Came to Say. London: Hutchinson.

4 Institutional culture as keyword

One of the key institutions set up to help develop and regulate higher education after apartheid was the Council on Higher Education (CHE). This was established in 1997, and combined two functions that were initially planned for separate bodies. The first of these was intended to provide a neutral, non-coercive space in which to hold an inclusive and ongoing debate around higher education issues between government, the universities and the public; the second, to operate a system of institutional surveillance and academic auditing on a model derived from the New Public Management principles that were reconfiguring academic experience across the world (Cloete 2002: 423). Not surprisingly, a certain tension exists between these two roles, and the CHE was at its best when self-consciously exploring this tension. Lis Lange – former executive director of the CHE’s quality assessment commission – expressed this tension well. She noted that while the Council ‘recognized that monitoring in the context of the evaluative state [in global higher education] had bureaucratized the relation between higher education, the state and civil society’, the system of evaluation and monitoring intended for South Africa ‘had precisely the opposite purpose: to deepen democracy through identifying the obstacles to its achievement’ (Lange 2006: 47). A central aim of the CHE auditing process – the potentially autocratic dimension – was therefore to seek to establish a ‘link between evaluation and deliberative democracy’ (2006: 47) so that the ‘conception of the purpose of monitoring’ was not simply ‘accountability’ (as it was or claimed to be in the global template of the evaluative state), but also ‘self-reflection and the generation of knowledge about higher education’ (Lange 2006: 46–47). As a part of this self-reflexive programme, and helping to fulfil the originally intended mandate of both promoting and serving as a forum for public discussion, the CHE publishes both a regular journal – Kagisano: CHE Higher Education Discussion Series – as well as a free-standing series of research-based enquiries into key issues and debates in higher education. In 2006, I agreed to write an analysis of a new term that was coming through in South African higher education discourse, that of ‘institutional culture’. At one and the same time, the idea of institutional culture seemed to hold the key to successful transformation at

INTRODUCTION Institutional culture has become a buzzword in recent discussions of higher education in South Africa. Indeed, as references to it proliferate, there is a growing sense that institutional culture may well be the key to the successful transformation of higher education in South Africa. Or – to frame the matter as forcefully as do many recent analysts – it is simply the massive fact and bulk of institutional culture that may be the main obstacle in the way of the successful transformation of South Africa’s higher education system. So it is that casual reference to institutional culture features in ministerial announcements and the mission statements of leading universities; that it is becoming increasingly the focal point of research surveys, articles, and dissertations; and that institutional culture is used to explain or explain away phenomena as different (or as related) as marking and manslaughter.1 In the currently dominant deployment of the term, institutional culture is used to refer to what is perceived as the overwhelming ‘whiteness’ of higher education in South Africa.2 As dean of Education at Pretoria University – and perhaps South Africa’s leading controversialist in higher education matters – Jonathan Jansen put it recently, ‘the last frontier in the quest for social integration and nonracial communities in former white institutions will always be this hard​to​define phenomenon called “institutional culture”’ (Mail & Guardian 19​27 August 2004, page 1). In this now dominant usage, institutional culture figures as a kind of shorthand term for the powerful currents of racial feeling still active in South African society more than a decade after formal democratisation. Yet, as Jansen indicate s in the Sunday Times article, for all the apparent confidence with which the term is used, there is still a troubling sense that institutional culture remains ‘a hard to define phenomenon’ or, in the words of another recent commentator, a ‘slippery notion indeed’ (Ensor 2002: 285). The starting point for this chapter is precisely this slipperiness, one that can perhaps best be defined as a certain tension between the term’s immediate appeal, and an underlying uneasiness regarding its precise referent and related conceptual coherence. Why is it that the phrase ‘institutional culture’ can come so readily to the lips, yet at the same time appear so difficult to pin down, once and for all, in a singular definition? The method of this analysis is derived from a particular stance within contemporary literary and cultural studies, a stance I refer to elsewhere as that of a ‘critical literacy’. In this sense of the term, ‘critical literacy’ refers to the analysis and interpretation of ideas and representations in the necessarily intricate combination of their historical, theoretical and textual dimensions. In this perspective, ‘institutional culture’ is treated less as an assured or given concept, one with a definite set of easily specifiable contents, and more as a ‘keyword’, an item of contested vocabulary in a conflictual and disputed social process. In this sense, the very fact that ‘institutional culture’ is a phrase on the lips of many educationalists may point to the difficulty of the term, as the term names and, by naming, seeks to control a contested reality.3 The term ‘keyword’, in turn, is taken from the work of the British literary and cultural critic, Raymond Williams (1921–1988), and a brief discussion of his use of it may help to ground the analysis that follows.4 Williams has been described as ‘the single most important critic of post​war Britain’ (Eagleton 1984: 108). Williams probably did the most of his generation of post​war critics in

Britain to emphasise the links between culture and society. Taken as a whole, his work articulated the possibility of extending the powerful analytic tools developed in the study of literature to the broader processes of cultural and political life in ways that are highly relevant to public discourse in contemporary South Africa. Keywords, first published in 1976, represents something like a central work in Williams’s oeuvre.5 Subtitled ‘a vocabulary of culture and society’, it extends the discussion of the changing meanings of words and concepts under the pressures of social and political change. While Williams’s classic study Culture and Society 1780–1950 had focused on the shifting senses of words such as ‘industry’, ‘democracy’, ‘class’, ‘art’ and ‘culture’ (Williams 1979: 13), Keywords extended the same method of historical semantics to a much broader series of terms, ranging from ‘aesthetic’ and ‘alienation’ to ‘work’ and ‘science’. In both books – as in Williams’s work as a whole – the guiding principle remains the same. Attention to the fact that ‘our vocabulary, the language we use to inquire into and to negotiate our actions, is no secondary factor, but a practical and radical element itself’ (Williams 1979: 323). A useful starting point for this investigation of institutional culture is Williams’s entry on the word ‘culture’ in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1983). Culture, he writes, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams 1983: 87), and he offers a survey and summary of its various senses and definitions over the past three​hundred years. Much of the discussion is generally useful for any careful consideration of institutional culture, but what is taken from it in particular is less its content than its form.6 For the important stress in Williams’s account falls on the fact of this variety, with his noting how ‘it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought’ (Williams 1983: 87). ‘Faced by [the] complex and still active use of the word,’ he writes, ‘it is easy to react by selecting one “true” or “proper” or “scientific” sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused’ (1983: 91); but, he adds, [i]n general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument … [and] within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions … these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage. (1983: 91) From this densely argued perspective, what makes institutional culture so ‘hard to define’ is not, in the end, simply the reality it names. It is rather the fact that naming that reality is part and parcel of a series of complex arguments about the future of higher education in South Africa, in which there are (in Williams’s terms) ‘fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions’. Rather than seek to settle on a single ‘true or proper or scientific’ meaning to the term, it is then precisely the ‘range and overlap of meanings’ at work in the existing uses of institutional culture that form the focus of this investigation. In emphasising these, one aim in this project is to contest a pervasive mode of writing in higher education discourse. Much current writing deploys a vocabulary that tends to represent change (perhaps in some distantly Hegelian fashion) as an organic process, and this effectively works to naturalise what is better understood as a complex and disputed social action.7

This chapter, therefore, examines several stages in what might be called the career of the term, although the sense of career is here less the usual one as progress and natural development to an assured professional outcome, and more the root sense of career as a swerving, shifting, or troping. The first part thus examines the emergence of the term in its (apparently) cognate form of organisational culture in business studies writing in the early 1980s, and some of the dynamics engaged in its first uses in higher education discourse in the mid​ to late 1980s, while the second looks at two major forms of its deployment in South Africa.

THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE William G Tierney was one of the first writers to put the term to work in discussions of higher education management. In his influential article, ‘Organizational culture in higher education’, he observed that the term ‘organizational culture’ first emerged in the 1980s ‘as a topic of central concern for those who study organizations’ (Tierney 1988: 2). Tierney mentions books such as William Ouchi’s Theory Z (1981), Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1984), Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures (1982) and Edgar H Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership (1985) as standard works in a well​established field (Tierney 1988: 2). This account focuses particularly on Schein’s 1985 study, as it usefully embodies and exemplifies the constitutive contradictions at the heart of much writing on organisational culture. In general terms, it is important to recognise that the emergence of a new term or idea, such as ‘organisational culture’, is always an active response to a changing social and political reality. ‘Active response’ is stressed because it is important to understand the term ‘response’, not as some passive and automatic registration of a changing reality, but as an active attempt to come to grips with that reality and, by naming it, to work on it. The idea of organisational culture came into focus as a distinct object of analysis in business studies at a very particular economic and ideological moment. This was the moment of crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s in which the perceived pressures of a global economic downturn led to a consequent awareness of, and emphasis on, the fact of increasing levels of global competition.8 In particular, for American business the term came into focus as a way of examining and dealing with the sudden disturbing visibility of Japan as a major competitor in the global economy in areas (electronics, motor car manufacture) in which the United States had previously prided itself on its dominance and superiority. Japan’s newly visible success held up an unflattering mirror to what was perceived as America’s comparative weakness and its increasing lack of competitiveness in many areas of manufacturing (this at a moment when the economy as a whole was undergoing a major shift from manufacturing to finance as the focus of its interest and activity).9 In the immediate post​war period, as America’s Occupation Authority helped in the rebuilding of its shattered economy, Japan figured in the American social imaginary as a figure of fun, a mere ‘copycat culture’ incapable of creativity and innovation, and no threat to American economic dominance.10 With the suddenness that perhaps characterises all cultural

articulation of economic and political process, all that changed with the recognition in the early 1980s that the Japanese economy had become the third largest in the world (Pascale and Athos 1986: 20), and with the fact that America was running a particularly large trade deficit with Japan.11 By the 1980s, Japanese business culture became an object of anxious speculation and emulation, disturbing enough to feature in numerous mass cultural narratives, as well as in writing on business studies itself.12 Within business studies itself, organisational culture was the ground of anxious comparison between Japanese and American business practices. In Theory Z, William Ouchi shows (to quote the subtitle of this seminal analysis of Japanese business practices) ‘how American business can meet the Japanese challenge’ (Ouchi 1981). Ouchi argues that much of Japanese business success came from its different organisational culture, and the ways that culture produced more committed, energetic and innovative employees. In response, a whole series of analysts sought to bring the strengths and weaknesses of American business into focus through a consideration of organisational culture. Abegglen and Stalk argue that Japanese organisational culture, the kaisha, ‘has gone farther than others to minimize conflicting interests and to integrate each of the members of the group into a whole that works in the common interest’ (1985: 182), while Pascale and Athos sought to ‘point out how our managerial blind spots [are] related to American culture and society’ (1986: 22). While, in contrast to Ouchi, Thomas J Peters and Robert H Waterman found that ‘[b]usiness performance in the United States has deteriorated badly at least compared to that of Japan’ (1984: 41), nonetheless the ‘excellent companies [in the United States] … had cultures as strong as any Japanese organization’ (1984: xxi–xxii). All in all, as Edgar Schein puts it in his landmark study, Organizational Culture and Leadership, the ‘discovery that some Japanese companies could compete successfully with their United States counterparts suddenly focused our attention on both national and organizational culture’ (1985: x). In practical terms, the new focus on comparative organisational cultures seemed to promise or to offer an extra and crucial dimension in the search for ever​increasing efficiency in a situation of ever​increasing competitiveness. Peters and Waterman have presented one of the most influential cases for the importance of organisational culture. In their view, the idea of organisational culture is useful because it enabled a challenge to the hitherto single emphasis in managerial theory on the importance of rational planning strategy. While key writers, such as AD Chandler, had established the importance of a rational planning strategy to the success of American business in the first half of the twentieth century, the crisis and reconfiguration of the new global economy suggested the need to turn away from received wisdom and to emphasise the equal if not greater importance of a more cultural understanding of business structures and management in the workplace itself.13 For Peters and Waterman, the ‘rational approach to management misses a lot’ (1984: 30). The idea of the rational ‘has come to have a very narrow definition in business analysis’, they argue. ‘It is the right answer, but it’s missing all of that messy human stuff, such as good strategies that do not allow for persistent old habits, implementation barriers, and simple human inconsistencies’ (1984: 31). What Peters and Waterman found – in their investigation of the actual practices of a number of stable and profitable companies – was that efficient cost analysis alone (as argued by figures such as Chandler) could not explain their comparative success. Only something like

organisational culture could: the recognition of and working with the largely unconscious structures of work and production in the business environment. Once this recognition was in place, the control and management of organisational culture then promised to give a sharpened competitive edge to companies as they operated in an ever more competitive world economy. Organisational culture therefore presented a new dimension to the process of increasing competitiveness and market share: not simply the product, or better processes of production, but a new dimension of improved management and control.14 The promise was of a new dimension of improved management, control and efficiency, a deeper penetration of Weberian rationality. But the question arises as to the extent to which it was or could have been fulfilled. The question, in turn, gives rise to what might be called the constitutive contradiction of the literature on organisational culture, one that is not only carried through, but is also even exacerbated in much of the thinking on the role and place of institutional culture in higher education debates. This constitutive contradiction is perhaps best grasped by paying attention to the ways in which the instrumental promise of the term gives way to a nuanced and inevitable realisation of the real difficulties of intervening in the complex reality that organisational culture names. It comes through most strongly in the representation and figuring of the nature and scope of leadership in successful organisations.

Leadership versus culture Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (1985), a standard reference point for work in the area, embodies with great force what this chapter calls the constitutive contradiction, which is seen at work in most uses of organisational culture. In large part, this is because of Schein’s deliberate foregrounding of the issue of leadership within organisational culture, and the powerful role he ascribes or wishes to give to leadership. Indeed, it is Schein’s assertions that ‘the unique and essential function of leadership is the manipulation of culture’ (1985: 317), or that the ‘only thing of real importance that leaders do is create and manage culture’ (1985: 2, emphasis in the original), that are the most cited phrases from his work. These clearly provided a selling point for the book as well as the central rationale for Schein’s own consultancy practices. Yet even in these strong formulations of the study’s central assertion, there is already a crucial tension or hesitation present in the real differences and tensions between ‘create and manage’, since to create is to create anew or start afresh, while to manage is usually to work with something that already exists. In fact, the substance of Schein’s study always points to difficulties and contradictions in the idea of leadership that the assertions about it confidently or blandly dismiss. For all the emphasis on the power of leadership to create culture, the emphasis finally falls rather on the difficulties and limits of control, and the consequent need for managing culture, in the more awkward senses of having it to deal with or putting up with it. ‘All cultural definitions emphasize that culture is the product of shared meanings among group members, but the process by which something comes to be shared by a group is still not well understood,’ he admits (Schein 1985: 313). He finds a paradox: that ‘leaders create cultures, but cultures, in turn, create their next generation of leaders’ (1985: 313). Schein repeats this many times: the ‘unique and essential function of leadership is the manipulation of culture’ (1985: 317) and

‘[c]ulture is created in the first instance by the action of leaders; culture is also strengthened and embedded by leaders’ (1985: 316–317). But there are also serious limits to all of this: ‘Do not assume that culture can be manipulated like other matters under the control of managers’ (1985: 314). Yet the substance of this interesting study is devoted to the largely unconscious aspects of culture, and the difficulty of raising these to awareness. In this process, the leader is caught up as well. The point is that a business needs a therapist to deal with the largely unconscious aspects of organisational culture. The leader may lead, but often in an unconscious and self​contradictory way that can benefit from the insights of a therapeutic advisor. All in all, Schein’s model of the dynamic process which is organisational culture is deeply indebted to the American appropriation of psychoanalysis (now generally referred to as ‘ego psychology’) in which – to recall Freud’s words – ‘Wo es war, soll Ich werden’: ‘where id was, there shall ego be’.15 This is apparent in Schein’s own oft​cited definition of the terms and goals of his work, and how in it, the term ‘culture’ ‘should be reserved for the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic “taken​for​granted” fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment. These assumptions and beliefs are learned responses to a group’s problems of survival in an external environment and its problems of internal integration. These come to be taken for granted because they solve those problems repeatedly and reliably’ (Schein 1985: 6). With its emphasis on the unconscious as ‘learned responses to … survival in an external environment’ and ‘problems of internal integration’, Schein’s account falls squarely within the vocabulary and conceptual world of the ego psychology dominant in the period. Yet, the past thirty years of work in cultural theory has contested the findings and assumptions of ego psychology as perhaps overconfident or misguided in its assumptions concerning the possibility of a cure or a full taming of the unconscious. From Lacan’s insistence on the illusory nature of any integrative idea of the ego to the labile complexity of recent social theorists such as Slavoj Zizek, the general trend in cultural analysis has been to point to the need for a much more complex appropriation of psychoanalysis for understanding social and political process than American psychology – at least in the 1950s – could dream of.16 From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that many of Schein’s actual findings in his book tend to undermine rather than substantiate his claims for the power of leadership. In practice, Schein’s attention to the psychodynamics of organisational behaviour – present in the subtitle to the work, Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View – tends to undermine his (doubtless ideological) commitment to the leadership model, which seems to promise a straightforward implementation of intention. Despite his frequent and repeated emphasis on the power of leadership, a great deal of the substance of his study is taken up with detailing the limits of leadership when dealing with organisational culture. These limits are in part internal: the leader doesn’t know what he wants, and acts in contradictory ways; and partly interrelational. In the end, the key point that emerges from a careful reading of Schein is one that works against much of his general claims. It is the simple fact that the leader cannot be regarded as being outside the process, and able to use the organisation as if it were an instrument of his will; he (as pre​feminist writing has it) is better regarded as one of several interacting elements. The founding contradiction in Schein’s view of organisational culture – the tension between

a desired image of an omnipotent leadership and the messy reality of institutional complexity – is common to most discussions of organisational culture. In the next section of the argument, the question of how much of the same promise and, with it, the same structure of internal contradiction is carried over and reproduced – perhaps even with increasing force, as the term ‘organisational culture’ is transposed into higher education discourse. Here, it gradually takes on the form of the apparently cognate term, ‘institutional culture’. I use the term ‘apparently cognate’ as a means of referring to the elision of the differences between educational institutions and business organisations operated by neo​liberal thought, noted by several commentators.17

FROM ORGANISATIONAL TO INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE WG Tierney was one of the first scholars to propose the extension of the term ‘organisational culture’ to cover the work and running of universities as organisations in his essay ‘Organizational culture in higher education: Defining the essentials’ (Tierney 1988). What is striking in his account, as in much of the related writing in which the term ‘organisational culture’ is taken into higher education debates, is the failure or reluctance to name the external pressures that necessitate the importation of the new term. In this, it is, as has been seen, quite unlike the proponents of the term in business studies, who explicitly justify the need for the new coinage in terms of the threat of Japanese competition. This represents an internalisation of external pressures in higher education discourse that perfectly embodies the pressures of hegemonic thinking. For hegemonic thinking is at its most visible when it seeks to make invisible its own enabling or directive presuppositions. So it is that Tierney describes the aim of his work as seeking ‘to provide a working framework to diagnose culture in colleges and universities so that distinct problems can be overcome’ (1988: 2); ‘to point out how administrators might utilize the concept of culture to help solve specific administrative problems’ (1988: 3) – but the problems themselves are never discussed as such. All in all, he suggests ‘leaders in higher education can benefit from understanding their institutions as cultural entities’ (1988: 5). Administrators, he writes, ‘tend to recognize their organization’s culture only when they have transgressed its bounds and severe conflicts or adversarial relationships ensue’ (1988: 4); but it is never quite clear just what the content of these conflicts or the stakes in these adversarial relationships are. In this perspective, and as the vocabulary of diagnosis and problem​solving indicates, the idea of organisational culture is an instrumental and prophylactic one, in ways familiar from Schein’s account. The proper understanding of organisational culture is there to prevent or at least smooth over difficulties in managing change in institutions of higher education, and it is the process of managing change that provides the central justifying element for the application of the new term. As will be seen, the detail of the argument belies the instrumental claims made for the concept of institutional culture, in ways that repeat and reduplicate the tensions of Schein’s arguments. In Tierney’s article, the constitutive contradiction is figured in the very specific place, position and perspective that Tierney wishes to grant to or assume in the successful administrator.

This comes through in something like a moment of self​conscious acknowledgement, on Tierney’s part, of the metaphorical nature of his whole enterprise. He writes of the anthropological nature of his study, of how, in an influential definition, an ‘organization’s culture is reflected in what is done, how it is done, and who is involved in doing it’ (Tierney 1988: 3). ‘[W]e look at an organization,’ he writes, ‘as a traditional anthropologist would study a particular village or clan’ (1988: 4). However, the similarity which this comparison invokes and promotes – that the researcher, and following him or her, the administrator, should stand in relation to his or her organisation or institution as an anthropologist stands in relation to a village or clan – conceals at least one major difference, for the administrator or leader to whom Tierney’s essay is addressed is himself or herself also a part of the village or clan; likewise, the administrator is a part of, rather than an observer of, the institution. Taken at face value, the position that Tierney establishes for the administrator or leader is, however, less that of the anthropologist than that of the coloniser, since the aim of the cultural understanding is to subordinate the village or tribe to the will of the administrator. What is revealed/concealed in the notion is the way in which the idea of institutional culture is related to questions of power and control in institutions of higher education. This is the unacknowledged centre of the discussion; and it is a centre interestingly at odds with its substance. For, what is striking in Tierney’s account of his research at ‘Family State College’ is that the best possibilities for positive change and transformation rely on the pre​existing disposition of the organisational culture. It is because Family State College has a preexisting ‘strong organizational culture’ (Tierney 1988: 17), one that enjoys the values of open communication and collegiality, and already respects its constitutive members, that change and growth were experienced there as positive aspects. Something of the same paradox is apparent in the reports of other researchers in this area. To ‘effect orderly change in the organization without creating unnecessary conflict’ (1988: 19), the best thing is to have a pre​existing ‘strong organizational culture’. In this sense, organisational culture is double​sided, and is looked at in two ways or from two different and opposed perspectives. For administrators, organisational culture names the resistance that has to be overcome for successful change to occur; the theoretical premise is that by naming it, it can be overcome more easily. At the same time, a strong organisational culture is one to be desired if conflict is to be avoided. But – or so Tierney’s analysis suggests – this aspect or dimension can only be seen from a ‘native’ perspective, one located within the institution and not (as in his figuration of the problem) from without, from the coloniser’s ‘anthropological’ perspective. This constitutive contradiction – which is observed at work in Schein and has now been seen again in Tierney – seems, in fact, to be a feature of the whole discourse on organisational culture.

INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE(S) IN SOUTH AFRICA The brief and schematic survey of prior uses of institutional culture sets the scene for a comparative analysis of the term’s deployment in South Africa. Comparative analysis is useful,

since it helps to establish where there is continuity between local and global uses of the term. Where there are divergences, these are likely to signal new content and emphases within the use of the term. In fact, many of the changes to the higher education system post​1994 correspond to the changes in higher education imposed worldwide by the new hegemonic ‘common sense’ of neo​liberalism, and some discussions of institutional culture in South Africa refer directly to these changes, as will be seen later in this chapter.18 At the same time, what marks out much discussion of institutional culture in South Africa is the extent to which it is necessarily permeated by the difficult questions presented by racial identities in a post​apartheid, post​colonial society.19 In the first – and currently dominant – usage, institutional culture names or refers to the perceived ‘whiteness’ of academic culture, although it is often not clear whether this whiteness is ascribed to ‘European’ academic culture in general, or to the particular (and various) ecologies of intersubjective exchanges in campus academic and social life at institutions as different as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, or the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University. In the second, respectively, institutional culture names the contested terrain of power and authority between administrators and academics as South Africa adopts and adapts global initiatives in the neo​liberal reform of universities.

Institutional culture as whiteness The current, dominant sense of the term in South Africa understands the institutional culture of higher education institutions through the lens of ‘whiteness critique’. In this perspective, it is argued, institutional culture is – above all – experienced by black staff and students as the overwhelming ‘whiteness’ of academic culture. ‘Whiteness’ here refers to the ensemble of cultural and subjective factors that together constitute the unspoken dominance in higher education of Western, European or Anglo​Saxon values and attitudes as these are reproduced and inflected in South Africa. This ‘whiteness’ is or can be experienced as an alienating and disempowering sense of not being fully recognised in or by the institution, and the consequent impossibility of feeling ‘at home’ within it. In this regard, all the well​known pressures and dilemmas of African and other post​colonial universities come into play around the now central idea of institutional culture, and help to lend the term its considerable power and resonance in contemporary discussions.20 Attempts to counter this alienation come through in a variety of ways. At the most general levels, some advocate a wholesale process of ‘Africanisation’, while others call for the development and implementation of policies of ‘cultural justice’ at the university.21 More specifically, a number of research projects in and including the implementation of transformation at universities are now focusing on the ethnic and existential dimensions of institutional culture.22 For the purposes of this chapter, Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl’s study, ‘Like that Statue at Jammie Stairs …’: Some Student Perceptions and Experiences of Institutional Culture at the University of Cape Town in 1999, may serve as an exemplary account in its characteristic mixture of immediate appeal yet theoretical weakness.

First published by the Institute for Intercultural and Diversity Studies of Southern Africa in 2001 (Steyn and van Zyl 2001), the report has done much to establish the idea of ‘whiteness’ as the new referent for institutional culture, or at the very least as the single most important element in the institutional culture of universities. The study continues to serve as a reference or even starting point for many new researchers in the field. In so doing, it embodies both the strengths and the weaknesses of a new usage in which the content of the term comes to refer almost exclusively to the racial dimensions or aspects of university life, with some emphasis on how these factors impact on pedagogic communication. The core definitions of the report refer to, or confidently assume, the general understanding of institutional culture as ‘the prevailing ethos – the deep​seated set of norms, assumptions and values that predominate and pervade most of the environment’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: x). Institutional culture is the ‘sum total’ effects of the values, attitudes, styles of interaction, collective memories – the ‘way of life’ of the university, known by those who work and study in the university environment, through their lived experience. (2001: 20) As ‘sum total’, institutional culture has the capacity to refer to any and every aspect of experience at university, from parking to policing, from the sites and names of buildings to any and every joke told on campus (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: 27, 28, 42). At the centre of Steyn and van Zyl’s study is the assertion that ‘whiteness’ stands as the unacknowledged core of UCT’s institutional culture.23 In the Abstract that heads the document, the claim is that ‘it is clear that in students’ experiences “whiteness” still largely characterizes the institutional culture’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: n.p.). In line with this, they argue that the ‘institutional culture of UCT has been shaped by a very specific historical cultural positioning, and the worldview which informs this position has been normalised within the UCT environment. To a large extent this cultural milieu has been characterised by “whiteness”’ (2001: iii). And summarising their sample of student opinion, they conclude that ‘the assumption is that the white norm fits all’ (2001: 37). Not surprisingly, the final conclusions and recommendations suggest that ‘[s]tudent testimonies reflect that the university unquestionably subscribes to the ideology of whiteness’ (2001: 68). All in all, the ‘perceived lack of attention paid to institutional culture … is experienced both as a symptom and consequence of this culture of whiteness’ (2001: 68). As already argued, ‘whiteness’ is a key term taken from discussions about multiculturalism, largely in the United States. Several references are made in the survey to essays in David Theo Goldberg’s seminal anthology, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1995), and particular use is made of Peter McLaren’s article, ‘White terror and oppositional agency: Towards a critical multiculturalism’ (1995).24 Steyn and van Zyl take from McLaren the centrality he gives to the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a pivotal but unacknowledged category in Western society and education. For McLaren, ‘white culture’s most formidable attribute is its ability to mask itself as a category’ (1995: 61). ‘[U]nless we give white students a sense of their own identity as an emergent ethnicity,’ he argues, ‘we naturalize whiteness as a cultural marker against which

Otherness is defined’ (1995: 59). ‘White groups,’ he writes, need to examine their own ethnic histories so that they are less likely to judge their own cultural norms as neutral and universal. … Whiteness does not exist outside of culture but constitutes the prevailing social text in which social norms are made and remade. (McLaren 1995: 59) Whiteness, he concludes, ‘has become the invisible norm for how the dominant culture measures its own worth and civility’ (McLaren 1995: 59).25 Many of the details of Steyn and van Zyl’s account work to echo and confirm McLaren’s argument. Some students reported feelings of alienation and anomie, and maintained that ‘UCT is Eurocentric in tradition and practice’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: 69). Others believed that ‘the institutional culture would only really change if the white section of the university made a conscious effort to open up to learning, rather than assuming that “others” were the only ones in deficit’ (2001: 66). The central and repeated point – of ‘whiteness’ as the ‘invisible norm’ – offers a powerful new perspective on the institutional cultures of South African universities. The varied testimonies point to the difficulties and possibilities of dealing with this aspect of socially pervasive though often subliminal racism ‘still at work’ ten years after the formal demise of apartheid.26 The findings call for an intensive consciousness​raising exercise around the issue of whiteness similar in scope to the great consciousness raising around patriarchy enjoined by feminism in the sixties and seventies: a ‘conscious deliberate attempt to examine and question the “normal”’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: 29). This would include, in the first instance, a commitment to education and training around ‘whiteness’ in pedagogical and other sites of intersubjective exchange on campus. These and other recommendations from the survey continue to serve as useful guidelines for further initiatives, both at UCT and elsewhere.27 At the same time, a number of visible inconsistencies and theoretical difficulties emerge within and from the report’s deployment of institutional culture as whiteness. These have to do with the explanatory centrality apparently assigned to whiteness in its survey and summary of student experience and perception. The general theoretical problem may well be that of the tension between contrasting ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ strands in sociological analysis; and it comes through in this survey as a problem of translation.28 For while the study as a whole claims that nothing can be achieved ‘without understanding the sense​making of the students themselves’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: 2), the authors acknowledge that students ‘may not always be able to articulate exactly what it is that they experience’ (2001: n.p.). The survey, for instance, claims that most of the students ‘who discussed the issue of UCT’s institutional culture, had a solid grasp of its relation to institutional power – they could identify the centre, and the resultant tension of those on the margins’ (2001: 36); but it remains unclear whether the key terms of ‘centre’, ‘margins’, ‘institutional power’ and ‘institutional culture’ are the terms actually used by the students themselves, or the translated terms of the interviewers ascribed to the students. The danger throughout is one of a certain circularity, in which the central explanatory category of ‘whiteness’ is at one point taken as the starting point of the analysis, but at another is

represented as an end result or as a conclusion derived from it. The formulations vary and seem to embody the always difficult, interpretive transaction that takes place between interviewer and interviewee.29 For a classic ‘objectivist’ sociologist such as Durkheim, ‘social life must be explained not by the conception of those who participate in it, but by the deep causes which lie outside of consciousness’ (cited in Bourdieu 1990a: 125). No mere survey of opinion, based on personal experiences, would have a chance of getting through to the underlying causes of alienation and anomie in an institutional culture like that of the university. Yet, at the same time, the richness of texture enabled by subjective accounts is a resource no sociologist can ignore, and particularly not one who wishes to locate the dynamics of agency within structural constraint, and to resist the tendency to reduce the respondent in the interview to an object of analysis.30 The middle ground is hard – if not impossible – to find; but a stricter attention to the inevitable complications of the process than is evident in the survey might have yielded less problematic results.31 It is for these and other related reasons that many sociologists suggest a control on opinion surveys, including those done by in​depth interview, through two related procedures. The first is in terms of internal coherence, necessitating a very careful scrutiny of the match between data and explanation; the second is an external check through the comparative application of other explanatory hypotheses existing elsewhere in the literature.32 In terms of the survey’s internal coherence, two problems emerge. First of all, a certain undermining of the explanatory primacy of whiteness emerges from the report’s attention to significant cultural divisions within the black student body itself, a body assigned an essential unity in the binary oppositions engaged by whiteness critique. Significant divisions are reported between black students from Model C schools and those from poorer schools (often paralleling or reinforcing a divide between those from urban and rural backgrounds). The significant division here between different schooling at primary and secondary levels undermines the cohesiveness of a purely racial categorisation, such as whiteness as the primary explanatory factor in experiences of alienation within higher education. It may well be that such alienation is perhaps better viewed as part and parcel of a structure of racialised rather than racial inequalities.33 Secondly, there is the uneasy way in which whiteness is joined as a vantage point for critique of institutional culture through questions raised by issues of sexual orientation, gender, and disability. In the report, these come together as simply different aspects of the general power relations at work in the institutional culture of the university; but this again undermines the report’s general claim (illustrated above) for the central explanatory role apparently given to whiteness. This is particularly apparent in those moments where a vocabulary of centredness replaces or subsumes that of whiteness, as, for instance, in the Executive Summary that precedes the report proper. This paraphrases the arguments that follow, indicating ‘that those who were in subject positionalities [sic] that are centred were able to move through the university a great deal more comfortably than those toward the margins’ (Steyn and van Zyl 2001: n.p.) and goes on to explain that ‘these centres include: whiteness, Euro​American worldview, English​speaking as mother​tongue, maleness, heterosexuality, able​bodiedness, (upper) middle​class​ness, South African nationality, urban background, etc.’ (2001: n.p.).

In theoretical terms, these inconsistencies suggest that whiteness alone does not play the primary role in institutional culture that the report appears generally to ascribe to it. Whiteness may instead be better regarded as just one (and a secondary or overdetermined) factor among others, such as the maleness, heterosexuality, being able​bodied, urban background and/or South African nationality mentioned in the survey. The existence of such internal inconsistencies suggests a strong need for the consideration of alternative explanations, and prime among them, perhaps, Pierre Bourdieu’s notable theories of education and social reproduction, for Bourdieu’s writings are particularly attuned to the feelings of alienation and anomie at work in education systems. Indeed, the existence of such feelings is held to play a constitutive rather than (as it were) incidental role in social reproduction as a whole.34 Many of the feelings expressed by students in the Steyn and Van Zyl report correspond very strongly to the dilemma faced by the working classes and the lower​middle classes in a higher education system geared to the success of the already privileged. For these – in Bourdieu’s terms, the ‘naturally’ distinguished – the institutional culture of higher education poses no problems of adaptation. They ‘merely need to be what they are in order to be what they have to be, that is, naturally distinguished from those who are obliged to struggle for distinction’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 11). In this struggle for distinction (the cultural marker of social and economic privilege), the natural is, of course, the precisely constituted materiality of prior privilege that makes even the most democratic educational structures still a prey to social and economic inequalities. All in all, Steyn and Van Zyl’s account, in placing its main emphasis on ‘whiteness’ as racial differentiation, tends to ‘background’ (if I may reverse the more usual term ‘to foreground’) the broader issues of reproduction and cultural capital at the heart of Bourdieu’s account.35 If, indeed, Bourdieu’s insights can help to smooth out several contradictory findings in Steyn and Van Zyl’s survey, this works to suggest that though race may be an obvious and immediate factor in the experience of alienation and anomie, it may well be a secondary phenomenon in terms of explanation. In other words, race is secondary to the deeper logic of social subordination and reproduction that divides racial groups internally according to the force of class distinction.36 This, indeed, is the general conclusion of many of the contributors in Goldberg’s anthology (and elsewhere), who argue that multiculturalism needs to be attuned to the material conditions of cultural differentiation.37 Certainly, one of the surely unintended consequences of a focus on institutional culture as whiteness is a consequent marginalisation of the changes occurring at the interface between academics and administrators (and beyond these, between the universities and the state). This interface also forms an important aspect, dimension or referent for debate concerning institutional culture, although one somewhat overshadowed by the currently dominant definition discussed above.

Whose institutional culture? Academics versus administrators Although the sense of institutional culture as whiteness is dominant in South African discussions, a second sense is also present and in use, though somewhat overshadowed by the first. This second sense aligns itself more directly to overseas debates, and addresses a

powerful trend in university systems across the world, as well as in one dimension of what transformation in South African higher education has meant in practice. It understands and defines institutional culture from the standpoint of the newly emerging interests that are usually referred to as the ‘new managerialism’.38 From this standpoint, in Bill Readings’s succinct characterisation, ‘the administrator rather than the professor [becomes] the central figure of the University’ (1996: 3), while the university as a whole is subjected to a ‘generalized logic of “accountability” in which the University must pursue “excellence” in all aspects of its functioning’ (1996: 3).39 In this usage, institutional culture refers to the site of a conflict and contest between two different and opposing definitions of the purpose of higher education, definitions that are uneasily conjoined in South African policy. The first of these – akin to the values of academic freedom embodied in the ‘English liberal’ view of the university’s social function – comes through in the repeated emphasis in South African policy on the development of ‘critical citizenship’, and the need for an educated citizenship for the promotion and development of democracy. A central aim of higher education from this perspective is thus described as ‘the socialization of enlightened, responsive and constructively critical citizens’ (DoE 1997: 1). This point of view sees higher education as playing a constitutive role in the development of a democratic society, in a line of thought extending at least as far back as Immanuel Kant’s championing of Enlightenment values, and particularly the value of public deliberation, in his seminal essay ‘An answer to the question: “What is enlightenment?”’ (Kant 1991)40 The second is more in line with the state​centred view of higher education promoted by the Afrikaans establishment, but now carried forward in the post​apartheid state and in line with neo​liberal policies across the globe.41 It emphasises the need to ‘address the development needs of society and provide the labour market, in a knowledge​driven and knowledge​dependent society, with the ever​changing high​level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern economy’ (DoE 1997: 1). From this perspective, education and higher education needs to be carefully controlled and directed, and tailored to the dynamics of the economy. It sees education and higher education as playing a largely instrumental role, and one subordinated to the state’s interpretation of economic needs. Schein’s statement – that ‘[o]rganizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the most decisive functions of leadership may be the creation, the management, and – if and when that may become necessary – the destruction of a culture’ (Schein 1985: 2) – might well have provided the mot d’ordre for many university administrators in the post​94 period. In an interesting attempt to turn the tables, institutional culture became the name for academic culture itself, as the substance of what was being attacked and threatened by the new managerialism. In a useful survey of post​apartheid South African higher education policy, Gibbon and Kabaki suggest that ‘by 1998, the emphasis [in government policy] had decisively shifted from demands for democratisation to demands for efficiency and effectiveness’ with a consequently important shift in the balance of power between academics and administrators. Research showed that ‘the overwhelming majority of [academic] respondents felt that their relationship with management had been reconfigured in a way that now defined them as subordinate employees rather than colleagues’ (Gibbon and Kabaki 2002: 217). One of the prime effects of

‘transformation’ was a definite shift from ‘academic self​rule to academic managerialism’ (2002: 217), with an increasing salary gap developing between senior managers and senior academics (from a ratio of 2:1 during the late 1980s to a ratio of 4.5:1 in the late 1990s) (2002: 218). In this assessment, the “‘democratic phase” currently being experienced by South African institutions had long since been superseded in the developed nations by the “managerial phase”’ (Gibbon and Kabaki 2002: 216). That this phase represents an attack on rather than a dialogue with and improvement of academic culture – an intuition present implicitly in many responses to the pressures of neo​liberal change – was explicitly stated and argued by Olajide Oloyede.42 Writing in response to managerial changes at the University of Fort Hare, Oloyede (2002) argues that it is precisely that ‘destruction of a culture’ (championed by Schein) that academic culture is threatened with in South Africa. He sums up his case in the following terms: My main goal is to alert those involved in the transformation of universities to the fact that universities are fragmented into diverse disciplinary cultures and as such are loose and complex organisations. Precisely because of this, management discourse is not sufficient and cannot be the basis for the effective and efficient steering of the university. (Oloyede 2002: 118) ‘False managerialism’ tries to force disciplines into the same mould, impose crude accountability and over​simplified indicators of performance which are hardly appropriate to academic work. (2002: 117) Yet, asserts Oloyede, disciplinary values and cultures are critical for any effective steering of the university. This is because in each discipline, there exists a ‘self​organized’ collective control, which tends to take quite different forms from that of official regulation. This is grounded in collegiality … To this extent, roles, norms, values, beliefs and ideology – generally referred to as ‘organizational culture’ – serve as the essential elements of interaction. (2002: 117) In this deployment, something of a repetition of the dynamics of the term present in the earlier uses of a Schein or a Tierney can be seen. Institutional culture is what has to be controlled or managed by the colonising administrator; it is what has to be defended by the academic worker. The dispute over programmes – perhaps the first concrete point of higher education policy in South Africa that placed administrators and academics in more or less direct conflict – similarly reveals the constitutive contradiction at work within it.43 Institutional culture plays a contradictory role in these debates. As an instrumental concept, it appears to promise successful control over institutions for managers, while for academics resisting imposed change it refers to the substance of their practical activity as teachers and researchers.

CONCLUSION As Williams has reminded us, and as this brief discussion of different uses of institutional culture has shown, the act of naming involves an agent as well as an object. The instability of the term ‘institutional culture’ – its capacity to name different things, or to refer to different aspects of the same complex object – arises from the fact that institutional culture looks different depending on who is seeing it and from where; or, more accurately, who is looking for it and with what purposes in mind. Though a singular name, its referent is best understood as multiple and complex, in ways that most users of it tend to ignore in the passion of their arguments. As has been argued, the term emerged (as ‘organisational culture’) in business studies in the early 1980s as a strongly instrumental one, promising to be able to bring American business culture in line with the perceived success of Japanese business culture. It was to do so by oiling the wheels of management, and restricting unproductive frictions between leadership and workforce. In the later 1980s, although by now as ‘institutional culture’, it began to appear in higher education discussions. In its dominant uses overseas, it referred to the restructuring of academic life, its recentring on the administrator rather than the academic. It is important to note, in summary, that the more recent writings on organisational culture suggest that in reality, and despite the claims made for it by its prime originators in business studies, its use as an instrumental concept is extremely limited. This acknowledgement – argued here in terms of the constitutive contradiction at its core – has been increasingly recognised in more recent literature. Against the mythology of strong directive leadership, Simsek and Louis argue that ‘real organizational change requires leadership strategies that emphasize interpretation of organizational values and meaning rather than emphasize organizational restructuring and administrative control’ (1994: 690). And, in a point which should but didn’t have much resonance in South Africa, they point out that despite what the strategic management and planning models assume, change is a highly decentralized yet community​based activity. Change that is orchestrated from the top and which reflects the ‘vision’ of subjective realities of an elite group cannot define institution​wide change processes unless it takes into account the alternative competing paradigms that have typically emerged in different parts of the organization. (Simsek and Louis 1994: 691) Similarly, Kezar and Eckel write that while ‘[l]eaders might be more successful if they understood the cultures in which they were working’ (2002: 457), they need to recognise that ‘where strategies for change violate cultural norms, change most likely will not occur’ (2002: 456). All in all, as Simsek and Louis suggest, ‘[m]anaging meaning is considerably more slippery than traditional models of leadership would suggest’ (1994: 690).44 Indeed, it may be that the most substantial result of the study of actual institutional cultures is – paradoxically enough – the undermining of the instrumental promise or lure that the originating theorists insisted the concept held. Rather than serving as a resource for the ‘traditional model’ of top​down authoritarian leadership, the study of institutional cultures tends

to promote a very different image of successful leadership from that of the colonist or anthropologist that has been offered. The reality of institutional cultures suggests rather the need for a full recognition of the workings of democracy in action. A strong image of this alternative model of leadership is exemplified in the principles that Nelson Mandela found at work in the village of his youth, Mqhekezweni, where he learned ‘to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion’ (Mandela 2002: 25). ‘I always remember the regent’s axiom,’ he later recollected. A leader ‘is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being led from behind’ (2002: 25–26).45 If much of the overseas discussions of institutional culture focused on the institutional aspects, the main focus of interest in South Africa shifted to its cultural aspects and dimensions. Many discussions here have, above all, emphasised the need for a thorough critique of the dominant whiteness of institutional culture in higher education. However, as has been argued, while the focus of this critique brought some strong feelings to light, these discussions were weakened by a tendency to over​unify the category of race. Even the most powerful of these analyses would, in any event, have to take into account Henry Louis Gates’s astute point that ‘a redistributionist agenda may not even be intelligible with respect to cultural capital [since] once cultural knowledge is redistributed so that it fails to mark a distinction, it loses its value’ (1995: 206). Following Bourdieu, Gates’s hard lesson is that while the currency of cultural capital (and, by extension, institutional culture) can change, it is likely to leave intact the structures of distinction that support it. What could confer ‘“equity” on “culture”’ is, Gates argues, unanswerable within a divided and unequal society (1995: 206). In more general terms, it may be that too exclusive an emphasis on whiteness also runs the risk – common to many post​colonial societies – of reaffirming the very racial categories and identities that the new post​colonial orders sought to disperse. In her powerful survey ‘Race and identity in the nation’, Zimitri Erasmus warns of the dangers of equity policies that in fact ‘perpetuate apartheid race categories and race thinking’ (2005: 20). At one and the same time, she recommends, it is important ‘to remember and recognize the historical legacies of race and white supremacy and their influence on the present’ while also moving away from ‘holding onto race as a form of cultural and political armour’ (2005: 27). ‘The challenge before us,’ she concludes, ‘is to find ways of recognizing race and its continued effects on people’s every day lives, in an attempt to work against racial inequality, while at the same time working against practices that perpetuate race thinking’ (2005: 30).46 Acceptance of this challenge is the difficult task that faces those participating in the ongoing debates around institutional culture. It may be that in the end institutional culture is less of a concept than a representation that screens a number of problems, in two opposed senses of the term. It serves as a surface on which various social contradictions and tensions can be projected, while at the same time often disguising or translating these into other terms according to the dynamics of displacement.47 It is a term that mimes conceptual density, but lacks conceptual force, while its apparently appealing explanatory force is often undermined by its actual contents. From the textual point of view, institutional culture is, of course, an uneasy conjunction of the given (the cultural) and the imposed (the institutional). It perpetually threatens an explanatory redundancy since if culture is understood to be the ‘whole way of life’ of a society, then any social institution of

necessity is part and parcel of the reproduction of that whole way of life. A more restricted definition of institutional culture as regards higher education may be less immediately grand and satisfying, but in the end more productive. Such a definition would be restricted to the core problem of pedagogical culture and the forms of its transmission, seeking to take into account what is all too often taken for granted: the reality of the uneven distribution of cultural capital. Universities need to develop a more self​conscious pedagogy if the real problems of institutional culture are to be addressed.48

NOTES 1 See, for instance, Kader Asmal’s comment on President Mbeki’s meeting with Higher Education Working Group in Pretoria, Thursday 11 December 2003: ‘Among other challenges that lay ahead, said Prof. Asmal, were transformation, curriculum development, and cultural justice. The latter entails building a more inclusive institutional culture that embraced language and cultural diversity among staff and students’ ([email protected]); Erasmus and de Wet (2003); Ismail (2000, 2002); Sunday Times Higher Education 1 April 2004; Ndebele (2004); Ruth (n.d.); Steyn and van Zyl (2001); Thaver (2004) and Du Toit (1996). The use of closed marking books at UCT, and much of the internal public commentary on the Hahn murder case at UCT (where a professor was attacked and killed by a former PhD student) also deploy the term. 2 ‘Whiteness’ is a term developed in critical multicultural writing in the United States to designate the blindness of white culture to its own assumptions. In South Africa, the term has notably been picked up by Melissa Steyn, and forms the basis of her study of institutional culture at UCT. Compare with Robinson’s ‘Wits “still too white”’ (Mail & Guardian 7–14 November 2003). 3 A similarly sceptical stance underlies much of Adorno’s work. See, for instance, his distrust of what he refers to as the ‘harmonistic tendency’ in much sociological analysis, what he describes as the ‘tendency to explain away the constitutive contradictions on which our society rests, to conjure them out of existence’ (Adorno 2000: 7). It may well be that in some senses ‘institutional culture’ corresponds to this ‘harmonistic tendency’. And compare endnote 13. 4 For much of this, see Higgins (1999) and, with special reference to Williams’s Keywords, Higgins (2003a). Compare also Christopher Norris’s astute comments (Norris 1997). The recent Keywords series For a Different Kind of Globalization (Tazi 2004) may also pay oblique tribute to Williams. 5 References here are taken from the second, revised and expanded edition of 1983. 6 In particular, his attention to the metaphorical shift in the use of the term, from its original meaning as the tending and cultivation of crops, to the ‘process of human development’, and used with reference to various forms of education, is particularly valuable. Also useful is the attention to Herder’s criticism of Eurocentrism in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784– 1791), where he asserts that the ‘very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature’ (cited in Williams 1983: 89). For a useful selection and presentation of key texts representing Enlightenment views of race, including a relevant portion of Herder’s study and Immanuel Kant’s critical response to it, see Eze (1997), especially pages 65–78. 7 For further examples and discussions of this ‘pessimism of the will’, see Ch 2 and Higgins (2000, 2003b). 8 For a useful global survey of this moment, see Hobsbawm (1995), especially Chapter 14 ‘The crisis decades’. 9 As Sir Peter Parker put it, ‘Japanese competitiveness has become one of the paramount economic events of the post​war world. Nowadays our mirror on the wall is no longer giving the West the flattering answers of the fairy​tale’ (1986: vii). I say ‘comparative weakness’ in the sense that the United States – where the writings on organisational culture are strongest – nonetheless remained by far the world’s largest economy. For a useful comparison between the American and Japanese economies in the period, see Fulcher (2004), especially pages 64–81. 10 For a deft critique of such attitudes at the height of their acceptability, see Philip K Dick’s (1964) alternative​future novel, The Man in the High Castle. 11 Pascale and Athos (1986) noted that if present trends continued, Japan would be the wealthiest country in the world shortly after 2000. 12 Eric von Lustbader’s Nicholas Linnear novels trace the rise of Japanese business dominance through the Second World War to the present day, beginning with the best​selling The Ninja in 1982; Michael Crichton – ever alert to changing trends and interests – produced Rising Sun in 1992, with its Japanese motto ‘Business is war’ standing as epigraph to the novel (and this was made into a successful film by Ridley Scott in 1994). The success and complex reception of the recent film Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola) testifies to an ongoing cultural engagement with the dynamics (however fantasised in these cases) of what business studies named ‘organisational culture’.

13 For standard and influential accounts, see Chandler (1962) and his later Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990). Peters and Waterman credit Chandler with ‘the very powerful notion that structure follows strategy … [a] dictum that had the makings of a universal truth’ (1984: 4). 14 In this sense, the idea owed its growth and development to the forces so well described by Bourdieu, who noted how an ‘important part of orthodox sociological discourse owes its immediate social success to the fact that it answers dominant demand which often comes down to a demand for rational instruments for management and domination or to a demand for a “scientific” legitimating of the spontaneous sociology of those in the dominant [group]’ (1990a: 50–51). Compare with Adorno’s comments on the ‘harmonistic tendency’ in endnote 3. 15 Freud’s famous phrase is taken from the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud 1966 Standard Edition XXII: 80). It became one of the assertions that the school of Lacan did most to challenge or complicate. For a brief discussion, see Higgins (1990). 16 In this, Lacan’s (1966) ‘re​reading of Freud’ is of paramount importance, with his findings reaching a much wider public after the publication of his selected writings in 1966 and their translation into English in 1972. It is probably not exaggerated to say that cultural theory and analysis in the last thirty years has been devoted to undermining too overconfident a take on Freud’s slogan. See, for instance, Ragland​Sullivan’s assertion: ‘Lacan’s campaign against ego psychology manifests itself throughout his thought. He naturally opposed the idea that there is a whole self that serves as an agent of strength, synthesis, mastery, integration, and adaptation to realistic norms’(1986: 119). In many ways, the work of Slovenian cultural and political theorist Slavoj Zizek can be seen as elaborating the implications of Lacan’s rejection of ego psychology for social and ideological theory. Homer puts the point succinctly: ‘We like to think of our society as naturally and harmoniously evolving over time and through the democratic consensus of the people. For Zizek this is not the case: all societies are founded upon a traumatic moment of social conflict and the social ideological fantasy masks this constitutive antagonism’ (2005: 113). 17 While business organisations are constituted by their role in the production and distribution of economic goods and services to a competitive market, educational institutions are traditionally defined by their role in the production and distribution of cultural capital to a society for the public good. Robert Young (1992) argues the case forcefully. Peters and Waterman cite Selznick on the differences covered up in the substitution of one term for another: ‘The term “organization” thus suggests a certain bareness, a lean, no​nonsense system of consciously coordinated activities … An “institution”, on the other hand, is much more nearly a natural product of social needs and pressures – a responsive, adaptive organism’ (in Peters and Waterman 1984: 98). 18 See, for instance, Orr (1997: 67): ‘the latest policy proposals … tend to give more emphasis to the “demands” of “international competitiveness”, conceptualizing human resource development in a narrow “economistic” way’; Subotzky (1997); and Bertelsen (1998: 150): ‘while the rhetoric of “transformation” remains plausibly democratic, the change that this language is used to legitimate is essentially market​driven’; and, more generally, Higgins (2000a). 19 For two ground​breaking discussions, which place such questions in their necessarily historical and theoretical context, see Mamdani (1996) and Mbembe (2001). 20 In this regard, Castells’s warning regarding self​destructive conflicts in post​colonial universities may be apposite. In a report to the World Bank Seminar on Higher Education and Development in 1991, Castells noted that the specificity of university systems in the third world lies in their colonial past. This specificity, he writes, ‘emphasizes their ideological dimension in the first stage of their post​independence period’ (Castells 2001: 212), and he warns that ‘the contradictions between academic freedom and political militantism, as well as the drive for modernisation and the preservation of cultural identity, have been a fundamental cause for the loss of the best academic talent in most Third World countries’ (2001: 213). 21 See, for instance, Chirevo V Kwenda (2003) on cultural justice; and on Africanisation, among others, see Seepe’s call to place ‘the African world​view at the centre of analysis’ (2000: 59) and also (in the same issue of Perspectives in Education) Mangçu (2000) and Nekhwevha (2000). A founding reference point is Ajayi et al. (1996) The African Experience with Higher Education. 22 See, for instance, the work of the University of Western Cape Research Group on Institutional Culture, and notably Lionel Thaver’s (2004) work within that group. 23 And, by extension, that of the other historically white universities in South Africa. 24 Franz Fanon’s discussion, ‘The fact of blackness’ (from Black Skins, White Masks), may be regarded as the starting point for critiques of ‘whiteness’. ‘The white world,’ he writes, ‘the only honourable one, barred me from all participation’ (Fanon 1990: 111). 25 The stance is common to most of the contributors in Goldberg’s collection. For the pedagogical implications, see especially Henry A Giroux’s (1995) essay in the collection, ‘Insurgent multiculturalism and the promise of pedagogy’. 26 For a powerful and probing account of the concept of ‘subliminal racism’, see Kistner (2003). 27 At UCT, see especially the continuing work of the Institute for Intercultural and Diversity Studies of Southern Africa, and particularly the ongoing work in the Health Sciences Faculty (Ismail [2002]; Erasmus and de Wet [2002]). 28 I leave aside the more problematic dimension of the translation of experience itself in terms of the Freudian concept of transference. This attends to the ways in which the subject’s most apparently spontaneous experiences in the present are in reality strongly influenced by past traumas. As opposed to this repetition, psychoanalysis seeks a working through that allows

the analysand to ‘re​experience some portion of his [sic] forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the [analysand] retains some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognise that what appears to be reality is in fact only a repetition of a forgotten past’ (Freud 1966 Standard Edition XII: 18–19). Given the psychodynamics of the teaching situation, transference plays a significant role in much student–teacher interaction in both positive (it is, after all, the source of the learning impulse itself) as well as negative ways. 29 The lack is somewhat surprising given the attention paid precisely to this problem in McLaren’s account, one of the acknowledged sources of the survey. See endnote 37 for further discussion. 30 For useful general discussion of these tensions, see, for instance, Giddens (1979), particularly Chapter 2 ‘Agency, structure’, as well as Bourdieu (1990a). 31 Bourdieu’s analysis of the dynamics of the interview situation is particularly useful here. See especially his insistence that ‘[s]ocial agents do not innately possess a science of what they are and what they do. More precisely, they do not necessarily have access to the core principles of their discontent or their malaise, and, without aiming to mislead, their most spontaneous declarations may express something quite different from what they seem to say’ (Bourdieu 1999: 620). The essay’s warnings regarding style and point of view could usefully supplement the current discussion of the Steyn and van Zyl report (2001: 621–626). 32 Giddens (1989: 679–683), for instance, in his standard account of sociological practice, recommends some form of triangulation to seek to lessen the problems arising from situations in which the influence of the interviewer may be present. 33 A finding significantly echoed in much other research. Compare, for instance, Erasmus’s comment on how an essentialist way of working with race is at play in the new division arising among South Africa’s youth: apartheid’s children versus democracy’s children. ‘Many young black people … use a racially dichotomous language in which those who are not seen as “truly” black are referred to as “coconuts” – black youth, most likely from Model C schools, who are seen to speak, dress and act like white people; while those seen to inhabit a “backward blackness” – rural ways of being and/or black youth who seem to be stuck in “old struggle politics” – are called “dusty​crusties”’ (Erasmus 2005: 27). 34 See, notably, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), and Bourdieu (1990a); and, for a powerful ‘internal’ account, Willis (1977). 35 For a useful survey of staff attitudes towards race at historically white universities – but one whose argument perhaps also calls for the deployment of a concept of cultural capital to strengthen its analytic reach and explanatory power – see Gwele (2002). The survey raises the question – without addressing it directly – of whether differences of habitus can be used as evidence for active racism. For a useful explication of the concept of habitus, see Bourdieu (1990b: 52–79). 36 For a useful discussion of the complications of class versus racial analysis in South African historiography, see Neville Alexander’s (2002) essay ‘Race and class in South African historiography’. In a frustrated moment, Alexander concludes that ‘in the final analysis, it is empirical research that is required to give an approximation of the relationship between race (or gender, or ethnic group, etc.) and class, rather than any reductionist formula derived from abstract models of society’ (2002: 25). Erasmus’s (2005) key phrase – ‘racialized inequality’ – may offer the most useful distinction. 37 Meanwhile, left​liberal multiculturalism ‘emphasizes cultural differences and suggests that the stress on the equality of races smothers those important cultural differences between races that are responsible for different behaviours, values, attitudes, cognitive styles, and social practices’ (McLaren 1995: 51). For McLaren, it tends to ‘exoticize “otherness” in a nativist retreat that locates difference in a primeval past of cultural authenticity’ (1995: 51), a retreat that at the same time authorises a ‘populist elitism’ in which ‘one’s own location as an oppressed person is supposed to offer a special authority from which to speak’ (1995: 52). While not arguing against ‘the importance of experience in the formation of political identity’ (1995: 52), McLaren is wary of the ways in which an appeal to experience ‘has become the new imprimatur for legitimating the political currency and incontestable validity of one’s arguments’ (1995: 52). ‘This,’ he concludes, ‘has often resulted in a reverse form of academic elitism’ (1995: 52). 38 Though the limits of this managerialism may also be now becoming apparent. See, for instance, Bargh et al. (1996): ‘the government has encouraged the belief that the corporate sector provides the most appropriate model of governance for higher education in the age of massification and marketization. The discussion of recent developments in corporate governance suggests that this second assertion should be treated with considerable caution … there is little evidence to suggest that the corporate sector has useful models of governance to offer higher education’ (1996: 167), and again, the ‘(perhaps obsessive) focus has been on more effective management, which has been interpreted as an elevation of the managerial interest at the expense of professional perspectives’ (1996: 168). 39 For useful discussions of this, see Readings (1996), especially pages 21–43. 40 For a useful discussion of Kant’s contribution to the formation of the very idea of public opinion, see especially Habermas (1992: 102–117), and also Derrida’s (1990) informative and provocative discussion, ‘Mochlos ou le conflit des Facultés’. For an interesting recent highlighting of the complexities and antinomies within Kant’s position, see Kouvelakis (2003), especially pages 12–23. 41 For a usefully sceptical discussion of the main differences between Afrikaner​ authoritarian and English​liberal stances on the question of the university’s relation to the state, see Bunting (2002), while for a clear call for greater state control of the universities than currently exists by the then minister of Higher Education, see Asmal (2002). 42 For a useful comparative argument, also locating the new managerialism firmly in the imperatives of the post​Reagan neo​-

liberalism, see CFS Chachage’s (1999) unpublished paper, ‘Higher education transformation and academic exterminism’. Summing up the changes introduced by the new managerialism, Chachage charges that they amounted to ‘a call for the “market” to dictate biases in universities. Thus, there would be a bias for professional as opposed to liberal faculties and within faculties a bias for the imparting of “technical” skills rather than critical analytical ones’ (1999: 4). 43 In her survey of programme implementation, Ensor’s conclusion regarding the success of programmes illustrates the difficult dynamics of institutional culture from any instrumentalist perspective. The national CHE had tried to impose from above academic programmes that sought to promote the managerial virtues of ‘interdisciplinarity, portability, coherence and responsiveness’. To the question, ‘Has this been achieved?’, Ensor’s answer is ‘unequivocally “no” in respect of portability, but with respect to the others, contingent upon how one defines an academic programme and the descriptors involved’ (2002: 287–288). Despite this sugaring of the pill (‘contingent upon how one defines an academic programme’), the article makes clear that the response to the perceived imposition of programmes revealed levels of an academic institutional culture still strong enough to resist change when regarded as pedagogically inappropriate. Indeed, as Ensor ultimately concedes, ‘the central organizing principle of university undergraduate curricula remains the disciplines. In this sense, contemporary curricula in sciences and humanities look little different from the way they did before academic programme implementation began’ (2002: 289). 44 Similarly, the very useful ERIC digest, ‘Organizational culture and institutional transformation’ (Keup et al. 2001), sums up and amplifies the same tensions. On the one hand, the idea of organisational culture is intended as an instrumental one: for successful transformation to occur in higher education institutions, ‘it becomes critical to understand and explicate the values and personal meanings that define organizational culture’ (2001). Keup et al. cite Farmer (1990) in support of the contention that ‘failure to understand the way in which an organization’s culture will interact with various contemplated change strategies thus may mean the failure of the strategies themselves’ (1990: 8). Such a sceptical and warning note rings particularly true with regard to the massive challenges and changes at work in the planning and discussion of higher education in post​apartheid South Africa. 45 In its careful attention to the demands of changing habitus, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (2002) can be regarded as a classic investigation of the pressures in and gains from the movement through different institutional cultures. 46 More broadly, Mahmood Mamdani noted, ‘Africa’s real political challenge is to reform and thus sublate the form of the State that has continued to reproduce race and ethnicity as political identities’; it is ‘to create a single political community and citizenship from diverse cultural historical groups and identities’ (2004: 22). In similar mode, Neville Alexander warns against all forms of ‘ethnic mobilization’, and suggests that the ‘real challenge’ for South Africa ‘lies in moving away from the notion (and the reality) of separate racial, and to some extent also ethnic, groups towards a situation where the multiculturalism of the society can find its expression in the fact of multiple identities of the individual held together by an overarching national identity’ (Alexander 2002: 98). Compare also Charles Taylor’s frustrated assertion, after a consideration of the conceptual dynamics of contemporary identity politics, ‘There must be something midway between the unauthentic and homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth, on the one hand, and the self​immurement within ethnocentric standards, on the other. There are other cultures, and we have to live together more and more, both on a world scale and commingled in each individual society’ (Taylor 1995: 101). 47 For a useful discussion of such displacement, see Bourdieu et al. (1999: 620–621). 48 For some of the classic resources in this regard, see Bernstein (1975) and Giroux (1995).

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5 Making the case for the humanities

‘Making the case for the humanities’ is the final formal chapter of this book, and while it undoubtedly presents itself also as an extension and deepening of the insights of previous chapters it may perhaps stand as, in some sense, a conclusion to it. For in taking and placing previous arguments in the context of a larger survey of global higher education policy, it enables a deeper consideration of the imperilled place of the humanities in today’s higher education policy, both internationally and nationally. While much of the sense of threat was no doubt implicit in previous chapters – and will be more than apparent in the interviews with Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and Jakes Gerwel which follow in the second section of the book, and which supplement the arguments presented – it helps, I think, to make the question of the humanities in the university as explicit as possible here. The chapter was originally commissioned as a part of the Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa: Status, Prospects and Strategies, published in 2011 by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The Academy is – like the Council on Higher Education – a new institution in South Africa’s higher education system, specifically developed after apartheid to promote (as its motto has it) ‘scientific thinking in the service of society’. Launched in 1996, it came into full operation with the passage of the Academy of Science of South Africa Act 67 of 2001. Its central aim is to stand ‘independent of government’ and to act as ‘a credible voice of science to be heard on topics of national concern, independent of institutional or commercial linkages, obligations and agendas’ and placing particular emphasis on ‘excellence in the application of scientific thinking to the problems and challenges facing South African society’ (Gevers and Parker 2003). The consensus studies were often directed at particularly sensitive points in the interface between scientific knowledge and the social order and included – in the medical field – the report HIV/AIDS, TB and Nutrition (2007) and The Emerging Threat of Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (2011); in agriculture, Science-based Improvement of Rural/Subsistence Agriculture (2009); and in urban studies, Local Economic Development in Small Towns, Housing Delivery and the Impact on the Environment (2009). In addition, ASSAf has also examined pressure points

INTRODUCTION This paper was commissioned by ASSAf as a contribution to its Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa: Status, Prospects and Strategies. The main purpose of this study is ‘to provide evidence​based policy advice on the status and future role of the Humanities in South Africa to government and other stakeholders’. As a contribution to this project, the current paper is intended to put forward or make visible a case for the social and economic value of the humanities and social sciences in contemporary South Africa. In so doing, it forms the third phase of the commissioned research, the first stage having been a preliminary survey and analysis of some key components of global and local arguments on and around the topic; the second, a brief summary of some key findings.4 It is important to note at the outset the deliberate hesitation in describing the central task of the paper as ‘to put forward or make visible a case for the humanities’ as there is a real​world difficulty inscribed in the hesitation between ‘putting forward’ and ‘making visible’. The difficulty is this: that while consensus largely exists within the academic community of scholars in the humanities and social sciences on the specific scholarly value of their work as well as the general social and economic value of the education and training they offer their students, there have nonetheless been considerable problems with the reception of the case, with making it heard outside of that community. Generally speaking (as will be seen below), higher education policy has been blind to the accomplishments of the human and social sciences, and their claims for relevance have fallen on deaf ears.5 In this, evidence​based advocacy for the humanities and social sciences shares many of the problems and obstacles faced by other forms of evidence​based policy advice where factual statement alone is found to be rarely enough to carry a case with policy makers. As research consistently reveals, making a successful case depends on the interaction between two distinct though related elements, which we may roughly characterise as statement and address.6 First, a successful case relies on the quality of statement, understood largely as the truth value of the evidence and consequent arguments being put forward; but, second, a successful case also relies on its qualities as address: the extent to which it is able to make its case heard, either to appeal to, or to successfully challenge, the beliefs and opinions that its likely audience holds with what it is willing to regard or to count as evidence. Just how deep this question of willingness goes has been a topic of concern for social and political theorists for quite some time, as well as a recent object of attention at the interface of contemporary accounts of social theory and cognitive science.7 In all of these, in different ways and within different theoretical and methodological frameworks, full attention to the context of reception is increasingly seen as a necessary component of felicitous statement.8 In the real world, statements have a better chance of survival when they take into account the background of assumptions and received ideas that they must either confirm, or necessarily work to displace, in order to create a space to be heard.9 Successful statement turns out all along to have been also a question of address. Due recognition of these dynamics of statement and address has to be the starting point for an enquiry such as this, since a necessary first step in making the case for the humanities is at least registering or calling for the recognition of the dominant framework of assumptions,

beliefs and opinions in policy discourse that, largely unquestioned, tend to close off discussions of the value of the humanities before they have even properly begun. Whether recognising the existence of this obstacle is enough to avoid or circumvent it may be unlikely, for a variety of reasons: the sheer force of received ideas; the interests involved in maintaining the obstacle, which range from the inevitable forms of déformation professionelle associated with the extreme polarisations of ‘two cultures’ thinking, to the more deliberate and at times fully conscious impact of political parti pris, among all the other social forces characterised in the history of political theory as the forces of opinion or ideology.10 Nonetheless, pointing out the obstacle and its real obduracy must be a necessary first step in any attempt to further rational debate around the place of the humanities and social sciences in higher education policy, and the necessary consideration and evaluation of available evidence and argument.

Statement versus address in two reports But let’s flesh out this somewhat abstract distinction between statement and address by briefly considering two reports on the humanities and social sciences, the first published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities in April 1998, the second by the British Academy in January 2004. Briefly, consideration of the Australian report may warn us of the dangers of not considering adequately the importance of address. In its privileging of statement over address, the Australian Academy report ends up compromising its case for the humanities by unwittingly undermining its evidentiary basis, while – through contrast and comparison – we can see how the British Academy report shows the strengths of attending to at least some of the basic dynamics of address in the preparation and putting forward of its core claims and evidence (though – as we shall see further below – at the same time raising a deeper level of difficulty facing any real practice of evidence​based policy formation). In 1993, the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) issued a report, ‘Bridging the gap’, calling for a systematic survey of the research disciplines in Australia, with a particular eye to Australia’s ‘capacity to undertake strategic research’ (cited in AAH 1998 Vol. 1: ix). In 1996, the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs contracted the Australian Academy of the Humanities with the task of surveying the scene presented by research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences, and in 1998 the Academy issued a three​volume report, Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia into the 21st Century, which sought to respond to the ASTEC brief. In the Preface to the report, the Academy describes its tasks as to ‘map where humanities research is now, indicate the impacts of the humanities and humanities research in the short, medium and long​term future, and articulate the case for the value of the study of the humanities in our society’ (1998 Vol. 1: Foreword, iv). To this end, the report was divided into three volumes. The first volume, Overview, was made up of three separate and distinct chapters: ‘Context and commentary’, ‘Staff and student statistics’, and ‘Issues and recommendations’; Volume 2, Discipline and Area Studies Surveys, covered the range of existing disciplines in twenty​seven chapters ranging from ‘Aboriginal studies’ to ‘Gender and women’s studies’; while the third and final volume, Reflective Essays, contained ten chapters, each written by an individual and engaging with such central ideas and concepts as ‘Public culture’, ‘The idea of

the university’ and the ‘Humanities and science and technology’. A main conclusion of the 550​page report is the finding that the ‘Humanities is one of the best performing sectors of the Australian research enterprize’ (1998 Vol. 1: xviii), but, at the same time, the report also notes with ‘profound concern’ the ‘marked deterioration of working conditions’ and availability of research funding for academics in the humanities and social sciences (1998 Vol. 1: xviii). If continued, the report suggests, this deterioration threatens to roll back the considerable gains made in Australian scholarship and academic life since the 1957 Murray report laid the ground for the expansion of Australia’s universities. This revitalisation occurred through the 1960s and into the 1980s, as evidenced by the significant increase in the number of PhD graduates in the humanities and social sciences, and the rise in the quality and quantity of their research output through that period (AAH 1998 Vol. 1: 9–12). In a crucial paragraph, one that seeks to articulate the impact and value of research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences, the report argues that the ‘importance of the contribution of research in the Humanities to our national life is easily evidenced’, and offers in support of this the following series of assertions: It constantly generates new knowledge about the human condition and human experience. It widens horizons, deepenssensibilities, sharpens awarenesses. It regularly reinterprets past knowledge in the light of new information and of new developments in understanding. A great deal of it is extensively committed to transmitting the great storehouses of accumulated knowledge to new generations. It contributes crucially to the preservation of common standards of citizenship, to the strengths of inherited cultures, and to the viability of attested values through all the vicissitudes of changing social, cultural and economic circumstances … It serves to foster a culturally aware society at the expense of ignorant chauvinisms, and thereby powerfully supports tolerance and social cohesion. On any account Humanities research constitutes a great cultural resource, a medium for social criticism, a vehicle for the exploration of, and debate about, crucial social and cultural values, and a mechanism for fathoming the social phenomena within which we live. (AAH 1998 Vol. 1: 6) What is particularly striking here is the simple fact that, despite the claim for the contribution of research in the humanities to national life to be ‘easily evidenced’, nothing but bare assertion is offered as evidence. All that is offered is simply the statement of the shared assumptions and beliefs of the humanist academic community that it ‘generates new knowledge about the human condition … contributes crucially to the preservation of common standards of citizenship … supports tolerance and social cohesion’ and is, all in all, ‘a great cultural resource, a medium for social criticism … and a mechanism for fathoming the social phenomena within which we live’ and so on. This is indeed a statement of the common assumptions of the humanist academic community, but little or no attempt is made to provide any quantitative or even qualitative evidence to back up and substantiate these claims and assertions. This failing is evident in the very structure of the report, whose main contents contain i) an account of the progress of scholarship within the range of different disciplines which are held

to constitute the humanities and social sciences, and ii) a series of statements concerning particular ideas, concepts and values at work in the humanities. Indeed, perhaps the most striking feature of the Australian Academy report is that while every practising humanist is likely to agree with the claims and assertions made in it, the report itself does nothing to provide evidence or argument of any kind that would likely sway someone standing outside the self​confirming circle of humanism’s long​standing claims and assumptions.11 Much of this comes into focus around two key terms of the report (and higher education policy discourse): impact and value. As regards impact, the Australian Academy report construes impact above all as scholarly impact, internal to the specific disciplines, and referring to progress and advances in knowledge, technique and methodology, so that Volume 2 reports on the considerably improved volume and status of research and teaching in different subject areas in Australia, noting the ‘considerable advances, changes and diversifications in Humanities research and research training’, and the fact that many Australian​refereed publications enjoy a ‘considerably higher share of world citation indices than the world average’ (AAH 1998: xix). With regard to value, the matter is more complex, though what is important here (as shall be seen below) is that the realm of value envisaged by the report is entirely divorced from the commercial and economic realm envisaged (as ‘strategic research’) by the ASTEC brief. All in all, the report may best be regarded as statement rather than address: it presents little more than a pure statement of the shared assumptions of the humanities and social sciences as to the social value and impact of their teaching and research, without offering much in the way of evidence to bring the case across to a readership outside that closed circle, even though the existence of that readership and other constituency is constantly signalled in the report, though barely addressed as such. ‘At the present time,’ write two of the contributors in one of the single best essays of the report, advanced industrial societies tend to give dominant value to research that promotes economic prosperity. The dazzling advances in information and communications technology (and their increasingly important role in the economy) have given them a preeminence in the view of funding agencies. (AAH 1998 Vol. III: 166) The real value of the humanities, though, lies beyond the pale of the purely economic definition of value, or, as the authors put it, ‘beyond a strictly utilitarian role’: research in the humanities and social sciences contributes to a deeper understanding of the values that are the ingredients of worthwhile personal and social human life. They help to shape a sense of the worth and meaning of individual life and the responsibilities of a citizen, and they raise challenging questions about the human purposes being served by the main practices of our social and cultural life. (AAH 1998 Vol. III: 166) Here what is happening is a mirror image of what happens in much reform policy in higher education: while it excludes the humanities, here the humanities exclude it in the name of a

critique of utilitarianism. This is a conversation that can go nowhere fast, one where statement excludes address. In the end, the Australian Academy report speaks for its humanist constituents, but does not really address the ‘utilitarian’ concerns of policy makers, and their very different understandings of value as economic value (‘research that promotes economic prosperity’), and impact as having a visible and demonstrable impact on wealth creation and the economy. So it is that the report is – in evidential terms at least – the weakest at its strongest points, at the point of an internal consensus that would be fractured by the dissenting views, opinions and beliefs of the policy makers. In the end, the Australian Academy report does not make a very powerful case for the humanities, and does not provide anything like the necessary force of argument and evidence to make the case. Ironically enough, given the title and general claims of the report itself, this is largely due to its failure to characterise and engage with its Other: the beliefs and opinions of the policy makers around just what constitutes impact and value, and quite what culture is. Nonetheless, at least one essay in Volume 3 does identify a key point of the problem of pure statement, or a form of address developed as internal consensus and professionally shared assumptions.12 This key point lies in the very idea of culture itself. Uncertainty lingers about the place and proper boundaries of humanities research not because humans are resistant to change, as polemics against ivory towers and ‘cloisters’ commonly assume, but because an outdated idea of culture as marginal to economic and social life persists in the broad academy, as well as in the community. This idea can be of culture as a luxury pursuit for social elites or as a natural attribute of all human beings. Either way, it inclines us to assume that while it is good to study culture, it isn’t really necessary … this assumption carries with it an anachronistic notion of public culture as an extramural, spare time sphere of activity in which a few exceptional scholars (‘public intellectuals’) engage in a spirit of commitment or noblesse oblige. (AAH 1998 Vol. III: 323) Or, perhaps, as the economist Keynes remarked long ago, the difficulty often lies ‘not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones’ (1936: 383). ‘Practical men,’ he suggested (and we might venture policy makers in higher education) ‘who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’ (1936: 383) – and perhaps particularly so when it comes to understanding the impact and value of culture on and for the economy!13 As will be seen, the British Academy report – in seeking in its own way to evidence and address this ‘outdated idea of culture’ – represents a significant step forward in making the case for the humanities. By refusing to simply reflect back (as the Australian Academy report tends to do), to engage and establish the common ground of a shared vocabulary on policy makers that policy discourse tends to engage, an opening for a real conversation is engaged, though, as will be seen, not taken advantage of in a way that underlines the real complexity of evidence​based policy advice. While the Australian report tends too much towards simple statement, performed as the simple expression of the shared assumptions of the humanist community within the academy, the British Academy report has the merit of seeking to address and engage with different core

assumptions in a vocabulary that policy makers might recognise and respond to.14 If a problem with the Australian Academy report was its tendency to simply assert the key values, shared assumptions and informing beliefs of its humanist constituents, the British Academy report of 2004, ‘That Full Complement of Riches’: The Contribution of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to the Nation’s Wealth, does seek to more fully confront and address the very different opinions, beliefs and values of the reigning policy makers through the provision of direct evidence in quantitative and qualitative form. That the humanities and social sciences play a significant role in providing the ‘high​level skills and ground​breaking research essential to a knowledge​ based economy’ (British Academy 2004: Preface, n.p.) is the central claim of the British Academy report, but it is well aware that in making this claim it sets itself against received notions and short​term thinking that dominate much of the government’s attitude to higher education policy. In fact, in the body of the report, most of the evidence gathered to support the central claim of the social and economic relevance of the humanities and social sciences refers overwhelmingly to the easily visible contributions of the social sciences to the better understanding of policy issues. As the report puts it, ‘The social sciences have as their explicit agenda the understanding of patterns of social change with respect to both social life and social and organizational aspects of the economy’ (British Academy 2004: 40). Consequently, in areas from crime prevention to urban planning, the changing dynamics of family life, employment and unemployment, the painstaking empirical studies and theoretical analyses that the social sciences can provide have done much in Britain to shape and reshape government policy in many areas through the provision of expert advice. As the report summarises, ‘the best policy making is that informed by evidence’ (British Academy 2004: 40) and one of the crucial public roles of the academic study of the social sciences is to gather and adjudicate just such evidence, subjecting it to historical, conceptual and comparative analysis in order to yield informed recommendations for policy makers. At the same time, the British Academy report is also able, without too much trouble, to put forward some of the simple facts regarding the directly visible and calculable contribution of the arts and humanities to the national purse in a period in which economic productivity reveals a continuing shift to non​material production. The report endorses the findings of the 1997 European Task Force on Culture and Development that ‘the arts and culture were the main source of content for the creative and cultural industries, the media and value​added services of the telecommunications industries’ (British Academy 2004: 15) and notes that, in Britain, these industries accounted for some five per cent of GDP and, in 2001, ‘were growing faster than the economy as a whole’ (British Academy 2004: 16).15 An intriguing area for further investigation is a more precise account than we have at the moment of the actual contribution of students trained in the humanities and social sciences to the media, entertainment and communication industries such as advertising, architecture, arts and antique market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio, not to mention translation, book publishing, journalism, tourism and heritage – that is, the presumed but as yet uncharted contribution of humanities graduates to these sectors of the economy, now, following the ground​breaking work of economists such as Richard Florida, generally known as

‘the creative economy’.16 Given the strength or at least suggestiveness of the available evidence, why then the general failure to acknowledge the contribution of the humanities to the economy? Here the British Academy report adduces two simple but fundamental failings. The first relates to the usually short​term focus for gathering post​graduation employment statistics (usually six months after graduation). ‘The variety of subjects within the arts, humanities and social sciences means that different subjects will relate to employment in different ways,’ notes the report, and ‘[g]raduates of subjects such as law, economics and business studies will often enter employment that has a clear and direct link to their subject of study.’ But, it emphasises, [f]or other subjects, the link may be less direct and the transition from graduation to employment may be longer and more complex … graduates with a non​occupation​specific degree are suitable for a wide variety of employment and are less pressurized to find work that exactly fits their training because they have skills that are applicable to a large number of sectors. (British Academy 2004: 54) That the time frame for capturing successful post​graduate employment in the humanities needs to be significantly lengthened is one of the report’s most crucial observations. It notes that a longitudinal destination study ‘found that after two years 80% of the cohort surveyed had established themselves in their chosen field’ (British Academy 2004: 55), and similarly observes that [m]ost of the data on graduate employment are collected six months after graduation. But these data are not good indicators of long​term prospects. Studies of long​term career paths tend to show a convergence in the levels of occupational attainment obtained by all graduates regardless of subject studied … the occupational attainment of graduates in the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences is not markedly dissimilar. (British Academy 2004: 55)17 A second – and for the purposes of this proposal, more central – finding was the difficulty academics in the humanities had in articulating the utility of their disciplines both to their students and to potential employers. It is at this point – on the key question of skills – that the blind spot of current debate becomes strikingly visible. For the key skills – those that further persuasiveness, conceptual thinking and confidence – are those of a critical literacy. Why should these skills – the general skills inculcated by the humanities in general, as well as by English literary and cultural studies in particular – be so difficult to identify and articulate? I think it is because the very pervasiveness of literacy practices in the conduct of social, political and commercial life has made them as invisible and as taken for granted as the air that we breathe.18 Properly considered, much of the workings of an advanced economy rely on the accurate transmission and interpretation of information, and the skills of dealing with information – processing, evaluating, recommunicating it – are key skills in the functioning of both global and local economies and their interaction, as argued further below. Two things are notable with regard to the British Academy report: first, the marked advance

it represents in terms of its address. While the Australian Academy report appeared to take little account of its likely audience and their framework of assumptions and beliefs, and to remain within the terms of its assumptions, the British Academy report attempts to internalise and make the case for the humanities and social sciences in terms that the new higher education policies can understand. But, second, what is also evident is the sense that still the case cannot be heard. As the president of the British Academy, Lord Runciman, puts it in his Foreword to the report, ‘Too often government statements and official pronouncements refer approvingly to the undoubted contributions made by the natural sciences, engineering and technology to wealth generation … while failing to acknowledge the equally important contributions made by the arts, humanities, and social sciences’ (British Academy 2004: n.p.). That the dilemma – the ‘failing to acknowledge’ – signals a real and substantial problem is evident in the simple fact that the Academy saw fit, in 2010, to ‘supplement and update’ (British Academy 2010: 4) the earlier report with another – Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 2010 report notes with increasing frustration the ‘disturbingly polarized debate … in which the rival claims of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] and non​STEM subjects are treated as necessarily antagonistic’, citing Lord Runciman’s observation cited above, and further notes that the ‘statement remains largely true today’ and that ‘the enormous achievements of non​STEM disciplines are often overlooked’ (British Academy 2010: 5), pointing to a problem beyond the sharing of vocabulary alone, and towards the importance of considering the social, political and ideological bases of such a vocabulary in their fully historical and theoretical dimensions. In the first instance, this takes us to the necessity of considering the case for the humanities, and the difficulty of making that case heard, in the larger framework of the shifts in higher education policy across the globe in the past twenty years or so. What is overlooked in reform policy? When the British Academy 2010 report suggests that the ‘achievements of non​STEM disciplines are often overlooked’ (British Academy 2010: 5), an interesting term is brought into play. For to overlook (among a range of other senses) suggests both to see and yet not to see; to perceive, but not to fully process, register and allow full access to consciousness; perhaps to have read, with the eyes running across the lines of the page, but without attention to the content, and so in effect to have actively ignored. To overlook is interesting because it suggests the complex interaction of levels of the motivated with the unintentional that makes evidence​based policy advice so challenging. The reality of overlooking exemplifies all the real​world difficulties faced by evidence​based policy advice of any kind, bringing into play the complexities of statement and address previously discussed, but now raising these to a higher level where it becomes necessary to speak of what I shall call here the dynamics of exclusionary consensus. Higher education policy over the past twenty years or so has managed to constitute the apparent paradox of an exclusionary consensus. In this, an apparently general consensus is generated by the refusal of one particular perspective – with all the benefits accruing from the particular narrowness of its focus of attention, but also all the deficits necessarily resulting

from its partiality – to acknowledge the existence of other perspectives differing in interest and scope, and yet to claim for itself an unchallengeable sovereign knowledge. When such an exclusionary consensus is put in place, alternative views and arguments tend to be discounted before they are even considered. In its strongest form, exclusionary consensus works by overlooking any arguments and evidence that might question, contradict or even simply modify any of its constitutive tenets. The formation and hardening of this consensus is easy enough to chart. In 1998, the distinguished scholar of the relations between higher education and employment, Ulrich Teichler, noted ‘the increased uneasiness within higher education about undue instrumentalist pressures’ (Teichler 2009: 67). In 2000, Patricia Gumport, in an oft​cited article, could write of the shift from the ‘dominant legitimating idea of public higher education … as a social institution … toward the idea of higher education as an industry’ (2000: 70). By 2004, Guy Neave could suggest that ‘we find ourselves in the presence of a fundamental reframing of higher education’ (2004: 142). In this reframing, higher education moved ‘from being a sub​set of the political system … [to becoming] a sub​set of the economic system’ (Neave 2004: 143). In this move from uneasiness, to a tension between opposing views, to a fundamental restructuring which does not allow opposing views we may observe the formation and hardening of the current exclusionary consensus.19 Looking back over the period of its formation (usually dated as beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Bill in the United Kingdom and its assault on academic freedom), the Scandanavian scholars Peter Maasen and Johan P Olsen note two of the dimensions of evidence and argument that its perspective marginalises or deletes.20 First, they observe the almost entire absence of a properly historical account of the university in reform policy; and second, they point to a related narrowness in the conception of the university’s social roles and functions. Reform policy displays little or no interest in the complex and varied social roles and functions that the university has played in Europe since its inception, simply tending to claim that this complex institutional legacy has been entirely superseded by present demands. Reform policy appears to have neither any significant conception of nor interest in ‘the possible role of universities in developing democratic citizens, a humanistic culture, social cohesion and solidarity, and a vivid public sphere’ (Olsen and Maasen 2007: 9). Second, and relatedly, the value of research and teaching tends to be narrowed down to the purely instrumental, with the two components of academic activity simply identified as, and reduced to, the status of ‘key instruments for economic performance and growth and mastering global competition’ (2007: 7). While reform policy and the politicians and bureaucrats who are its main proponents tend to speak with one voice, this is due to the suppression of the voices of other interested parties, and notably those of academics themselves and the university rectors who to some extent represent them. Olsen and Maasen point out that ‘while one view has a dominant position in reform documents and speeches, there are competing views’ (2007: 11) and these include those exemplified in the Magna Charta of European Universities, which claims the university as above all ‘a public institution, rooted in the Enlightenment, and serving the common good’ (2007: 10).21

In a conclusion, Olsen and Maasen offer the deliberately low​key hypothesis that ‘reform strategies that reduce the complex set of roles the University has performed historically in the national context to solely an economic role in the European context is unlikely to be successful’ (Olsen and Maasen 2007: 22). Nonetheless, this reduction continues to play a central and continuing role in European higher education policy debates, with increasingly visible and disturbing consequences. In the end, what is overlooked in reform policy is all that works to constitute the social totality, understood as that set of formations and relationships which daily weave (or unravel) the communicative fabric in which all economic activity actually subsists, and all innovation is made possible.

The mirage of the professional university Something like the cautionary hypothesis proposed by Olsen and Maasen – that the narrowing down of the university’s role to solely an economic one, and the deliberate blindness to the complex social roles and functions that the university had historically played was ‘unlikely to be successful’ (Olsen and Maasen 2007: 22) – was in fact emphasised at a much earlier stage in the formation of the exclusionary consensus. The fact that it was done so in reports published by two very important and influential organs of reform policy, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but came to be subsequently ignored is still further evidence for the structures of complex ‘overlooking’ at work in reform policy. Let us now briefly examine the ways in which two detailed reports – the first, presented at a World Bank seminar on higher education and development held in Kuala Lumpur in 1991, and the second issued by the OECD in 1993 – deal in particular with the question of the relation between innovation and employment (key themes of all reform rhetoric) and the humanities (a key absence in reform policy). In 1991, Manuel Castells, one of the world’s leading researchers into the influence of the development of internet technology on the global economy, presented an important report to the World Bank seminar on higher education and development. The University System: Engine of Development in the New World Economy presented many of what were to become the standard tenets of reform policy, and, notably, emphasised ‘the developmental potential of universities’ (Castells 2001a: 211), ‘the university as a productive force in the informational economy’ (2001a: 211), and how the needs of the new economy ‘made research increasingly important as a strategic tool to enhance productivity and competitiveness’ (2001a: 210). Yet the main thrust of Castells’ arguments was to ‘convey to policy makers’ that it is just ‘not possible to have a pure, or quasi​pure, model of the university’ (Castells 2001a: 211). Theory has to accommodate the messy complexities of history rather than turn away from them, and Castells stressed that ‘the critical element in the structure and dynamic of university systems’ is, in fact, what he referred to as their ability to combine and make compatible seemingly contradictory functions which have all constituted the system historically and are all probably being required at any given moment by the social interests underlying higher education policies. (2001a: 211) These contradictory functions include their major social role as ideological apparatuses in

which the ‘conflicts and contradictions of society’ can be expressed and even amplified (Castells 2001a: 206); their powerful social function in the ‘selection of dominant elites’ (2001a: 207); the generation of new knowledge associated with the success of ‘the American science​oriented universities in the new processes of economic growth’ (2001a: 208); as well as the site of many core professional formations and the education of an appropriately skilled national bureaucracy. Given this real complexity in social reproduction as well as economic growth, Castells suggests that ‘[u]niversities will always be, at the same time, conflictual organizations, open to the debates of society, and thus to the generation and confrontation of ideologies’ (2001a: 211–212), and emphasises that [t]he technocratic version of a ‘clean’, ‘purely scientific’ or ‘purely professional’ university is just an historical vision sentenced to be constantly betrayed by historical reality. (Castells 2001a: 212) In fact, with regard to the centrality of innovation to any market​centred vision of the university, Castells (anticipating the conclusions of Olsen and Maasen more than fifteen years later) insists that [o]ne of the key elements in the development of the universities as centres of discovery and innovation is precisely the cross​fertilisation between different disciplines (including the humanities), together with their detachment vis​à​vis the immediate needs of the economy. Without the self​determination of the scientific community in the pursuit of the goals of scientific research, there will be no discovery … there will only be scientific discovery, and connection with the world centres of scientific discovery, if universities are complete systems, bringing together technical training, scientific research and humanistic education, since the human spirit cannot be piecemealed to obtain only the precise technical skills required for enhancing the quality of regional crops. (Castells 2001a: 216) It is precisely this insistence on universities to be ‘complete systems’ for there to be any chance of real innovation that is lost or ignored in the rhetoric of reform policy as it hardens into an excluding orthodoxy.22 In similar fashion, the 1993 OECD report, Higher Education and Employment: The Case of the Humanities and Social Sciences, exemplifies the dynamics of an excluding orthodoxy.23 The report is in many ways most notable now for the fact that while some of its findings and recommendations have been largely echoed by reform policy, other key observations and recommendations have been ignored and not taken up. On the one hand, the report articulated what have by now become commonplaces of reform policy, particularly with regard to the low standing of the humanities and social sciences. According to the research conducted by the OECD group, the emergence of mass higher education from the 1970s ‘has had several negative consequences for higher education generally and for the humanities and social sciences especially’ (OECD 1993: 50). Massification diluted the ‘traditional screening role’ of higher education: ‘Now that university

enrolment has increased substantially, the intrinsic value of university degrees varies considerably from field to field, depending on real or perceived differences in selectivity, difficulty, student profile, and instrumental value’ (1993: 50). In this situation, across all the countries surveyed in the OECD report, ‘the study of H/SS [humanities/social sciences] disciplines ends up low on the range of values’ (1993: 50). A second and related consequence has been the ‘increased emphasis on the part of employers, students, and, in many countries, of government, on the extrinsic or use value of higher education’: More students depend on educational credentials rather than on socio​economic background for employment, more employers are looking for specifically skilled employers (sic), and governments are more concerned about the explicit returns on their growing investment in funding higher education. (OECD 1993: 50) ‘This trend,’ the report emphasises, ‘further diminishes the status of H/SS disciplines because of their less obvious relevance to work’ (1993: 50). But the wording here is deliberate: ‘less obvious relevance to work’ does not mean no relevance, though it does indicate problems with seeking the kind of simple and direct connection between qualification and the world of work that policy makers are naturally inclined to wish were there.24 Indeed, one of the major challenges that the report identifies for policy makers is the dramatically ‘changing content and organization of work’ (OECD 1993: 51) under the impact of the increased speed of scientific and technological discovery. In this situation, the report observes a significant paradox in the situation of the humanities and the social sciences, and one that disappears from later reform policy formulations. The paradox is this: that while the ever more rapidly changing nature of work in the global network society ‘dramatically enhance(s) the potential role of the humanities and social sciences’ (OECD 1993: 51), these disciplines are facing more criticism than ever before. It is important to quote rather than to paraphrase the OECD report’s judgement here. ‘[S]ome of the problems currently facing the traditional H/SS disciplines,’ the report observes, are ‘triggered by external attitudes and value judgements which are often unjustified and discriminatory’. The denigration of H/SS because they are perceived as ‘soft’ subjects reflects excessive societal emphasis on technological advances and economic development, as well as misunderstanding of the kind of knowledge needed to deal with the contemporary complexity and ambiguity. (OECD 1993: 50–51) In the end, in the view of the report, for individuals to function well in their occupations and as members of their society, higher education will need to provide sophisticated generic skills in the areas of communication, interpersonal relationships, and critical thinking such as can be acquired through the study of H/SS; contextual understanding of their activities requiring appropriate elements of the humanities and social sciences; and the capability of dealing with complexity and ambiguity by means of ways of knowing which differ from the traditional scientific model and are consistent with the methodologies of H/SS. (OECD 1993: 51)

In conclusion, the report recommends that these skills – located in the humanities and social sciences – ‘should be integral parts of all higher education programs, technical or non​technical’ (OECD 1993: 51). That both this very direct recommendation from 1993, and Castells’ careful analysis of the necessarily contradictory functions of higher education should be effectively ignored is yet further testimony to the power of the excluding consensus that comes to constitute higher education policy at the close of the twentieth century.

Forcing round pegs into square holes: The Cambridge Impact Study Even the brief and partial survey of argument and evidence presented above should, I think, make clear some of the real difficulties the excluding consensus poses for anyone seeking to make a case for the humanities and social sciences today. In addition, though, I think it is worthwhile to present just one more analysis of some of the argument and debate around a key term in contemporary higher education policy, the idea of impact as a somehow quantifiable measure of research success and a thereby trusty indicator for research support. I do so by examining the core arguments of the recent report commissioned by the University of Cambridge and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the face of the (then) new template for research assessment offered by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for the next Research Assessment Exercise.25 The results of this full enquiry were published by the Rand Corporation as Assessing the Impact of Arts and Humanities Research at the University of Cambridge in 2010 (Levitt et al. 2010). The identification and assessment of the impact of research is fast becoming a key term for the assessment of the research support and research funding. Though specifically defined for calculating short​term effects, its long​term consequences are likely to be the viability of entire disciplinary areas, since no discipline can reproduce effectively without research support. The chapter examines the response from the humanities to the deployment of the term in the United Kingdom’s proposals for a new Research Excellence Framework to replace the previous Research Assessment Exercise. Immediate response to the HEFCE proposals was negative in the extreme. Ross McKibben, in the London Review of Books, described the new proposals as constituting ‘a funding arrangement which can only be destructive’ (2010: 9), and made the obvious point that HEFCE ‘provides no examples of how humanities departments might increase the “impact” of their research’ (2010: 10), while Oxford historian Robin Briggs, in a TB Davie Memorial lecture at the University of Cape Town, referred to the new HEFCE proposal as a ‘misconceived plan to include impact, defined in very narrow economic terms, in the new version of research assessment’ (2010: n.p.).26 An attempt at a more substantial and considered response to the workability of the new template, and with particular attention paid to its suitability as a tool for assessing research and research support, was commissioned by the University of Cambridge and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The resulting report (Levitt et al. 2010) may serve as an informed commentary on the dangers of forcing the round pegs of humanist scholarship into the square holes of an ill​informed policy template. For make no mistake: though with characteristic British reserve and politeness, the report pulls no punches and very clearly

identifies the significant failings of a one​size​fits​all approach with regard to the question of research assessment and funding. Though I want to pick out – and, later, significantly amplify and extend – just one element of the Cambridge report – the idea of public knowledge – it is worth briefly summarising several aspects of the report as a whole. The report was motivated by the imperatives of the audit culture that characterises higher education policy across the globe; the Arts and Humanities Research Council agrees that it ‘needs to account convincingly for its use of public money’, and therefore needs to develop ‘better ways to understand, describe and assess research impact’ (Levitt et al. 2010: xi). These ‘better ways’ are necessary because the existing template of assessment and its core definitions of impact do not fit the specificity of teaching and research outcomes in the humanities. ‘Conceptually and methodologically,’ the report advises that ‘the assessment of academic and non​academic impact of arts and humanities research is still very much in its infancy compared with other subjects, in particular science and medical research’ (2010: 35), but also notes that the forcing onto the humanities of a template of assessment derived from other areas of research and teaching is unlikely to yield useful results. What is required, the report argues, is a redefinition of the template and the core idea of impact if the ‘specificities of arts and humanities research’ are to be taken into account in a way that makes sense (2010: 35). Existing templates for assessing research impact were first developed by the Health Economics Research Group at Brunel University in the mid​1990s, and have been ‘adapted and applied successfully in an increasing number of studies both within and outside health and medical research’ under the rubric of the Payback Framework (Levitt et al. 2010: 35). This Framework is made up of two interlinked elements: a multidimensional categorisation of benefits from research (the so​called paybacks or impacts), and a logic model of the complete research process (for the purposes of research evaluation). The logic model is a simplified model of the research process, indicating when specific impacts can be expected, and linking inputs (often grant funding) to specific outputs (such as publications) and ultimately outcomes (such as saving lives through a new drug for example). The categories of benefit from research include both those within the academic world (such as knowledge production and research capacity) as well as wider benefits (such as health sector benefits or wider economic benefits). (Levitt et al. 2010: 36) At the centre of the report’s concerns is that research assessment and funding cannot be a one​size​fits​all situation, and that the specificity of arts and humanities research needs to be taken into account if you are to avoid the ‘round pegs in square holes’ syndrome. What is proposed is a redefinition of impact which challenges and contests the core assumptions built into it regarding the social and economic roles of higher education in general. ‘The concept of research impact is regarded as controversial,’ notes the report, and causes ‘strong reactions among many academics, some of whom prefer to consider the “value” of arts and humanities rather than its impact’ (Levitt et al. 2010: 1). Indeed, while academics at the University of Cambridge ‘were often able to articulate how research has value’, they found it

‘more difficult to identify impacts from their work and ways in which impacts can be assessed’: Often, although researchers are usually able to discuss the social, cultural, academic and economic aspects of their research, they remain very resistant to the idea of ‘measuring’ impact and generally feel more comfortable discussing impact in terms of ‘value’ and ‘influence’, rather than using the term ‘impact’. (Levitt et al. 2010: 5) The report finds good reason for this scepticism in the fact that its research ‘indicates that impacts in the arts and humanities cannot easily be assessed’ (2010: 5), and that the term itself needs considerable adaption if it is to make sense of the contribution of the arts and humanities to broader society. The report notes several points where there is a lack of fit between the reality of research and teaching in the humanities and what the template demands. Among these are relatively simple observations that in the humanities ‘[a]ccurate attribution of research impact is often difficult’ and, similarly, ‘research impact is difficult to predict or assess in advance’ (2010: Executive Summary, xiii). A template designed primarily for assessing the outcomes of applied research – for that is the underlying dynamic of a template drawn from health research – is unlikely to work well with the assessment of research which is primarily addressed to a scholarly audience, even though this has its own internal economy which has many points of contact with the general economy. There have to be differences between research which aims at ‘saving lives through a new drug’ (Levitt et al. 2010: 36) and research, say, on the history of the Crusades, where the impacts are likely to be most visible and obvious when internal to academic life, and diffuse and hard to track outside of that.27 Indeed, as the report acknowledges, with just a touch of the subdued frustration that animates the document as a whole, ‘As fashion and trends in research and in the relevance of research to other interests can change, this may make some impact evaluation criteria unfair’ (2010: xiii). Unfair, or at least very partial: and this takes us to the core of the argument, the obduracy at the heart of higher education policy, and its reduction of a multidimensional reality to a single dimension of economic calculation. For what is at stake, though rarely or never addressed as such, is the purpose of higher education in general. In much reform discourse, as noted above, the purposes of higher education are taken to be entirely economic and instrumental to the economy, preferring to leave aside the reality of the social bearings of education in general, and of higher education in particular. A striking feature of the report is its determination not to let this happen, but to point towards the necessary identification of this dimension of higher education through its attention to what it calls ‘public knowledge’, as when it asserts, in the Executive Summary, that ‘Public knowledge creation is a key non​academic impact of arts and humanities research’ (Levitt et al. 2010: xiv). In emphasising this dimension of public knowledge, the report makes a key move which I wish to amplify or extend a little, through the connection between public knowledge and critical citizenship that both the longer history of the university, as well as some aspects of South African higher education policy, suggest. The report puts it this way, that ‘[r]esearchers

pointed towards the importance of increasing the knowledge of the general (interested) public as one of the key impacts of arts and humanities research, and argued that awareness and knowledge about arts and humanities is a value in itself’ (Levitt et al. 2010: 39). A key dimension of this value is the stimulation and resource that arts and humanities research offers to the general public in its contribution to public debates. This, though difficult to quantify in any rigorous way, is obvious enough, claims the report, while quantifiable indicators exist in the form of ‘attendance at public lectures and art festivals, and sales of publications for the general public can indicate public access to knowledge’ (Levitt et al. 2010: 39). What is most powerful is the way the report sets these broader dimensions of impact against the narrow focus present in the ruling template. The broader definition of impact is present in the influential Warry Report of 2006, which suggests that: An action or activity has an economic impact when it affects the welfare of consumers, the profits of firms and/or the revenue of government. Economic impacts range from those that are readily quantifiable, in terms of greater wealth, cheaper prices and more revenue, to those less easily quantifiable, such as the effects on the environment, public health and quality of life. (Warry 2006: 2) What is striking here is – in everyday practice, and for the entirely understandable reasons offered by analysts such as Birnbaum – the ways in which the quantifiable elements tend to win out over the ‘less easily quantifiable’ dimensions; and the ways in which research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences – with some obvious exceptions – are marginalised by an intense and close focus on the narrow and ‘economist’ definition of impact proposed by HEFCE. Faced with the reality of this reduction of the aims and outcomes of higher education to instrumental purposes and economic outcomes meant that, in practice, ‘impact’ tended to refer only to the ‘readily quantifiable’, and the Cambridge Group sought – rather than to bash the round pegs of humanities work into fitting the template – to reconfigure the template to match the reality of work in the humanities. In so doing, they worked towards a redefinition of ‘impact’ in ways that more closely fitted the humanities. The first step in this was to provide a graphic representation of the narrowness of the current focus (Figure 5.1). Figure 5.1 enables us to see just what this narrowing of focus entails: the substitution of one dimension or aspect – the economic – of the social totality for the whole. While the demand for an accounting in terms of measureable impact works well enough for the quantifiable areas of economic growth, and the enhancement of social and intellectual capital, it confines to the fuzzy margins the intrinsic benefits to the individual of improved education, including better care of the self in terms of health and the better communication skills that can result from increased social and self​knowledge; in brief, all the social benefits of better education for the primary end of social cohesion and how these are likely to impact on an economy which is in any case situated within a social order.28 In fact, the narrowness of focus tends to inhibit – ironically enough! – even the actual calculation or acknowledgement of the economic benefits of education in the humanities, as

through what is widely perceived as the core element of ‘innovation’, can be dangerous. Economies – even or perhaps especially in an era of global capital – still subsist in social orders, and require motivated participants and workers and some measure of stability in order to function.29 In a developing country such as South Africa, struggling to emerge from the racially divisive social structures of ‘grand apartheid’, this may be particularly the case and a sore point which the application of the global higher education template will do little to heal. The imaginary of innovation as the central driving force of the economy proposes or rests in part upon the fantasy of a society in which there is no substantial social conflict or disorder. Focusing on the production of entrepreneurs may not be as worthwhile – even in the short​term – as the production of active citizens: people with the critical and communicative skills necessary to the functioning of an economy in a complex society in which the skills usually associated with intercultural communication are at a premium. This chapter has looked so far at a representative sampling of cases that have been made for the humanities, and some of the difficulties they have faced in making them. The Australian Academy of the Humanities case, I argued, was vitiated by an insider outlook: though the report stated the general claims of the humanities and social sciences for their internal scholarly value and external public value, this was done in terms of a mutually assured agreement. In ignoring the necessity of address, it tended to provide assertion grounded in such agreement rather than securely grounded in evidence. By contrast, the British Academy report sought to translate the claims of the humanities and social sciences into evidenced argument for the public benefits accruing from their work. However, this attempt at translation appeared to fall on deaf ears, and the chapter went on to examine the reasons for this through the idea of an excluding consensus whose key components have been identified by a range of scholars in the recent history of higher education policy. In addition, I noted that the force of this excluding consensus was strong enough to inhibit arguments and insights generated within two key institutions most associated with the globalisation of higher education policy, the World Bank and the OECD. This section of the chapter, which highlighted the difficulties of making any case for the humanities heard, further analysed the most recent attempt at forging a dialogue over the contested idea of ‘impact’ as a reliable indicator of research performance and quality, and pointed out some of the gaps between the values, opinions and beliefs of humanist scholars and those of policy makers. I turn now to some of the specificities of making a case for the humanities in South Africa with what I hope is a full awareness of some of the difficulties involved in doing this. My animating sense is that it may well be that some of the difficulties and specificities of the South African context may make it easier and create more of an opportunity for a genuine dialogue between humanists and policy makers than appears to have been the case elsewhere, with arguably by now some disastrous short​term consequences, and even potential for the long​term degradation of the university project as a whole. In particular, the pressing demands of social reality may make it possible to disrupt or even break the terms of an excluding consensus which enforce and return or reinforce a powerful but disabling set of binary oppositions which tend to generate the dialogue of the deaf that characterises too much of what should be a productive discussion between humanists and policy makers.

Is South Africa exempt from template fever? Is South Africa exempt from template fever? By template fever, I refer here to what higher education policy scholar Roger King has called ‘policy internationalism’ (2010: 35). Policy internationalism is the marked increase in the international convergence of policies in higher education (and other areas of government), visible over the past twenty years or so, and usually attributed (at least in part) to the extraordinarily rapid increase in the speed and ease of global communications (2010: 35). ‘Widespread policy borrowing,’ notes King, spreading policy imaginaries by national decision​makers predicated on global comparisons and the notion of the competition​state, and the growing influence of bodies such as the OECD, underpins global convergences in government policy prescriptions. (2010: 35) Even where governments are well aware of the pressure of local realities and contexts, research has revealed significant reluctance to question the regime of global governance templates in order to ‘evade international and other criticism that would follow outright non​adoption’ (King 2010: 36). With regard to the higher education template, he claims (and not at all surprisingly in view of the arguments reviewed above) that [e]verywhere we find the view (not necessarily well​evidenced) that universities help to provide economic well​being and comparative national advantage through providing the research and the educated personnel necessary to enable countries to compete effectively in the global economy and this despite the fact of the widespread belief that ‘universities have wider social functions than simply economic’ (King 2010: 37, 38). Similarly, Mala Singh observes that [p]olicy convergence under the pressurizing influence of emerging global ‘templates’ may be an even greater challenge for higher education systems and institutions in developing countries. This is because of the frequent lack of capacity to ‘contextualize’ and mediate relevant elements from powerful global ‘prescriptions’ for social and economic development. (2010: 48) She warns that the ‘potential of such templates for distracting attention from pressing local challenges is also great’ (2010: 48).30 To what extent has South African higher education policy fallen prey to these pressures, and to what extent successfully resisted them? The answer is clearly crucial with regard to any potential that making a case for the humanities in South Africa will have. The answer is – not surprisingly – a mixed one, but a mixed one that I will argue expresses deeper, more structural features of the South African context that make for a real possibility in this regard. The guiding lines of much South African higher education reform policy were set in the 1997 Programme for Higher Education Transformation. What is interesting here is less the dominance of the demands of the global template within it, than the (internationally)

remarkable fact of a key point of resistance to that template. For the Programme is an interestingly complex and perhaps even contradictory document.31 While (arguably) a vocational and instrumental view of the roles and functions of higher education tends to dominate the document as a whole, there is nonetheless a key commitment to the public value of higher education which – as we have seen – had been erased in reform policy elsewhere. The instrumentalist view common to global reform policy is fully present and active in the Programme, with its call for higher education to ‘address the development needs of society and provide the labour market, in a knowledge​driven and knowledge​dependent society, with the ever​changing high​level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern economy’ (NCHE 1996). Here we have the familiar terms of a global policy in which education and higher education need to be carefully controlled and directed, and tailored to the ever​shifting needs of the economy; but here we have also and at the same time a policy commitment to the values of the public good, and in particular to the role of higher education in promoting ‘critical citizenship’ or the ‘socialization of enlightened, responsive and constructively critical citizens’ (NCHE 1996). It is this stated commitment that gives at least a formal opening for the making of a case for the humanities in the traditional humanist terms of the ‘socialization of … critical citizens’ (NCHE 1996), and, more importantly, for the terms of the argument slowly developing here, for the articulation of a contradictory consensus – more correctly known as dissensus – to replace the exclusionary consensus of reform policy in general. Dissensus, like exclusionary consensus before it, may be little more, in logical terms, than a contradiction in terms; but it usefully helps to articulate the real opening that the Programme allowed simply by the fact of not suppressing dissent.32 Political theorist Jacques Rancière’s recent dissection of consensus in contemporary forms of democratic politics is much to the point here, and particularly his astute comment that while the word ‘consensus’ ‘apparently exalts the virtues of discussion and consultation that permit agreement between interested parties’, a ‘closer look’ at its actual deployment ‘reveals that the word means exactly the contrary: consensus means that the givens and solutions of problems simply require people to find that they leave no room for discussion’ (Rancière 2010b: 1). As described at some length above, this was precisely the dynamic of exclusionary consensus. In contrast, and demonstrating some level of immunity to template fever, the Programme worked precisely to open or keep open a space for real discussion and debate by embodying a state of dissensus. What might explain this breach in the exclusionary consensus of higher education policy? Undoubtedly, it is in part due to the existence in South Africa of the critical intellectual capacity Singh identified as a necessary precondition for the ability ‘to “contextualize” and mediate’ the ‘global “prescriptions” for social and economic development’ (2010: 48); but is also surely due to the simple fact of South Africa’s revolutionary transition from apartheid state to full democracy. The idea of the value of citizenship could hardly be denied to a new nation of first​time citizens, and the long history of the relations between humanist education and democracy – usually identified with the emergence of the studia humanitatis in Renaissance Europe – could well be foregrounded.33 All in all, if South Africa was not exempt from the ravages of template fever, it did at least

prove to have some levels of immunity to it, as the very existence of the current Academy report suggests.34

Questioning the question It’s an old adage of critical thinking to question the question, when to answer it in the given terms can only perpetuate a mystification.35 With regard to the dominant international template of higher education policy – which informs and infects a significant portion of South Africa’s policy in a living example of template fever – what needs to be questioned with regard to the potential dialogue of that policy with the humanities is the rigid series of oppositions that currently tend to structure the space of discussion in such a way that the exchange of views proper to dialogue is impossible, and in its place we have the exclusionary consensus presented above.36 Making the case for the humanities in the face of an exclusionary consensus of the kind described means somehow breaking out of the framework of received ideas which together constitute what can only be called a dialogue of the deaf.

From STEM to NAIL A contributing factor to this dialogue of the deaf is the visible promotion of the STEM disciplines in higher education policy, and the invisibling or overlooking of the contribution of the humanities and social sciences to the functioning of the social order.37 Recent years have seen, both globally and locally, a significant increase in research support in higher education systems to what have become known as the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This has been done with the eminently worthwhile goal of improving innovation and bringing better goods to the market in better ways, improving South Africa’s competitiveness and, consequently (and following Marx’s old logic of economic base determining the social superstructure), assuring continued social and economic development. The STEM disciplines, it is argued, provide the drivers for the future economy. As such, they have a stronger claim on the public purse when it comes to financing research and teaching at our universities. In this focus on the STEM disciplines, the humanities and social sciences have come to be marginalised and even ignored altogether, as one commentator – the late Masao Miyoshi – noted, ‘as if this branch of knowledge had already vanished’ (2000: 38). My intention here is to try and bring out some of the dangers of too exclusive a focus on science and technology in higher education policy, and to do this precisely by drawing attention to what is marginalised or left out in this excluding focus. Briefly, too narrow a conception of the benefits of economic and technological innovation runs the risk of forgetting that economies subsist within the larger social totality.38 Though economies help to determine social structures, social structures also work to constrain, support or enable economic advances as they create particular roles and identities in the social order. Relations between economy and society are best understood in terms of a mutual interaction which tends to disappear from view with a focus on science and technology that is too exclusive.39 One way of getting that mutual interaction into focus is, I think, by deliberately offering a

new acronym and turning our attention to its components. If we want to give South Africa’s development the complex consideration it needs, we must give due consideration to the NAIL disciplines. If the STEM disciplines represent, as their proponents claim, ‘the core technological underpinning’ for a developing and competitive economy, what is it that the NAIL disciplines achieve? Summing up in advance, the NAIL disciplines provide education and training in the key communicative skills that underlie or form part and parcel of all economic transactions, as well as in the realm of personal life.40 Research in them concerns some of the key questions of social reproduction that any complex idea of development – one that pays due attention to the mutual interaction of economy and society – requires to make it work. The NAIL disciplines help to recognise and understand the complex but constitutive ways that economies are always grounded in particular social orders.

What are the NAIL disciplines? ‘N’ in NAIL stands for ‘narrative’. Narrative is the province of all of those disciplines in the humanities and social sciences – and notably disciplines such as sociology and psychology, as well as history, and textual disciplines such as literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies – that examine the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves frame and effect our actions in the real world. For the NAIL disciplines, narrative is important because it provides the evaluative framework for our conscious agency as well as the informing background to our unconscious reactions. Narrative helps to order and construct both the realm of the political and the realm of the economic, which together constitute the social order as a functioning unity.41 So it is that many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities are, for instance, concerned with the role models that different narratives allow or prohibit – questions, say, of what it is to be a man or a woman in a particular historical time and place, or a particular social and cultural setting, and just how that sense of a gendered identity both enables and constrains choices and actions in the social world, ranging from job opportunities to acts of violence, consumer choices to family responsibilities. Similarly, the narratives associated with class, racial and cultural identities of various kinds are generally held to be key elements for social development.

The ‘A’ and ‘I’ of NAIL stand for ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation’ These two modes of critical attention are of course linked, and they are perhaps best understood as the two ends of a spectrum of techniques and skills in advanced or critical literacy that run from the (apparently) simple act of paraphrase through to the often considerable complexities of interpretation. It is common ground that in the ‘information age’, a key defining feature of competitive economies lies in the distinction between generic labour and self​programmable labour.42 Within this, the skills of analysis and interpretation are paramount – and form the bedrock of graduateness across all disciplines, as well as the core of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.43

At one end of the spectrum, we have the one​page summary that you might prepare from a variety of sources for a business meeting. At the other, a 200​page critical interrogation of a single sentence or even word (something like French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the Greek term pharmakon). Between the two, we have the vast array of communicating activities in which assessment and persuasion play key roles. Graduates from the NAIL disciplines – with their particular emphases on the skills of paraphrase and interpretation – have valuable roles to play in the ever​growing sectors of the entertainment and creative industries, in policy advice roles around topics such as xenophobia, in NGOs such as the Treatment Action Campaign,44 as well as in contributions to education in the medium​level literacy skills so desperately needed in just about all spheres of municipal administration. Just as mathematics provides the ground for the STEM disciplines, so literacy – or better, the multiple literacies of an increasingly visual and digital communication order – gives foundation to the NAIL disciplines.45 It may be that we can get a sense of the economic importance of these advanced forms of literacy from the particular vogue in business studies around the idea of ‘intercultural communication’. Though often trivialised as ‘10 rules for business meetings in 25 cultures across the world’, intercultural communication does point to the general importance of what we might call ‘ordinary translation’ in the everyday encounters and frictions of social and economic life.46 The thesis of ordinary translation helps to understand the difference between primary and advanced literacies. It argues that recognition of differences is crucial to successful communication, not only between different languages, but within national languages themselves. Ordinary translation accepts and seeks to understand the fact of the conflicts and divisions within society that we usually prefer to forget, but which the NAIL disciplines insist on remembering. In the end, too exclusive a focus on the STEM disciplines is perhaps entirely understandable in a country with a past like ours. This focus offers the utopian vision of a nation which can find a place in the world and excel through feats of innovation and scientific creativity; but in offering this focus, it prefers to marginalise or even forget the hard reality of a country suffering from mass illiteracy, and still plagued by social and racial divisions.47 Above all, this focus – in its relentless narrowing down to the narrowest dimensions of the economic – neglects the role of humanistic education as a training in the civic values and understanding necessary to weave a social fabric which may otherwise unravel. Education remains the key to development in South Africa, but we need to open up to a far broader conception of education than our dangerously narrow preoccupation with the STEM disciplines alone allows. No economy can come right or approach anything like optimal performance levels without the skills and understanding that research and training in the humanities and social sciences can provide; no social order claiming to partake of the substance of democracy is likely to be fashioned without the help that training in the critical literacy skills of the humanities enables in all the everyday transactions that together constitute the social totality.

NOTES 1 P Vale, ‘The human factor’, available at mg.co.za/article/2010​02​22​thehumanfactor. 2 See the final report at http://www.info.gov.za/viewDownloadFileAction?id=150166. 3 For further discussion, see the chapter conclusion and Higgins 2012. 4 This was given as an oral presentation for the ASSAf Humanities Panel Meeting, held in Cape Town on 30 May 2010; the second, ‘Forcing round pegs into square holes’, was delivered at the ASSAf Humanities Symposium in Pretoria on 27 October 2010. A useful starting point for the survey of material was the research conducted by Pillay et al. (2009). 5 Some measure of the desperation around this may perhaps be read into the decision – in August 2010 – by the 69​year​old president of the British Academy to cycle the 1 000 or so miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats to raise funds for the Academy’s work in the humanities and social sciences in the face of further likely cuts in government funding. 6 As one recent South African survey of evidence​based policy research put it, more attention needs to be paid to the ‘political, ideological and economic factors that influence policy development and decision​making, often at the expense of scientific evidence’, further recommending that ‘deep, real and nuanced understandings of the context in which policy decisions are made’ need to be engaged (Strydom et al. 2010: 22). Compare also a related observation by Phoenix that ‘policy discourse should be seen as “argumentation”’ (2009: 65). 7 ‘Quite some time’ is intended somewhat ironically, as the contest between statement and address may be said to constitute a central topic of argument and investigation in Western civilisation from Plato and Aristotle through Renaissance Humanism, across British empiricist philosophy, and down to present​day disputes in the history and philosophy of the sciences. For a useful survey of the contest, see Barilli (1989), while for an in​depth account of the clash of the two within one key thinker, see Skinner (1996), who argues that Hobbes finally comes down to a view that ‘if truth is to prevail, the findings of science will have to be empowered by the persuasive techniques associated with the art of rhetoric’ (1996: 376), while for an intriguing blend of social theory and neuroscience, see Manuel Castells (2009), discussed below. 8 Felicitous statement in something like the sense suggested by JL Austin’s discussion of unhappy or infelicitous statements in his classic How to Do Things with Words (1975). See especially pages 14–45. 9 Mikhail Bakhtin’s astute observation, that language ‘is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – over​populated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process’ (1981: 294), is useful here. Just how complicated and difficult shall be seen below, particularly with relation to key words of contemporary higher education policy such as ‘value’ and ‘impact’. 10 For a discussion and critique of Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thinking in the context of National Research Foundation policy, see Higgins and Green (2007). Again, the discussion of the force of opinion constitutes in itself one of the central themes of Western political theory from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hume to Hobbes, Marx, and Zizek. Its re​emergence and rebranding in today’s discipline of political communication is a phenomenon of note, particularly at a moment when, as Chomsky recently remarked, ‘Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry’ (‘Is the world too big to fail? The contours of global order’, speech in Amsterdam, March 2011, accessed from http://www.truthout.org on 21 April 2011). For a more temperate consideration, see Castells (2009), especially Chapter 4 ‘Programming communication networks: Media politics, scandal politics, and the crisis of democracy’; while for a useful survey of the shape of the emerging discipline, see Caramani (2008). 11 Something of the same bafflement is disappointingly present in Terry Eagleton’s response to the closure of Middlesex’s Philosophy department, and threat of further closures and budget cuts across the higher education system. ‘Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities?’ he asks, and replies, ‘The question is absurd. It would be like asking whether beer is to disappear from pubs or egotism from Hollywood’ (Guardian 17 December 2010). The article is one of a useful series in the Guardian, ‘Why humanities?’, which included valuable contributions from Joanna Bourke (Guardian 26 November 2010), Stefan Collini (Guardian 1 December 2010), Iain Pears (Guardian 29 November 2010), and Kate Soper (Guardian 30 November 2010). 12 The essay in question is more easily available outside the Australian Academy of Humanities report as ‘Public culture and humanities research in Australia: A report’ in the journal Public Culture; see Morris and McCalman (1999). 13 An important dimension of the whole argument around the relations between culture and economy of course lies in the many debates within Marxism concerning the relations between a determining economic base and a determined cultural superstructure. For a classic critical account of this, which Morris and McCalman are likely drawing on in their emphasis on the constitutive force of culture, see Williams ([1973], 2001) and commentary in Higgins (1999), especially pages 105–123. In this sense, the ‘defunct economist’ is none other than the Marx of the 1859 Preface; for detailed analysis of his arguments there, see Higgins (2009). 14 Though some argue that any attempt to find such common ground is doomed to failure in that the core mission of the university, and particularly work in the humanities, is to provide a space for what Derrida referred to as ‘unconditional knowledge’. For this, see Phamotse and Kissack’s pure statement: ‘we suggest that attempts to justify the existence and

pursuit of the humanities in instrumental terms are futile and misguided. We argue that their importance transcends the imperatives of utility to contribute towards the preservation and extension of what we think it means to be human, denying the constraints and logic of instrumentalism to insist upon the irreducible value of self​definition’ (2008: 49); while for Derrida’s argument, see his two interesting and related essays, ‘The university without condition’ (2002) and ‘Unconditionality or sovereignty: The university at the frontiers of Europe’ (2009). Here, Derrida argues that ‘the university demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth … The university professes the truth, and that is its profession. It declares and promises an unlimited commitment to the truth’ (2002: 202); and ‘The modern and European idea of the university presumes, in its principle, the unconditional right to truth; better still, the unconditional right to ask any question necessary on the subject of the history and value itself of truth, science or even humanity’ (Derrida 2009: 123). 15 See also the findings of the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, and its insistence that ‘[f]or a number of years, the balance has been changing between traditional forms of industrial and manual work and jobs that are based on information technology and providing services of various kinds. As a result the growing demand in business world​wide is for forms of education and training that develop human resources and in particular, the powers of communication, innovation and creativity … Whereas the dominant global companies used to be concerned with industry and manufacturing, the key corporations today are increasingly in the fields of communications, information, entertainment, science and technology’ (NACCCE 1999: 19); and those of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, ‘Many corporate executives understand that today’s competitive international marketplace demands workers whose education develops their critical thinking, problem​solving abilities, creativity and interpersonal acumen. The humanities and arts are essential to cultivating these attributes’ (PCAH 1997: 1). Compare also Gellner’s statement (and important consequent analysis of the social importance of literacy): ‘The paradigm of work is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing … Work, in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with other people … For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably precise communication becomes generally, pervasively used and important’ (1997: 64). For further discussion, with particular reference to the United Kingdom, see Coyle (2000) and Rylance and Simons (2000). 16 For useful general surveys, see Florida (2002), Hesmondhalgh (2002) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report (UNCTAD 2008); while for the beginnings of a South African account, see the work of Mike van Graan and the African Arts Institute at www.africanartsinstitute.org.za. 17 A finding paralleled in the Canadian report (Allen 1999) and the research findings presented in ASSAf (2011). Note also that most of the statistics do not deal with the question of job satisfaction, a dimension Teichler describes as both central to but marginalised from most debates on employment. See in particular his intriguing comments around the fact that ‘Graduates considered themselves to be more strongly driven by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motives’ (Teichler 2009: 14). 18 As argued in more detail in Chapter 3. 19 I cite the work of social scientists here, but the observations of practising humanist scholars were just as trenchant, and of course with more direct relevance concerning the impact of policy reform on the humanities. See, for instance, Bill Readings’s deliberately low​key observation in his ground​breaking The University in Ruins that ‘the centrality of the traditional humanistic disciplines to the life of the university is no longer assured’ (1996: 3). Similarly, in one of a series of important essays regarding the impact of the new higher education policy on the humanities, Masao Miyoshi noted that, ‘The humanities as they are now constituted in academia are no longer desired or warranted. There is a decisive change in academic outlook and policy to de​emphasize the humanities and to shift resources to applied sciences’ (2000: 18); see also Miyoshi (1998, 2005/06). 20 For the best account of the implications of the 1988 Reform Bill for academic freedom, see Russell (1993). Thatcher’s biographer John Campbell observed that the general result of the Thatcher reforms ‘was a brain​drain of talent and a demoralization of the whole academic community’, and noted that ‘[n]o group in society, with the possible exception of trade​union leaders, suffered a deeper fall in status’ (2008: 409). After her retirement, Thatcher herself later wrote that ‘many distinguished academics thought that Thatcherism in education meant a philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training’, but asserted that this was ‘certainly no part of my kind of Thatcherism’ (cited in Jenkins 2007: 124), perhaps forgetting her earlier claim that ‘academics and intellectuals … are putting out what I call poison’ (cited in Campbell 2008: 396) and her consequent determination to discipline the academic community into a purely utilitarian view of the universities’ social function. For the view that Thatcherism is the ultimate source of the current ‘undermining’ of British universities (alongside some American managerial systems), see the article by Simon Head (2011). 21 Carlo Salerno, in a powerful contribution to the Olsen and Maasen collection, also points to the same monologism and exclusionary dynamic at work in the Bologna process, noting the remarkable fact that ‘the Bologna process should drag on for six years without any formal representation for the one Estate on which implementation ultimately depended – namely academia’ (Salerno 2007: 140), and the absolute contrast between the ‘two modes of discourse’ of the European Commission and the Bologna Declaration, the Commission with its ‘increasingly utilitarian, technocratic mindset, and the Bologna Declaration which (re​)instated the primacy of the cultural dimension’ (2007: 141).

22 For a somewhat similar view on the real nature of innovation, see the more recent account by Dodgson and Gann who also emphasise the ‘importance of the new interdisciplinary combinations between science, arts, engineering, social sciences and humanities, and business’ (2010: 134). 23 The report drew on research conducted in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and Yugoslavia, and may still represent the widest available survey. Its findings are largely confirmed by those of the Allen report for the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and notably its suggestion that, ‘One of the outstanding features of the knowledge​based economy will be the breadth of advanced education and skills it requires’ (Allen 1999: 13), a breadth encompassing training in the humanities and social sciences. 24 As the noted specialist on the relations between work and higher education Ulrich Teichler observes in this regard, ‘researchers are likely to deliver a more complex picture than the practitioners consider desirable for making priority decisions’ (2009: 18). He also points to the reality facing any planner, that ‘the signals from the employment system are more blurred and ambivalent than ever before’ (2009: 30; his emphasis). See also the findings of the British Academy report (2004), Allen (1999) and ASSAf (2011). On this, note Robert Birnbaum’s observation that ‘instead of recognizing that higher education’s most critical goals are difficult, if not impossible to measure, institutions and systems responded by setting up goals [for] those things that could be measured’ (2001: 84). Note also his useful warning: ‘The more reasonable something sounds, the less need to subject it to critical analysis and think through its implications’ (2001: 160). 25 The Research Assessment Exercise is a peer review exercise to evaluate the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. This assessment informs the selective distribution of funds for research by the UK higher education funding bodies (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rae/). 26 That ‘impact’ nonetheless seems accepted as a key term, see Collini (2010) and Pears, who forthrightly states, ‘It is bad policy: it will damage research in the sciences and corrupt it in the humanities, as academics will have a strong incentive to become liars’ (2011: 12). 27 How does one assess the impact that reading a philosophy book had on the Treatment Action Campaign? Nathan Geffen, in his account of this most remarkable movement, which has saved countless lives and, in so doing, had a significant impact on the economy, regards it as decisive for the movement’s political success, noting how ‘Achmat suggested I read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, which put forward a compelling argument consistent with liberal philosophy that there are occasions when civil disobedience is justified in democracy’ (Geffen 2010: 63–64). 28 For an interesting – but now historical and almost antiquarian! – reminder of the social benefits of individual higher education, see the important Carnegie study Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social Value of American Higher Education, published in 1977 and its important reminder that, ‘The chief products of higher education, learning in all its manifestations, consists primarily in changes in people – changes in their knowledge, their characteristics and their behaviour … learning may set in motion a dynamic process leading to further changes in people and also to broad social changes … Higher education is part of a dynamic process that may extend far into the future, bringing about changes that no one can predict’ (Bowen et al. 1977: 16). 29 Castells puts this well and subtly in his recent study Communication Power, noting that ‘a major source of power’ in the contemporary world (alongside, but of equal importance to the threat of military violence and the influence of money) is communication power: ‘the ability to generate, diffuse and effect the discourses that frame human action … Because the public mind – that is, the set of values and frames that have broad exposure in society – is ultimately what influences individual and collective behaviour, programming the communication networks is the decisive source of cultural materials that feed the programmed goals of any other network’ (2009: 53). 30 Compare also Singh’s earlier insistence that in ‘developing country contexts with fragile public institutions and social development priorities that do not stop at market liberalisation, it is crucial for the “public good” functions of higher education not to disappear completely’ (2001: 13). 31 As indeed I have argued further elsewhere; see Chapter 2. 32 For a powerful and accumulating body of work around ideas of democracy and the critique of consensus, see, for example, Rancière (2006, 2010a, 2010b). 33 Though for an important discussion of some of the internal complexities of the term in South Africa, see Chipkin (2007), while for useful surveys of the relations between democracy and humanist education, see Nussbaum (2001, 2011). A suggestive starting point for a historical survey of the role of the humanities in South Africa is Vale (2009). 34 And as the related work of the Charter for Humanities group suggests. 35 A classic instance is to be found in the opening pages of The German Ideology, where Marx writes of Hegel’s philosophical system that, ‘Not only in its answers, even in its questions there was a mystification’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 28). 36 If anyone should doubt the force of this, despite the opening of possibility breached by the Programme’s commitment to ‘critical citizenship’, we need only recall the moment of the ‘Marcus Brief’ of 2003/04. Here, humanist academics were asked, at a series of workshops sponsored by the National Research Foundation, to talk about developing ‘a National Research Agenda for Social Science, Law and Humanities’, but with the questions framed in such a way that a bias towards the most extreme forms of scientism was more evident; key questions included why the social sciences and humanities have ‘trailed behind natural sciences in the quest for better understanding of the contemporary world’ and why they have failed to

make clear their role ‘in stimulating innovation and technology in a way that addresses human needs and issues’ (in Marcus 2006: 25); for further discussion, see Higgins and Green (2007). 37 For a deliberately satirical attempt to defamiliarise the received terms of this dialogue of the deaf, in which the government is threatening to withdraw all funding ‘from the teaching of science and technology subjects’ and ‘recognises that arts, humanities and social sciences subjects are essential to society’s well​being’, see Collini in the Guardian of 1 December 2010. For Collini’s further related claim that ‘contributing to economic competitiveness must automatically over​rule contributing to enhanced understanding’ and must necessarily lead to ‘third​rate universities’, see the Guardian of 1 April 2011. This is precisely a claim of the kind that deserves further consideration and evidential enquiry before the full adoption of potentially damaging policy directions in South Africa. 38 As Sibusisi Vil​Nkomo put it in 2011, ‘The private sector has an interest in both the macro​stability of its investment locations as well as the micro​context of its operations. Sustainable private enterprise can only thrive in a society that is stable and predictable; and this means that creative solutions must be found for pressing social needs through the think industry, including research institutes and universities’ (‘SA needs to think to tackle challenges’, available at www.iol.co.za/business/opinion/columnists/sa​needs​to​think​to​tackle​challenges​1). 39 As is to be found, for instance, in the foundational statement of South Africa’s National Research Foundation: ‘It is generally accepted that the capacity of a country in science and technology is directly related to its potential for development and progress and for promoting the quality of life of its people.’ That such a statement exemplifies the rhetoric of exclusionary consensus should be clear enough by now. For further analysis of the statement, see Chapter 3. 40 For a useful comparative statement, see Yu (2009), and her forceful assertion that in ‘an increasingly knowledge​based global economy, study of the humanities … are prerequisites for vocational mobility, personal growth, and civic participation … the humanities impart practical skills needed by all Americans, including reading, writing, language proficiency, critical thinking, moral reasoning, effective communication, historical knowledge, civic awareness, and cultural literacy’ (2009: n.p.). 41 For a lively and engaged account of the social and human importance of narrative, see Chamberlin (2004). 42 See, for instance, Castells’ claim that the key distinction for the promotion of economic growth is that between generic and self​programmable labour, that is, ‘the capacity to research and recombine information’ (2009: 30) which is an essential component of all innovation. Compare also his fuller description: ‘The critical matter is to shift from learning to learning​to​learn, as most information is on line, and what is really required is the skill to decide what to look for, how to retrieve it, how to process it, and how to use it for the specific task that prompted the search for information. In other words, the new learning is oriented toward the educational capacity to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into action … Communication is the essence of human activity’ (Castells 2001b: 259). Compare also Beth Stafford’s useful reminder: ‘Academic research involves three stages: finding relevant information, assessing the quality of information, then using information either to try to conclude something, to uncover something, or to argue something. The Internet is useful for the first step, somewhat useful for the second, and not at all useful for the third’ (cited in Brabazon 2008: 15) and Tara Brabazon’s useful distinction: ‘Operational literacy – encoding and decoding – is a cultural practice of reproduction. Critical literacy requires the production of argument, interpretation, critique and analysis’ (2008: 30). 43 For a useful discussion of graduateness as the core of higher education, see Wally Morrow’s important paper, ‘Higher knowledge and the functions of higher education’, and its claims that ‘the kind of knowledge involved in HE is not a question of quantity; it is qualitatively different’ (2009: 116). It is ‘seen as a catalyst in breaking through the inevitable limitations of common sense and settled consensus. In this sense it is seen as a potent source of innovation and development, and is in the background of discourses claiming that societies are “learning” or “knowledge” societies’ (2009: 117). 44 The Treatment Action Campaign was founded on 10 December 1998 to lobby and advocate for better treatment for people living with HIV and to reduce the rate of HIV infections. It was ultimately successful in challenging the Mbeki government’s ‘denialist’ approach to the epidemic in South Africa. For an account, see Geffen (2010). 45 And of course, especially so in a multilingual society such as South Africa’s. In this regard, see especially Alexander (2007) regarding the teaching of African languages at all levels of the education system. 46 For a deliberately non​essentialist exploration of intercultural communication, see Holliday et al. (2004). The oblique reference here is to Quine’s thesis of ‘radical translation’ in his 1960 study, Word and Object. 47 For some intriguing remarks concerning the ideological appeal of scientific advance in the apartheid era, see Dubow (2006), especially pages 256–266 and, for discussion of some of the complexities of post​apartheid attitudes to science, pages 268– 278.

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6 ‘A grim parody of the humanities’

It’s embarrassing to introduce an academic superstar to a small audience in a large hall. Such were my thoughts as we walked towards the Leslie Social Sciences Building at the University of Cape Town (UCT). ‘There may be just my Theory of Literature class here,’ I murmured, as we hurried towards the lecture, adding silently, ‘all 10 of them!’ Could the unfashionable topic, ‘Marxism at the millennium’, draw in the crowds on this swelteringly hot afternoon in Cape Town, perhaps the last perfect day for the beach, in March 1999? I needn’t have worried: the hall was packed to capacity. But then, this was Terry Eagleton speaking. Though you won’t quite find his books at airport kiosks, you will find them at every university bookshop in the world. He is that rare thing: the author of academic best-sellers. Literary Theory: An Introduction alone has sold something like a million copies, in twenty or so different languages, while After Theory was published as a popular Penguin paperback in 2004. Aside from hard work and an unusually acute intellect, the main reason for this extraordinary success is sheer style. Eagleton writes with the kind of wit more usually found in a thriller than a university setwork: less philosopher Jurgen Habermas than fiction writer Carl Hiassen, more Raymond Chandler than cultural theorist Raymond Williams. As one student at his UCT lectures commented, ‘He made us feel a connection, even when we were a bit lost by the level at which he was talking. He was humorous as well as serious.’ Humorous as well as serious: perhaps the defining quality of Eagleton’s style. Thinking, for Eagleton, is obviously a pleasure, as well as a deadly serious matter – so that he places great emphasis on the role and reality of pleasure in all education. It’s precisely what’s being denied, he argued, in the current global restructuring of higher education on apparently pragmatic principles of profit above all, and in which the business model – as opposed to the pleasure principle – reigns supreme. After a lecture series at UCT, Eagleton gave one talk at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). It’s a chilling irony that while Wits was eager to host the superstar, they had closed down their own space for literary theory – their outstanding department of Comparative

INTERVIEW WITH TERRY EAGLETON HIGGINS: Why don’t we start where all writing might be said to begin, with the question of

style? Your own writing is widely noted for its lively and accessible style. Highly energetic and allusive, it enjoys the ability to paraphrase the most sophisticated arguments, and somehow ground these in quite ordinary and common-sense examples. To what extent did this style of writing and expression come naturally to you, and how far was it a conscious tactic?2 EAGLETON: Well, I like popularising, I like trying to write for a larger audience. Indeed, some

of the more interesting responses to, say, Literary Theory: An Introduction, did actually come from people who had never seen the inside of a university. These were simply intelligent general readers who wanted to know what was going on in the field. I like popularising, I find I can do it, and I think that it should be done. Radical intellectuals have a duty to reach a wider constituency; or, at the very least, to be intelligible within their own constituency. I’m quite scandalised, particularly when I go to the [United] States, by the way in which even the left there doesn’t seem to feel this impulse as an imperative. I think there are material reasons for this: writing in a deliberately simple way may not win you any prestigious awards or posh chairs, or anything of that kind … and I think it’s true that I can do it because I’ve got some other stuff behind me. I can, as it were, afford to do it in a way that someone starting out in an academic career wouldn’t be able to do. But I am horrified sometimes by the implicit acquiescence in academicism maintained even by quite supposedly radical thinkers and writers, particularly in the USA though also elsewhere, where academic writing remains an in​group kind of writing. This is particularly objectionable in the case of literary theory because – contrary to all appearances – I believe literary theory to be a genuinely democratic activity. It’s genuinely democratic in the sense that what it sets out to replace is a criticism that has a very different kind of starting point. This mode of criticism says, ‘Look, in order to be intelligent, you have to have a certain kind of intuition, one bred into you by a certain sort of culture: it’s a matter of blood and breeding.’ Literary theory stands against this and says, ‘Anybody can join in this activity if they are prepared to learn certain languages or certain kinds of language.’ These languages may not be easy to learn, but no one would expect that it should be easy to learn the language of surgery, for instance. It’s then particularly scandalous that people engaged in what is basically a democratic enterprise should write in such an obscurantist way. Perhaps there’s a further point to make about my own writing style and that is to say that I’ve written creatively for as long as I can remember. I sometimes think that I may be just more of a writer in the sense that what I write sometimes seems less important to me than the fact of writing itself. I get a great kick out of the act of writing – that’s probably why I do so much of it! I couldn’t be so productive if I didn’t enjoy it, and that’s why I’m also rather scandalised by a certain apparently utilitarian attitude towards writing on the left. This is a left, remember, which is supposed to be opposed to utilitarianism in many other forms and on many other levels. But with regard to writing, it sometimes seems to settle for often flat​footed and instrumental forms of expression. I always remember what [Fredric] Jameson said once, in an

interview, when asked about his style – which is certainly one of the most striking things about his writing, though it’s quite often repressed or ignored by those who write on him. He said, ‘You have to be able to get something out of it for yourself.’ I think that contains an insight too often ignored on the left, and is to be understood as that of a craftsman, adding something to his instrumental function. HIGGINS: It is, then, in your view, a dangerous thing for progressive intellectual work to

become as opaque as it has in some cases, and perhaps particularly so in some postcolonial and postmodern theorising. I think this touches on another, quite general question that I’d like to put to you. As we fast approach the end of the twentieth century, and find ourselves living through this particular phase of intensified globalisation and neo-liberal ascendancy, what do you see as happening in and to education and higher education, what do you see as the contemporary role of progressive intellectuals? In your lecture yesterday, you talked a little bit about the difficulty Western Marxism found itself in politically, when it’s widely admitted that its main strengths have so far been found in cultural understanding and analysis, rather than in political action and organisation. How do you see intellectuals engaged in education responding to the pressures of the current situation? What’s your sense of what is happening in universities, in Britain and elsewhere? Maybe we could develop this as we go along … EAGLETON: Yes, yes. Let me first just try and find a closing word on the style issue, before we

move on. To say that one shouldn’t write in a deliberate and wilfully obscure way isn’t of course to say that style should always be easy, or be easy to read. In an age of consumerism, and one which includes and encourages the habits of intellectual consumerism, there’s often an attitude on the part of some students that comes through as, ‘If I don’t get it in the first two paragraphs, then there must be something wrong with it, not with me.’ At a certain level, that’s a completely understandable response for literary students to make since there is supposed to be something about literature which makes it generally available. Writing on literature is expected to be immediately accessible. But it’s as well to remember that those who do react in that consumerist way – ‘If it doesn’t go down straight away, then it’s indigestible’ – would never say that about their reading, for example, of an engineering textbook. But just as in engineering, there is a specific set of skills and languages to be learned in literary theory in order to understand it. What I’m trying to say is that populism need not be the only opposite to elitism. When jargon means a wilfully obscure in​group language, it is politically objectionable. But jargon can also quite properly refer to an inevitably specialised idiom, such as one that garage mechanics speak (and I at least don’t understand what they say about carburettors!). I think one has to distinguish between the different meanings of the term. As far as the intellectual or educational question goes, the humanities, I suppose, have always acted in a displaced and inevitably remote way as a place where certain sorts of critical values could be preserved. The cost of that was always that they were going to be preserved and nurtured at a distance, that is, at an institutional distance from whatever it was that they were criticising. One has to weigh up the losses and gains from that. At least it made possible the role of what one may call the general humanist intellectual, who, whatever the

dangers of amateurism and overreaching involved, was nevertheless able to occupy a position in which something like a whole system could be subjected to critical analysis. Now, as against the fashionable Foucauldian view, I don’t think the need for that sort of general intellectual died away with Lord David Cecil! I am sceptical of that claim, even on purely empirical grounds. Just look at the intellectuals who have been the most formative in our period: you can review a whole litany of them from Williams and Chomsky, Bourdieu and Kristeva to Habermas and Said, and still go on with the list. It does seem to me that all of these were or are in some ways trying to keep open that general intellectual space. Of course, while that space has now to be submitted to specialisation and technical forms of knowledge, this process shouldn’t go so far that the whole general space is functionalised out of existence. That, I think, is the opposite danger. For, in a sense, the intellectual is just the opposite of the academic. If you wanted to explain to someone what an intellectual is, you might do worse than say it’s someone who is the opposite of an academic. I think this is so in at least two senses. First, academics tend to get pinned down in a single specialist area, while intellectuals find the need to transgress the boundaries between given discourses. Secondly, and relatedly, intellectuals have some sense of the bearing of ideas on society as a whole (something which academics in my university certainly don’t!). So intellectuals are distinct in that way from academics. Some academics are intellectuals, but not all of them are, I can assure you, just as some non​academic people are intellectuals. We have to get the terms right. When the left enjoys some ascendancy – and I am thinking back now to the very exciting periods of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, though I promise not to get weepy and nostalgic about it – then, of course, the idea of the intellectual as functional or, as in Gramscian terms, organic, can enjoy enormous power. When there is some progressive movement taking place, then there are tasks immediately to hand which make sense of that role, as a functional definition and identity. In a different kind of period, one like our own, of political downturn, then the need at the very least to keep open a space for critique becomes more radical than it was. In other words, things are never simply radical in themselves, it’s always a matter of historical circumstance. And I think here the circumstances have shifted. If humanities departments in universities can try to resist what I would call, in my own context, their Thatcherisation or instrumentalisation, and keep open the rather precarious space of critique, then they’re doing a power of political good. People in them shouldn’t be guilt​ridden into thinking that theirs is merely an armchair radicalism or whatever. It may be that it’s a hell of a sight better than nothing. But it is true of course, as you are suggesting, that now even those institutions of critique, which of course always have their downside, they were always rather privileged and protected – that was the other side of their being able to be a critique. But when even they become so deeply penetrated by capitalist logic, then I think Habermas is right in saying that they will rapidly produce pathological symptoms. In his terms, systems of communicative rationality will not submit without a struggle to instrumental oppression. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in now. HIGGINS: Well, that’s certainly the case here, I think, where the government, for good enough

reasons, is explicitly pushing education and higher education in the particular directions of science and technology as the best means to improve economic development and progress in

the country. One can’t really disagree with that, and yet … EAGLETON (interrupting): One can’t disagree with it, because it’s true. Not least because culture

is not what’s primary … HIGGINS: … there is a way in which at the same time, they’re trying to remake the

humanities to serve instrumental purposes … EAGLETON (continuing): A materialist analysis would tell you that, and the paradox of a

materialist as cultural critic is to know that one’s own field is eminently dispensable, or at least is not, as it were, politically where it’s at. This is not to say that cultural criticism is nothing: there are plenty of places between being at the heart of things and being purely peripheral. But I think it is true that a materialist approach to culture does tell one that culture – in its narrower sense at least – is not what most people live by, even though it’s the hope of a radical that the situation may change! But it won’t change by cultural means, it will only change by material and political ones. So, to that extent, the argument you describe has something going for it. On the other hand, the idea of culture as the icing on the cake is the crassest piece of bourgeois philistinism. There’s something rather suspect about supposedly radical governments or regimes that find themselves re​enacting this kind of case. There is a world of difference between at least permitting the humanities to do their own thing, and hoping that some social good may come out of this, and submitting them to the logic of technocracy. That then strikes at their very root, and I think that is very dangerous. You end up with a grim parody of the humanities. HIGGINS: Here in the 1980s the progressive slogan was ‘liberation before education’, and

that may have made a certain kind of sense as a mobilising force. But it was also particularly striking that in many ways the black consciousness movement itself came out of the HBUs, the historically black universities. So some aspects of the political movement were formed within higher education. What’s now worrying is that today’s slogan sometimes seems to be ‘neo-liberalism before education’, and I’m worried about the shrinkage of critical space which that seems to imply … EAGLETON: I think that, as you say, the ‘liberation before education’ slogan is understandable

in its context. It reminds one sharply of the inevitable historical privilege that one enjoys in being able to delve into and discuss cultural matters. This is possible precisely because one is not confronted with such a situation of political unfreedom, so that all one’s energies or most of one’s energies don’t have to go into struggling against that. But one can understand the history of one’s own position, of how one comes to appreciate the importance of cultural analysis while freely acknowledging its privileged basis. Positions which arise or emerge from privilege do not necessarily have nothing to say or contribute. It’s a well​known fact, isn’t it, that those who are necessarily involved in the dust and heat of immediate political struggles

rarely have the opportunity to reflect, as it were, philosophically. I know this from my own situation in Ireland where there is a long and honourable tradition of Irish Republican struggle, but very little theoretical reflection on it. In a way, that’s completely understandable, though not entirely acceptable. There does seem to me to be a strange parallel between the functionalisation which neo​liberals are trying to inflict on the humanities, and some of the work being done today in the name of the left. For the neo​liberals, the idea is that culture is useful only if it can be harnessed to their own neo​liberal goals. And there is a kind of left parody of this position – an inverted mirror image of it. This comes through in something like the notion that ‘I’ll read this literary work only if it has some immediate benefit for me as a part of a particular group or as representative of some identity’. Once again, this may be an inevitable stage in a wider project of liberation, but I think that liberation will only come, we’ll only be sure that it’s there, when one no longer needs to place such a heavy investment in these questions of identity. It is politically imperative that one does so at particular points, there’s no way of short​circuiting that, and it would be the worst kind of liberal privilege to say, ‘Stop thinking about that and think about something else instead!’ But I think one must always also keep open the goal that it is when those identities really have ceased to matter so much that emancipation is now on the agenda. And to that extent we are in a pre​emancipation period, one in which we on the left are sometimes inclined to use culture instrumentally, just as the neo​liberals do, even if we do so for different and much more honourable purposes. HIGGINS: I guess this comes through in the debates on canon formation, where it seems at

times as if the main effect of identity politics is to actually narrow the range of what is read, and how it is read … EAGLETON: You’re not free as a critic unless you are free to say this work is terrible and

should never have been written. It’s hard to say that if this work is one that should be affirmed because of its political nature, or its relevance to some form of identity politics. Once one has got to the point of breaking open the traditionally exclusive canon, and admitting new kinds of work, but admitting them for critical as well as for celebratory purposes, then I think you’re on the road to critical emancipation. Nobody who remembers the old canon and its enormous psychological force, I think, could possibly doubt the progressiveness of cracking it open at the seams. When I first started teaching at Oxford, no post​graduate was allowed to work on a living writer. I think the syllabus went up to 1900, but there was some suspicion that Tennyson was a bit of a newfangled modernist, and might be a little dangerous. We’ve come an enormous way since then, and I don’t think we should underestimate our gains. As you know, the cultural left has effected some major and substantial achievements, and it would now be very hard to roll these back. But, on the other hand, and as in any argument, there is a danger of fetishisation, and there’s a danger that the left should fetishise the issue of the canon. After all, arguably you could have a canon consisting of nothing but black, working​class, female writing, but a canon that was still treated in an extremely conservative way (this is not an unknown situation; it’s by no means just a fantasy). I think it’s right that we should be at once more provisional and more

mobile about the canon. But there seems to be something, as you are suggesting, deeply ironic about an opening up of the canon which in some ways also represents a closing down, and I think we ought to look critically at that. HIGGINS: This connects, perhaps, to a further question, the question of the continuing appeal

of literary studies. There are still a lot of students all over the world who, in a situation of increasing job deprivation, opt to do this kind of subject, and that choice clearly expresses, at some level, some kind of desire. What do you think people want out of, or find in, literary studies? EAGLETON: When I first began studying in Cambridge, some people read English because it

was a subject for a gentleman. They read it because it was definitely not technocratic. When I later came to be teaching undergraduates myself, at Oxford, at the tail end of the Thatcher epoch, many people were still choosing to read English. Although they might not thematise this to themselves in quite this way, I think doing English was implicitly a way of doing what they wanted, and to hell with the instrumental rationality, to hell with what was functional and what would get you a job. In that sense it was perhaps unconsciously a kind of political choice, a kind of political resistance: it was introducing the notion of pleasure and fulfilment into a society which had less and less time for such things. When I began teaching, hardly any English student I taught knew what they were going to do when they graduated, but that was because they didn’t need to know. They had privileged positions waiting for them to move on into. When I finished teaching in Oxbridge, finished in graduate teaching, they still didn’t know, or the best of them didn’t, but that was because they fitted in less and less to the kind of technocratic society that was being created around them, so that again had a political edge to it. I’ll leave that there, I think. HIGGINS: Let’s try and take it just one step further. Something striking in discussions here in

South Africa as elsewhere is the fact that there seems to be a genuine blindness to the power of literacy, and even to the economic power of literacy. I see the history of English Studies as a chapter in the history of the relations between literacy and democracy, if at some quite abstract or deep level. From that perspective, the current neo-liberal attack on the humanities seems to be a profoundly anti-democratic move in the sense that it’s denying people the empowerment associated with the broader aspects of literacy, or what I call critical literacy (Williams sometimes called it ‘high literacy’). What are your own views on the issues around this kind of literacy? EAGLETON: The idea that literacy is simply a skill or set of techniques is quite absurd,

considering what in principle it opens up – a whole range of capacities, a whole series of practices. I think you’re absolutely right to stress that literacy is the sine qua non of any democratic situation. This is obviously so if you think back – although in a postmodern age which tries to erase history, this becomes very difficult – to the enormous importance which was assigned to literacy by working​class movements. These fought tooth and nail to achieve –

and let’s put the irony at its hardest – just the capacity for advanced literacy which some would now regard as elitist. Those who might now argue, from their position of relative academic privilege, that, ‘Well, Shakespeare isn’t all he’s cracked up to be’ would do well to remember that men and women – working​class men and women – gave their blood to be able to read Shakespeare, and would get up an hour before work in order to do so. It’s extraordinary how that whole scenario has been forgotten, I think. Certainly, one of the momentously important aspects of Williams’s work is just the high ranking he gives to this – just the fact that he remembers it.3 Though coming from the people he does, you might say he would, he would remember that the argument is as much about literacy as it is about literature. And I think it seems extremely welcome for you to be raising this topic again.4 Literacy has always been politically ambiguous in this sense: that the ruling class has never been able to decide whether it’s been a good idea for the working class to learn to read or not. There are losses and gains both ways. It’s one of those many social capacities that are at once essential to social cohesion and yet potentially uncontrollable. There’s an analogy here perhaps with universities as a whole. The state can’t – short of an extreme crisis – close the places down, because they are absolutely necessary powerhouses, both economically and ideologically. On the other hand, if you are foolish enough as a government to create spaces called universities where impressionable young people can hang around for three or four years, doing nothing but reading and talking, then you ought to watch out! Because it’s in certain circumstances – not in all circumstances, but depending on what’s going on outside the university walls – that this sort of space can become quite explosive. There’s no way of controlling that situation, and literacy is perhaps a kind of microcosm of that. What is dangerous about it is that it’s a purely open​ended facility, one that is both absolutely necessary and yet dangerously surplus. HIGGINS: This again seems to connect with some of your remarks yesterday, which perhaps

you would like to take the opportunity to expand upon. I’m thinking of your discussion of the question of value in Marx, not value only in the strict economic sense, but rather in relation to Marx’s more general anti-utilitarian arguments. You identified these, I think, as the real place of the aesthetic in Marx’s work … EAGLETON: Yes, or perhaps even more specifically, the aestheticist Marx, an image which is

something of a scandal and provocation. The value question is again ironic in that, first of all, I think that conservative critics have overestimated the extent to which the left has ignored the question of value. Some areas of the left have done that in a kind of forced and populist way, but others have simply tried to rethink the grounds of valuation, and this is an entirely different matter – not at all the question of ‘Do we value?’ Of course we value, it’s part of social existence, but perhaps the grounds on which we do are more problematic than we thought. It’s a type of irony that while some populist intellectuals are going around saying the value is in itself elitist and hierarchical, the populists themselves stubbornly go on preferring one television programme to another. It’s an academicist fantasy to imagine the value can simply go away. What I was talking about in the case of Marx was that very radical notion, which I call

aestheticist, of activities as valuable in themselves. This is the point. Just how scandalous that idea is to a society that understands nothing but cause and effect, goal and profit, and so on! I think that this is a radical area of Marx’s work which has been much underrated. In other words, not only does Marx engage with aesthetics in his well​known comments here and there, but, more substantially if you like, his political ethics are of an aesthetic kind too. HIGGINS: I think the direction I was trying to push you into, in a sense, was thinking about

one way of looking at the changes we’re being asked to make in the humanities here is to instrumentalise literacy, to make it have a distinct vocational outcome. This seems to be an absolute repression of the openness and freedom associated with literacy. EAGLETON: Yes, but I think one should point out that such instrumentalisation is quite difficult.

Indeed, it is much more difficult than some of its exponents or practitioners would believe, or have us believe, precisely because of the open​endedness of the capacity of literacy itself. I am reminded of what Brecht once said about Lukàcs: he said that Lukàcs as a critic was rather fearful of production, because you never know where you are with production, there is always more where that came from. Of course, this is very true of Brecht’s own plays. There is in them a sense of something waiting in the wings, a set of possibilities yet to realise.5 So perhaps our rulers shouldn’t be quite as sanguine as some of them seem to be about the success or the easiness of that project. Literacy is a slippery capacity. What seems particularly objectionable is the instrumentalisation of a capacity that has traditionally signalled a kind of freedom. The violent harnessing of that to certain preset imperatives and goals. There are other human capacities where one would expect that to happen, and it wouldn’t be so much of an affront. But the fact that you are doing that with capacities, a part of whose very point is the ability to question goals, to be able to think their way critically around them, that is a very devastating attack, a root and branch attack I think. HIGGINS: That’s what I meant earlier by what I think are very deep links between literacy

and democracy. If you are not training people to think for themselves, then you’re not training people to be part of a participatory democracy. EAGLETON: Williams’s phrase an ‘educated and participatory democracy’ is as relevant there

as ever.

NOTES 1 J Higgins, ‘The anti​realists of academe’, Mail & Guardian 3 October 2007, available at www.mg.co.za​2007​10​03​the​antirealists​of​academe. 2 This interview took place in Cape Town in March 1999. It was transcribed by Mary Watson and edited by John Higgins. 3 See, for instance, Williams (1993). 4 See Higgins (1999, 2001). 5 See Eagleton (1999).

REFERENCES Eagleton, T. 1999. A note on Brecht. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 8(1): 89–92. Eagleton, T. 2004. After Theory. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Eagleton, T. 2008. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Higgins, J. 1999. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. New York and London: Routledge. Higgins, J (ed.). 2001. The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Williams, R. 1993. The politics of literacy. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 3(1–2): 136–143.

7 Criticism and democracy

For Edward Said, the academic and the political came together in a way that perhaps exemplifies the complex social force of academic freedom. He was the author of several ground-breaking and influential studies, and the virtual founder of a new sub-discipline in literary studies. Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) was one of the first works to articulate a response to the new intellectual forces of French structuralism. With its confident reference to, and explication of, the key ideas of figures such as Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, but set firmly in the familiar terrain of canonical authors such as Conrad, Dickens and Proust, it established Said as one of the bright young stars of the United States academy. In it, Said effectively countered the critique of literary intention in ‘death of the author’ theory by asserting a more complex and historicised account of intention as beginning point. This was enriched and developed in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), where he emphasised the role of critical consciousness against the received structures or systems of ideas and behaviours, whether in Swift or Conrad, or as exemplified in the different tendencies of a Foucault and a Derrida. And the theme was taken to its logical conclusion in the 1993 Reith lectures, published in 1994 as Representations of the Intellectual. With its famous phrase describing intellectuals as those who ‘speak the truth to power’, Said laid out a powerful case for regarding intellectuals as ‘those who are never more themselves than when, moved by metaphysical passions and disinterested principles of justice and truth, they denounce corruption, defend the weak [and] defy imperfect or oppressive authority’ (Said 1994a: 5). It could have been – and was regarded by many – as a selfdescription. While Representations clearly articulates the importance of critical thinking which links his political to his cultural writing, his most academically influential work is surely the 1978 study, Orientalism. If this was the only book Said had ever written, it would still have assured him a place in the history of twentieth-century scholarship. Deploying Michel Foucault’s theories of the relations between power and knowledge, it argued, with all the combined force of historical scholarship and textual analysis, that Western constructions of the oriental Other

INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD W SAID HIGGINS: I was very struck by a phrase I overheard on TV on my last trip to the USA, on

some business programme or other. Someone being interviewed referred to the rest of the world as ‘offshore’, the full phrase was ‘offshore interests’. I was amazed: the whole world outside the USA – offshore! You seem to be one of the few academics and intellectuals resident in the USA who is fully aware of the brute fact of American global domination, in all its cultural, political, economic and military dimensions. The fact of that domination – its consequences and implications – seems to be an extraordinary blind spot in the attention of most US academics and citizens. Don’t you find something deeply disturbing about the ways in which Americans often don’t seem to engage with what it is to be American, when America is understood as this huge, global and imperial influence? SAID: There is a kind of insularity, I guess you could even call it a smugness. I must say I think

it’s getting worse. There really is such an insularity, combined with such a comfortable lifestyle, especially among American academics. This even comes through in terms of style: many academic writers are mostly incomprehensible – they cannot write! It’s unbelievable! And you hardly ever see them even sign a statement – let’s say over the bombing of Kosovo. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s always just the same six people: there’s Chomsky, there’s me, there’s Howard Zinn, a couple of others and that’s it. HIGGINS: It’s a bad moment. I’d like to ask whether you think the abstraction of a lot of

academic writing is tied up with a more general problem, a more general level of crisis in literacy or high literacy. SAID: I think it’s all related to the general eclipse of the culture of humanism. The culture of

humanism has, in general, suffered a huge amount of blows in the past decades – and most of them justified! There are several broad factors at work. As I said in my paper yesterday, every tyrannical movement you can think of claimed it was doing something or other to other people only in the name of some lofty ideal, or some idea of higher human development.1 The realisation of this betrayal has reflected down on several levels into the present​day American or Western university in the form of a general retreat from humanism. At the same time, there is the cumulative effect of theory from the 1960s and ’70s – themes of the death of man, the death of the author, and all the other things that emerged from French theory. Thirdly, the crisis is related I think to the redefinition of the disciplines: anthropology is no longer what it once was; the same is true of sociology, the same is true of the study of literature. So there’s now a kind of general amorphousness, where people feel they don’t know where they belong. And of all the disciplines in the university, it’s the humanities which has taken the biggest beating. This is mainly due to the fact that university administrators realise that the money is just not there. To fund a big research university in America, for example, there is much more money to be had from the defence and biomedical or engineering corporations than, let’s say, from foundations anxious to give money to the study of literature. So all of these things are, I think, factors in the decline. In addition, there is also – at least

in America, though I think it’s a special case – the fact that literacy has all but disappeared. High literacy has disappeared because the attitude is it’s somehow not worth the effort. What is much more important than the slow skills of high literacy is the mastery of a philosophical system, and some kind of almost inaccessible, conceptual deployment of that system. This is what people associate with profundity. I’ve attended lectures by academic stars in this kind of system thinking. They speak a language that you can’t understand, and somehow this draws more students to them, precisely because it’s not understandable. All of this on the theory that if you can’t understand it, then it must be profound! You also have to remember the sheer level of comfort of the university member, who is really shielded from society in the most extraordinary way. Conditions of life, however poor they may appear in comparison with an investment banker, or a successful lawyer or doctor, are still pretty amazing. Basically, most humanists and literary people now teach only three or four hours a week – and I’m talking here even about junior people! What you find now is that English departments do not only teach English literature, or even literature. At Columbia, we have a department where when I offered a course last year on Irish literature – beginning with Swift and Burke and coming right down to Brian Friel – students had never even heard of Swift, but they knew everything there was to know about Derrida, and Lyotard and Rorty. One result of this situation is a breakdown in the ability to write. You can see this everywhere. You can see it in jargon​ridden academic prose; you can see it in newspaper and media writing, which is basically monochrome. Just look at a magazine like the New Yorker. This used to be the apogee of what counted as high literary style in North America – at least in terms of popular definitions of high literature. Now they may have thirty articles, but they all look like they’ve been written by the same person! The fact is that students are simply no longer taught how to read and write. I keep coming back to that. Whatever I’ve done politically has been entirely dependent on the ability to read critically, to be able to understand the uses to which language can be put. And here I mean to refer to the truly vast range of possibilities that language has. I think the only place you can get a sense of this range, and a feeling for these possibilities, is through the study of literature. Because that’s what literature in a sense is about. Writing is not only about describing the world, and writing about it realistically, and reporting it, in the way that someone like Daniel Defoe wanted to do. It’s also about really pushing at the limits of perception and articulation in such a way as to mobilise and marshal the critical faculties to an extreme degree. And if you lose that pressure in writing, you lose everything. And I fear that that is what’s happened. For example, let’s go back to humanism for a moment. The root of the word is of course the human. But look how it’s losing its meaning: it has become so corrupted that the American adventure in Kosovo is described as ‘military humanism’! That shows you just how far this process has gone, and how the phenomenon of globalisation is eating away at the few pockets of resistance that do exist here and there. Virtually all the media, and public discourse as a whole, has been pretty much hijacked, and is controlled to such a degree that it is very difficult to express anything, except in that new lingua franca. That’s in part why other people then want to go off and invent a language of their own, so that it’s a very difficult proposition to try and speak in this context. Because you have basically a language that you know has been taken over by someone else and you have to try and use the same language – for ease of

communication – to express alternative thoughts and dissenting ideas. I think that’s the main struggle now. HIGGINS: So that one dimension of that struggle is to be found in the craft of writing, the

attention to the process of writing. Would this be a way of putting it? When writing, people are always faced with a choice. The choice is this: you can repeat with ease the received ideas about something; or, you can, in a difficult and painful process, try and resist the received ideas. It then seems there is a tragic paradox in the academy: a great deal of theoretical writing, which says that it is setting out precisely to question and destabilise received ideas, itself often becomes a received system, a technical vocabulary, whose use signals that you belong to this or that intellectual clique … SAID: Yes, exactly: that’s the real meaning of jargon. It’s interesting that you mention the notion

of choice because when I teach literature, which is really all I teach (though I teach music also from time to time, and some philosophy, but it’s usually literary things), I try and teach it from the point of view of the writer. I tell my students to read a piece of literary writing – say by Swift, or Yeats, or Conrad – and to read it as the outcome of a series of choices. Every sentence in a text represents a choice: perhaps a move away from a cliché, perhaps a turning away from other possibilities. Indeed, what gives individuality and originality to literary work is this constant sense of the sustained effort to refine and push away from the cliché, the hackneyed, the ordinary. It’s the consistent attempt to resist the dead material and ideas which are crowding in, which are trying to fill the space on the page, and seeking to crowd out and keep at bay the more original ideas which could emerge in that space. You get to know that this endeavour, however difficult, can be successful because you also study examples of bad writing, which show what happens when no choices are made, and the only words used are the words that come immediately to mind, the phrases that everyone uses. Of course, I’ve been very sensitive to these pressures and dynamics in the political context, and particularly in the one that I’m perhaps most associated with, the context of the Israeli– Palestinian conflict. Here the common currency of debate is provided by words such as ‘terrorism’, ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘violence’. Every one of these words is a cliché of some sort or another, and their use is designed exactly to prevent thinking and analysis. Just think, for example, of what tremendously vague but powerful things come to mind with the word ‘Islam’: its use prevents serious thinking. But the point is that these received ideas can be questioned, can be challenged, and can even be removed. That’s one of the things that you touch on in your own work that was so interesting about Raymond Williams.2 Whenever he spoke – and I heard him speak several times – he would always take a statement or question, and try to show the historical processes which made the question possible, rather than to try and answer it. HIGGINS: I suppose that’s precisely the interface which interests me in literary studies today.

Of course it’s possible to imagine there are two, different, Edward Saids, who happen to bear the same name. The first is the urbane literary intellectual, writer of essays on Proust, Joyce and Conrad, and other literary figures. The second is the so-called ‘professor of

terror’, as Zionist propaganda has it, and author of studies like The Question of Palestine and The Politics of Dispossession. But there must be at some level an interface or connection between the two since, in fact, there’s only one Edward Said … SAID: There are two different audiences, not one, though there’s only one body of writing … HIGGINS: … and its focus is combating received ideas … SAID: But not only that. It’s also about trying to provide an alternative language to take over the

positions which corrupted forms of language and thinking are currently occupying. I think of this whole problem as something akin to a military occupation. I think the public role of the writer or the intellectual – though it can also take place in the classroom – is to try and attack the occupation in some way. Sometimes the only way you can attack something so massive and powerful as this occupation – because you are writing against very powerful interests – is to draw attention to the fact that it is there, and that the linguistic occupation plays a role in a larger deliberate purpose. It’s like the way a tank is put into a village. First, you must draw attention to the ways in which the tank is as strikingly out of place as it in fact is. Next, you might want to try to provide an alternate route, around the occupied village, a route that offers some more generous view of the whole space in which the fact of the tank can seem so central and dominating ... I find this perpetual struggle at once hateful and frustrating, and yet terribly engaging and supremely interesting. And it’s not just about the Middle East: the same dynamics can be applied to a whole set of situations, local as well as global. HIGGINS: As people now say, we live locally, but our language is global. We tend to live in a

global language, one that may not quite fit the reality of the locale. But we are not just trapped in that language, like flies in a web: we are also to some extent responsible for the web, its makers. But to return to one of the themes you were elaborating in your paper yesterday – the impact of information technology, the internet, and the claims that some make for the access to information it enables. Manuel Castells, for one, draws a comparison between the empowerment offered by traditional literacy, and the empowerment enabled by the new information technology.3 Yet what seems to disappear in this picture is the difference between easy access to information and acquiring the sometimes difficult technical skills necessary for interpreting that information. SAID: That’s the difference between knowledge and understanding, to put it quite simply. You

could have access to all the available knowledge of something, you could sit there sifting through every media available, every newspaper that’s on the Net, and still walk away as functionally ignorant as you were when you started out. It is indeed the process of understanding that one wants to mobilise and get activated, get going, and this can or does take hard work. But the important point I would add to, or perhaps criticise, in your formulation of this, is that it is not a question of technical or technological or particularly specialised hard

work. It’s hard work that it’s possible for anyone to do. And that’s the point. You don’t have to be like an engineer. Literacy or even high literacy is not like that. It’s much more democratic, it’s accessible to any citizen. That’s the point. And, certainly, with regard to the Middle East or in the United States, the point is to develop a rather more heightened and mobilised sense of citizenship and participation than currently exists. And this is possible, this is available to people – if they do the work – but it’s important to stress that the work can be pleasurable, and one mustn’t leave pleasure out of it. It’s certainly pleasurable. Also, it’s important to emphasise that the project is a universalist one; the themes are always common ones: you want to go after injustice whenever it presents itself or masquerades as something else, say just as something inevitable. Take the way, for example, in America, during the Clinton period, that Madelaine Albright would go around saying ‘the US is the indispensable nation’. A phrase like that needs to be endlessly taken apart and shown for what that means exactly, what it suggests and so on. So I think that on the whole literacy is hard work, but with all kinds of interesting pleasures and potentials. It brings you back into activity, rather than allows you to sit back; it’s not a matter of reading in some remote way, technically manipulating a few symbols here and there to show that you have this facility, that you can apply that kind of system. That’s really the point: that sort of grasp on technique or system doesn’t empower you or give you a real kind of agency. HIGGINS: I reread your book Musical Elaborations recently, and I was struck by the phrase

you quote from Adorno, used to describe what he saw as the plight of classical music in the advancing twentieth century. The phrase was ‘the regression of hearing’.4 I was wondering whether you felt at the back of your mind – or perhaps even in the front of it! – any parallel between this ‘regression of hearing’ and what might be called a regression of reading, a regression of literacy. SAID: Absolutely. I recently did a talk on Glenn Gould at the Karajan Centre in Vienna. It was

part of a series of lectures by different people on the idea of virtuosity. I talked about Gould as an example of the virtuoso as intellectual. What I thought so extraordinary about Gould’s whole enterprise within music was that he made music intellectually, in the best sense of the word. The music he made was challenging and provocative; it stimulated attentive hearing; you couldn’t just let it happen – it required you to attend to it. In this sense, you can describe Gould’s approach to music as very literary. He wanted to make you hear a piece of music the way a good reader can make you hear and feel the shape of a text, not just to see or hear each line of it individually, but to grasp it’s structure. That’s why I noted the strong association between Gould and the particular musical form of fugue, and emphasised the fact that his chosen mode of playing and performing was always fugal, always contrapuntal, or with an emphasis on the contrapuntal in the music he was playing. And it’s just that level of literacy and attention and hearing that I fear is disappearing. First of all, just because it’s difficult and it requires attention to the simultaneity of voices rather than to just one single voice. And this, of course, is what the media has become: just one voice. The media have removed all the overtones, the parallel lines, the implications and consequences and associations that good

writing – and good music – have and enjoy. All of that has just been thrown out, thrown away. And all of this is what I continue to find in Gould’s playing, and what has been important for me in Gould, even after his death nearly twenty years ago now, in 1982. Consistently I’ve come back to him. He has this capacity for reactivating hearing, in that profound sense. Not that you have to know all about fugue in the technical manner in order to enjoy it … HIGGINS: … you hear it if you listen … SAID: … you don’t have to be an expert. But I do fear this attentiveness is disappearing very

fast, though I also think it can be reactivated. I’m not one of those people who says, ‘In the good old days, we were able to do this better.’ I think a lot of the problem has to do with the laziness of teachers. And that’s why I think the essential role for someone like me – at my age, and with my failing capacities – is really to teach. You can do this in the classroom with a certain amount of satisfaction and immediacy. You can also do it through writing, and that’s why I do more and more periodical writing. As you know, I write a great deal for a very large and often non​academic audience. I try and do this writing for two reasons: as from one culture to another – from, say, inside the West, to people who are not in the West, as a kind of translation – and second, as a way of trying to widen public awareness, to just expand the horizon of understanding, and say, ‘No, let’s not fall for this cliché.’ In addition, there is a third thing that motivates my work, and is very important to me. What I’m trying to concentrate on is an effort to try and reintroduce into public discourse the elements – not exactly of hope – but of vision. There’s so much emphasis today on pragmatism, on practicality and on implementation – to use a word that you know all too well in South Africa! But you mustn’t forget, in the emphasis on the practical in education, that the whole idea is to change things so that other things become socially possible. And somehow I think this kind of possibility is exemplified in fugue: the listening that is involved. The art of fugue always requires more than one voice – it really does require more voices to work together, and not just one. And this goes through all the way to the political. When people say, ‘In the end, what you want is a separate state for the Palestinians,’ I say no, that’s not what I’m interested in. I mean, who really wants a lousy little state which is practically useless? What’s much more interesting is the idea of a bi​national state, with two or more peoples living together. But – in that context – it’s fantastically difficult to make that idea of coexistence acceptable. The problem is that what really rules the arena of discourse today, in everything that you can imagine, is a sort of exclusivity: one line, one nation, one people, one identity. And this is so powerful. When you try and speak about otherness, it includes, and necessarily means hostility. The Other is always an occasion for worry … HIGGINS: … for fear, anxiety … SAID: … anxiety, conflict … HIGGINS: … rather than an encounter, an exchange or meeting, the chance to learn new

things … SAID: I wish my health allowed me the strength. I mean, what I’d really like to do, and I’ve

wanted to do it for a long time, is to just go and spend time in the Arab world, various places, and especially Palestine, but also elsewhere. Students are fantastically under​taught in the Arab world. It’s still mostly rote learning, especially in the humanities, and in literature in particular. The students all want to go into electronics, hotel management, the airline business – that sort of thing – rather than into what I would call the investigative or critical arts. HIGGINS: The critical arts. That takes us back to the occasion of the conference which

brought you out here: ‘Values, education and democracy’. It was a very exciting conference, and a lot of good things were said. But they seemed to be said somewhat against the grain of the practical results of government policy, which emphasises science and technology at the expense of the humanities. While you were invited as a keynote speaker to celebrate reading, and acknowledge the power of critical consciousness, the need to understand the dynamics of otherness and other cultures, and so on, there’s a way in which those emphases are displaced in much current policy, where there’s a generally philistine attitude towards the study of literature, which sees it as something expensive and aesthetic, and not at all useful. Were you aware of these tensions? What do you make of them? SAID: I think there’s a dialectic at work here, a necessary tension between the critical and the

administrative. I don’t think it’s an unhealthy dialectic, as long as it’s maintained as such, and you don’t get the total dominance of the administrative. When you have only one discourse at work, then you need to worry. The invitation to the conference came to me in a way that I couldn’t resist: an invitation to talk about the crisis in book culture, what’s happening to it. I found that very, very compelling. I’ve been around a lot of ‘third world’ ministers of culture and education (more that I’d care even to mention), and I’ve never encountered the genuine concern for culture that I found here. But, of necessity, it’s a difficult battle. I mean, if everyone was willing to support it, then you would know that there’s something wrong. But I like that. I like the sense of being in battle; I hardly know any other sense. I think you need a sense of resistance. I talked about that in the beginning of my talk (it went by rather quickly). I think that that’s also what you want to communicate: that knowledge is not something that you just pick up the way you can take or copy something from a computer screen in front of you. Rather, knowledge is something you work at. It’s like the way you practise a piece of music: if you’re a pianist, once you get the independence of the fingers, then you can understand the structure of the whole. It’s important to get the detail without being overwhelmed by the detail. Those are the barriers you set at the beginning of the work. And the work does mean that you’ve got to push against other things. Of course the emphasis on administration – the talk of implementation, the need for pragmatism and realism – is much more evident in politics. Now all they want is to settle things, in what has become the ‘science’ of conflict resolution. Of course this tends to mean that issues of justice, and questions of vision – a vision that insists on doing more than just turning people into instruments, or the clients of consumer capitalism – are just never

discussed. HIGGINS: Or when discussed, only in a narrow and limiting kind of way. SAID: Well, my view of how things are here is very superficial. I’ve hardly scratched the

surface, but it seems clear that you do have discussions here of a kind that don’t take place at all in the United States, except of course among the small radical fringe. Here, as the conference has shown, the discussion of these issues does take place quite centrally … HIGGINS: … but you have to keep pushing. It’s always an embattled situation, as you say.

How do you cope with that? SAID: You’re catching me at a very bad moment. I’m very discouraged about my health. It’s a

tremendously tough struggle. Every day you have to think about what you can do. You have to pull yourself up so you can do the things you really want to do, but the resources … are … diminishing. And then, politically, you know, the world I live in is very … HIGGINS: It seems to be worse than ever … SAID: It is … And it’s so difficult to communicate a sense of that to the outside world. There’s

that. But then, in addition, what I do not understand is the failure, the failure to … When I’m in Europe I’m always asked this question. Why is there this failure across the world – whether it’s Africa, or Europe, or Latin America – to mobilise some intellectually effective counter​force to the United States, which is running roughshod over the rest of the world. Roughshod isn’t the right word because it seems like something everybody wants. But, wherever you go, you find it’s the only superpower that can participate: so you say, the Americans want this, the Americans don’t want that. And then what you find is the compromise, and the betrayal of the intellectual class, which has been totally seduced and corrupted by American power, money, and institutions, in the most extraordinary fashion, without any sense of pride, without any sense of ‘what are we doing?’ What does it mean to collaborate within the Institute of Democracy, with USAID – all the great instruments of democracy? What does it mean when we know, historically, that these were developed as instruments in the Cold War? You know them: the big blue ribbon foundations that distribute millions of dollars. Yes millions of dollars in good works, OK. But look what happens when you then give yourself up totally to them. I see it in the ‘third world’, where the metastases of NGOs have replaced political movements. And always the first to go are the intellectuals. I’ll give you an example – just a small example. On the West Bank in Gaza there are, according to a survey done maybe five years ago now, there are now something like sixty​five institutes or think tanks established there. Institutes for human rights, institutes for women’s rights, institutes of citizenship, for the study of folklore, or customs of the Middle Ages. I mean, they span the whole range from medical relief to villages to …

HIGGINS: The A to Z of international human rights … SAID: … but there isn’t a single one, that I have been able to discover, that is devoted to either

a) the study of the United States, or b) the study of Israel. There isn’t a single Arab university, including the two American universities, in Cairo and Beirut, that have departments of American Studies, that teach anything about the workings of American society. And so you have, on the one hand, this extraordinarily powerful and pervasive presence of these two actors in the Middle East – Israel and the United States – and yet, on the other, an extraordinary occlusion of them: the invisibility of both of them. It’s a stunning contradiction, one I cannot possibly explain or understand. And it continues! Similarly, you’ll have people – political leaders – stimulating, provoking, demonstrations where they burn American flags, or effigies of presidents and so on, while their children are being educated at the University of Tennessee, or they’re trying to get Green Cards to go and live in Detroit, or something like that … HIGGINS: So the task is to see straight rather than crooked, to see through the contradiction

to what’s behind it. Maybe the critic can begin by observing where the blind spots occur. SAID: Indeed.

NOTES 1 See Said (2001). 2 See Higgins (1998, 2001). 3 See Castells (2000). 4 Said (1991a: 3).

REFERENCES Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Higgins, J. 1998. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London and New York: Routledge. Higgins, J (ed.). 2001. The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Said, EW. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books. Said, EW. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, EW. 1980. The Question of Palestine. London and New York: Routledge Said, EW. 1982. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Said, EW. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Said, EW. 1986. After the Last Sky. New York: Pantheon. Said, EW. 1990. Culture and Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, EW. 1991a. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, EW. 1991b. Identity, authority and freedom: The potentate and the traveler. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 3(1–2): 67–81. Said, E.W. 1994a. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage. Said, EW. 1994b. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994. London: Chatto and Windus. Said, EW. 2000. The End of the Peace Process. New York: Pantheon. Said, EW. 2001. The book, critical performance, and the future of education. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10(1): 9– 19.

8 ‘Living out our differences’

This interview took place shortly before the sudden and untimely death of Gert Johannes (Jakes) Gerwel on 28 November 2011. In the poet and writer Antjie Krog’s words, Jakes Gerwel was South Africa’s ‘most broad minded thinker and its most loyal critic’ (Mail & Guardian 30 November 2012).1 Born on a small farm in the Eastern Cape in 1946, he studied at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and completed a doctorate at the Free University of Brussels. This was published in 1983 as Literatuur en Apartheid: Konsepsies van ‘gekleurdes’ in die Afrikaanse roman tot 1948 (Literature and Apartheid: Conceptions of ‘Coloureds’ in the Afrikaans Novel until 1948), a ground-breaking critique of the representation of coloured and black people in the white Afrikaans novel, deeply influenced by two contrasting strains of progressive thought, Black Consciousness writing and Marxist theory and literary criticism, but powered at the same time by his lifelong love of the Afrikaans language, and his sense that it could and needed to become a vital resource for the building and healing of the ‘new’ South Africa. A tough-minded academic who also had an unusual capacity for administrative discipline and focus, Gerwel was vice-chancellor of UWC from 1987 to 1994. True to his inauguration promises, he deftly and with great courage guided the institution away from its status as an apartheid ‘bush university’ to become a self-styled ‘university of the left’, opening its doors to all races, and leading its protest march on the Day of Action against the De Klerk regulations in 1987. For Gerwel, education should not lead ‘towards the reproduction and maintenance of a social order which is undemocratic, discriminatory, exploitative and repressive’, and universities above all need to promote ‘through example a democratic culture’ (cited in Badat 2013: 1). On Nelson Mandela’s election as first democratically elected president of South Africa, he was appointed director general of Mandela’s office, and later served as chancellor of Rhodes University, and chair of the Board of Trustees of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. Fiercely independent, a man of intellect and rare principle, he embodied all the difficult virtues of the post-colonial critic in a newly freed society set in a

INTERVIEW WITH JAKES GERWEL HIGGINS: As everyone knows, South Africa has enjoyed, since 1994, an extraordinary and

extraordinarily peaceful transition from apartheid state to democratic nation. In your view, what are the factors that made this unprecedented transition possible? GERWEL: I have been criticised in the past for being too deterministic about these things, but I

am of the view that it was South African history that laid the ground, or established the foundation, for us to come to a remarkable resolution of apartheid and the colonial conflict. The concept of South Africa as ‘one nation’ is an old one. It’s not one that we only discovered during the negotiations, though it was one that was realised and concretised during the negotiations. But if one thinks back: at the end of what we used to call the ‘colonial wars of dispossession’, in the mid​nineteenth century, there were no independent African polities left after those wars. Then as a material factor there was the fundamental change of the South African economy with the discovery of minerals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This had many direct effects: urbanisation increased to an extent that I don’t know happened elsewhere on the continent; the economy became an integrated one, although not equal in its allocation and distribution. So, from the late nineteenth century, the fact of the new economy effectively brought into being the concept of ‘one nation’. And after that came the South African War, the Anglo​Boer War, which in a sense consolidated this idea, though in a very violent way. The fact of union was the juridical consolidation of this idea, and from Union2 [of South Africa] onwards, the main political struggle was about the ‘colouring in’ of our nationhood. You’ll remember after 1910 the delegations which went to Britain to argue that we were ‘one nation’, and how that should be politically expressed. And similarly, you saw that same concern coming through during the long years of the struggle against apartheid. Even the concepts that come out of that struggle manifested the commitment to the idea of South Africa as one nation. We produced the idea of ‘non​racialism’ that appears to be a singularly South African concept. The idea is a particularly South African extrapolation coming from that core concept of South Africa as one nation. Another term that was central in the push towards democracy – though often criticised by some – was Harold Wolpe’s [1988] idea of South Africa embodying a ‘colonialism of a special type’. This also gave expression to the fact that the struggle was always among ourselves; it was not about some South Africans having a real home somewhere in a metropole beyond. And this came through in many of the other key concepts that drove the struggle against apartheid. The ‘democratic struggle’ was never directed outwards, was never about the extinction of something: it was about the country’s people coming together. Just remember how a substantial element in Congress3 politics – naively at some points – thought that we were moving from a racial society to a multiracial society, and towards a non​racial society, and that apartheid was an aberration within that movement. There was a great deal of that kind of inclusive thinking, so that even in the fiercest moments of struggle, what was going on was not typified as a racial struggle. We had a theory of contradiction that while the principal contradiction was the class one, the dominant one in the sense of the one which showed, was

the racial one. But the struggle was never conducted as a racial struggle. I always had the sense that our history was conditioning us to the point where we could resolve our conflicts in the way we eventually did. HIGGINS: What you’ve said usefully takes us up to 1994, and some way beyond that, but

today, and particularly in the current wave of populism, one has to ask whether the idea and practice of non-racialism really holds such a central position in current national and political discourse as it should, and as it did in the Mandela years. GERWEL: I think today there is a lot more overt racial talk; there is a lot of racial noise. But I

still think the non​racial concept is an informing one. It is not always lived out, and it is not always talked about by different groupings. But I still have the sense that on the world scale, South Africa is actually a pretty reconciled nation. We still live out our differences and our tensions and our divisions within a solid political and constitutional framework. The ANC [African National Congress] was the main driver of the old non​racial concept, for both tactical purposes and moral and principled reasons. I think today the ANC faces challenges: it has allowed material or materialistic factors to influence the concept of non​racialism. It was Stephen Gelb [1991], if I remember correctly – drawing from what was happening in the world and in the so​called ‘actual socialist states’ – who made the point that it was becoming clearer that South Africa could not become a worker’s state or a socialist state (at least not in our time) and that the most one could look forward to was a de​racialised South African capitalism. He asked, ‘If you have that, who will be the greatest rent​seeking or rent​gaining groupings or classes?’ and predicted that it would be the black middle class or the black bourgeoisie, and went on to probe a number of related questions: ‘How do you then discipline that process? How do you discipline the rent​gaining classes in order for there to be reciprocity, for the entire society to benefit?’ Today it looks to me like we failed in just those ways – unable to discipline the rent​gaining classes towards reciprocity. Gelb spoke about the need for a strong state to achieve that, but also asked, ‘What does it mean to have a strong state without becoming an authoritarian state?’ It seems to me that we have failed to answer that question too, and that rent​seeking and rent​gaining have become a driving force in society. We are not living out or pursuing those other principled ideals that we, as opponents of apartheid, had talked about. HIGGINS: And much is happening under the cover of that re-racialising discourse, for even

the rentiers you speak of need the support of the masses! GERWEL: I often contend that there is a kind of rationality in this trend, a perverse rationality

perhaps. Africans, in the South African sense of the word, had been the most discriminated against, and the most exploited and the most suffering group in our society, by and large. Of course discriminations or exploitation can be calibrated in different ways. But, even if only subjectively and in the rationality that goes along with that, one can understand why there is

that rent​seeking trend among black South Africans. But it is also clear that this trend is not good for society, and needs to be regulated and governed in a particular way which doesn’t become non non​racial. That is the challenge: how do you put right a past that was so racially determined, without yourself becoming racial in addressing it? That is the great challenge for our society, and it is a great pity that the race/class couplet is little addressed in public discourse, at least as far as I can discern. What has happened is that the issue has become almost a purely racial one, and even at times an ethnic one within black groupings themselves. This is the discursive challenge for public thinking set up long ago by the late Harold Wolpe [1988] and others, in their writings on race and class, and on the agenda again now that we face the imperative to change the society and the way that its racial/economic make​up looks. HIGGINS: That is a significant challenge. I am wondering whether a part of the problem is

perhaps the different critical resources and reference points available in the public mind to different generations. People of our generation were largely brought up to think in the terms offered by the complex interaction of race and class analysis; but, as you say, much of this kind of analysis has fallen out of use. So, what do you think make up the reference points for young thinkers today? How are they framing the issues of our time? GERWEL: This brings us to our pre​interview conversation about the humanities and education. I

am no longer that in touch with universities. My closest contact with university life now is through Rhodes University, where I serve as its chancellor. What happens in the universities now and how we are educating in the humanities are important societal questions. It is, after all, where those debates originated in our times. It was in the humanities that we spoke about these issues, and we were taught about them, and that young people learned about them. Interacting with students at the Mandela Rhodes Foundation4 these last ten years, I find encouraging the way that they think, and I am quite sure that there are many more young people like them. But I don’t find that they have picked up on the class debate: Marxism and its form of questioning have gone totally out of fashion it seems. I shouldn’t generalise … but the race/class issue was actually quite a fervent and informing debate during my time as a student and as a teacher; and we do know, of course, that material circumstances influence thinking. Perhaps today the demands for material progress are so strong and prevalent that people think of ‘class progress’ rather than ‘class war’. Higgins: Would you like to say something more on the question of the humanities, given the debates today? GERWEL: Ja, well, I remember that I half flippantly said after 1994 – when I was still a VC

[vice​chancellor] at UWC – that the bar for entry into the humanities should now be raised, so that the cream of the national intellect is directed into the humanities and social sciences. But that was in the old days, I suppose. Today you have to have a better mark to get into the natural sciences.

HIGGINS: Yet you yourself – with degrees in literary and social studies, and as former vice-

chancellor of UWC – have had a deep involvement in humanist education for most of your life. Where do you see the place of the humanities in higher education policy today? All the latest policy documents focus on the contribution of science, technology and innovation to society, but tend to have little to say of the humanities as such, while acknowledging the social and human challenges that the country faces. What do you make of the current marginalisation of the humanities? GERWEL: Look, one can understand the emphasis on science, technology and innovation

because of the history of education in South Africa, and the sense after ’94 that transformation of higher education was an imperative. In the old education system, too many black students went into areas like biblical studies and others, and there was a neglect of advancement and the development of human capital in the natural sciences, mathematics, commerce and technology. So it’s quite understandable why we sought to address that. The question is why the demise of the humanities, if there is indeed this demise, as a consequence of that changed focus? In a strange way, apartheid played a huge role in the vibrancy of the social and human sciences at the time. At the height of apartheid, sociology and historiography, for example, were vibrant and driving forces in the intellectual environment and public discourse. I often ask myself the question: in our epistemology or our conceptualisation, have we not lost a kind of a raison d’ être for the social and human sciences in the years that have followed? Did so much of the energy for the humanities and social sciences come from that oppositional energy that was set into motion by apartheid? The anti​apartheid struggle was also in a large degree a battle of and over ideas, a battle of the priority of one set of ideas over another, and in this struggle the human and social sciences played a great and liberating role. Is it that we’ve not properly conceptualised what the human sciences do in, say, [a] ‘developmental state’, because that has become another cliché? The emphasis seems to have shifted from oppositional social science to what do we do in a non​oppositional context? As you’ve said, the issues we’re facing are social ones; social cohesion, for example, and just how well are we doing with that? These are questions that are not going to be addressed by the non​human sciences. So it’s not about being sentimental about the human sciences or the social sciences. These are crucial to the development and progress of our society. HIGGINS: Indeed. I think that is what slipped out of the picture – and what emerges very

clearly in the example that you use – is that the force of ideas in society is a living and vital force. Certainly, you cannot really, for instance, look back at the successful anti-apartheid struggle and say that its force for social change was in some way due to the precepts of science, technology and innovation! Science and technology can do certain things very well, but one would have thought there would be more recognition that education in these areas simply is not useful for other socially important and politically crucial features of our lives in South Africa. While ideas – the terms of public understanding and social belonging – are clearly of crucial importance to a society, it’s as if educating people in the tools of critical

reflection – the assessment, interpretation and criticism of these ruling ideas – is just not important any more. What are your views on this? GERWEL: Even from my own recollection of what I learned at primary and secondary and high

school, ideas were central; or perhaps we might say ‘values’, though it is an old sociological term that is perhaps overused, and sometimes misused. If we just think about historiography in South Africa at the time, and its role in the societal battle of ideas. Part of that struggle was about our conception of our history, and of the way to go forward from that history. And one of the exciting and major intellectual developments in South Africa was the emergence of the revisionists and neo​Marxists; it changed the way people thought and eventually acted. And I think that much of this debate is now being neglected. The plan currently is that what we need in this country is, above all, more technology and science; but we may be a poorer society for that. Again, and without being moralistic, there are a lot of things that are of concern, particularly the erosion of values and good practices, and increasing corruption. How much of the debate around these issues and the action against them are being influenced by those kinds of debates? I don’t think that they are, or at least not in the same manner as it was done in the struggle years. HIGGINS: I sometimes feel a terrible irony is at work here: that after years of intense

struggle to overthrow the apartheid state, and to engage in the creation of an active and principled democracy, the key term and figure for our sense of social being has turned out to be the entrepreneur rather than the citizen, and it is that idea which is now acting to regulate the aims and outcomes of our education system post-apartheid. GERWEL: I remember UWC in those years, and think that perhaps we too were erring in a

certain way, after the changes, especially because our changes coincided with the final collapse of socialism. After 1990, there was an almost tangible feel how approaches – even, I would say ideologies – were changing. I remember I said to Ebrahim Rasool5 – who was then a special assistant in my office – that it was strange ‘how you can feel how the term “efficiency” is overtaking the term “human solidarity”’, and adding and conceding that ‘I suppose we’ll have to go that way because the demand is now for efficiency’. Who can argue against efficiency? But it did replace concepts of human solidarity. This was at a moment when we, at UWC, were admitting students who were not able to pay to study there. On one occasion, I ran into Derek Bok, the well​known president of Harvard University. He jokingly – but commendingly – said, ‘They tell me that you guys at UWC are putting education above economics!’ I think that remark describes what actually is now happening in reverse. It is, in a sense, economics above education: individualistic entrepreneurship above human solidarity – a different conception of citizenship. HIGGINS: Perhaps, as another dimension of contrast with the present, we could move now to

discuss your time in Nelson Mandela’s Presidential Office. What can you tell us about that

extraordinary period? How do you look back at it from the present? GERWEL: Let me situate it first on a personal level. I had been VC at UWC for going on ten

years; I started off as a change​seeking – and a radical change​seeking – VC. After so many years, you suddenly listen to yourself, and hear yourself defending positions ... I then negotiated with the university that I would step down as VC in 1995. At that time, you were appointed to a vice​chancellorship until you fell down, so I had negotiated to go back to a research professorship – an academic’s dream. And then, in 1994, I was asked to take up the position in the government. Those five years were in many senses more interesting than any traditional research professorship. I was secretary of the Cabinet in that Government of National Unity with the ANC, NP6 and Inkatha7 together: three historical enemies, and enemies in the real and not just metaphorical sense! To be there with those parties, working together – it was a remarkable South African experience. We were all a bit over​optimistically proud of ourselves and what we had achieved, the three sitting together as one government, and really working well together as the Government of National Unity. That was indeed an exceptional experience. But your question was more about working with Mandela himself. Mandela is a leader that throws up epistemological questions. We all cherish him and lionise him as this leader – which he really was – but he himself had a sense of collective leadership. He always raised the issue of how does the individual relate to the collective, how is the individual’s experience and conduct influenced by the collective, and how does it feed back to the collective? What I remember most of all about Mandela as decision​maker is his ability to project himself from the present – the moment in which he had to make a decision – into the future, and almost being able to stand at that future point and look back on the effect of a decision. Any of his generation – that Robben Island generation at least – would probably have taken the same positions that he did; but he had in addition this uncanny ability to not just reflect, but, as it were, ‘forward​flect’ on a decision. HIGGINS: Observing from a distance, and just, say, from reading Mandela’s [1995]

autobiography, what is so striking is his quite extraordinary depth of self-reflexivity. As you say, the capacity not only to step outside yourself, and really take in other people’s viewpoints, but also to think through how the consequent decision might look in the future – what its implications are in the real sense – and then also take those into account is startling. GERWEL: Yes. And then there was his anthropology. He had this genuine belief – and he often

argued with me about the provability of it – that human beings are essentially ‘good​doing beings, beings who do good’. We had an incident in government where somebody very senior did something very silly and stupid, and had to step down from that position. But, at the same time, he had played a crucial role in ensuring the stability of the transition period. In the end we had to part ways with him, and he stepped down. Madiba8 said to him, ‘If there is anything that I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask

me.’ A day or two later he came back and asked for an appointment to another international position. Everyone we consulted said, ‘No, you can’t appoint him,’ and Mandela was actually quite upset about this, and asked, ‘Why don’t they trust the guy?’ I replied to him that, ‘Actually because he did something quite untrustworthy.’ And he said to me, ‘That was an exception,’ and he made the argument that if you are able to follow human beings from the moment they get up in the morning until they retire at night, you would find that most of them do the proper things most of the time, and that the erring is an aberration. And he really acted on that. He is not naïve, but he has a faith in the goodness of human beings, no matter how they disagreed politically or otherwise, and he always acted in line with that belief. Of course, this attitude also helped to lay the basis for the furthering of social cohesion and national unity in the country. He is a remarkable human being. I just sit back and marvel about what makes a human being, and what are the factors, what are the conditions, that can make a human being like that. And the other thing of course is that he also believed that other people are like him, in that concept of acting. But he is a good politician. If you asked me what the difference is between him and Desmond Tutu – the two icons of our transition – it is that Mandela is a politician through and through. He understands party politics and politics to the fingertips. He is not a saint, and he often made that point. He is a hard politician. But he uses power, he uses his political agency for the good. HIGGINS: Yes. All this makes him such an extraordinary figure. One often wonders – and I’m

sure you wondered it as well – just what the psychic mechanisms are for becoming like that. What happened to all the pain and trauma that he suffered? How did that come through, was it – or how was it – transmuted, changed into something else? GERWEL: In all the years that I worked with him, in government and then after he left

government – that’s over eighteen years that I worked more closely with him than most others. And we often spent quite a bit of time together, not just on official business. In all of those years, he never expressed a word of bitterness. If he had bitterness, he worked with it, he internalised it, and buried it away. He would sometimes say to me, ‘Some things are better not to dwell on.’ That is the way he dealt with it. One could say, for instance, that he had been incarcerated and victimised by the Afrikaners – Afrikaners having been the masters of the apartheid state – but he had great appreciation for Afrikaners, and for individual Afrikaners. I could mention examples. HIGGINS: Partly why I ask this is because of the role in your own development of Black

Consciousness thinking, and the great emphasis in that placed on the psychic dimensions of oppression and subjugation, and the consequent importance of facing and getting through that. GERWEL: There was a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of psychological liberation, as

[Steve] Biko9 would often emphasise. A part of that was not to be the victim of your suffering, and not to be the victim of those who perpetrated against you. Mandela often made that point, ‘To be bitter would be to allow yourself to be kept imprisoned.’ He rose above that by the generosity of spirit. Mandela was so generous in his relationships with those who could be described as the adversary. If you talked about the enemy, which he didn’t regard as an enemy, he would say, ‘Be kind to your enemy, be kind to your adversary.’ People often talk about Mandela’s values, and what they learned from him. And often, when we had these long debates at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, about what are the core values of Mandela, I would say that the thing that I remember him teaching me was, ‘Jakes, never let your enemy choose the terrain of combat by reacting in anger. If you act in anger to anybody, even if it’s your friend, you are allowing that person to choose the terrain.’ So all this was a combination of genuine principled morals with a great tactical sense. HIGGINS: One of the proudest achievements in this country, one that is recognised

worldwide, is the South African Constitution, with its visible embodiment of and commitment to the constitutive principles of [an] open and democratic society. Yet there are visibly currents of opinion in the ruling circles of the government that maintain that the Constitution is a flawed document, the result of an unworthy political compromise, and in need of substantial revision. How do you view the short history of the South African Constitution and do you think it’s under threat? GERWEL: Look, constitutions are things which can be amended. They’re born in a particular

circumstance and at a particular conjuncture, and they are answers to the issues of that moment. Constitutions are not cast in stone. But, in stable societies, a constitution is intended as a foundation, and to be long​lasting. And I think [post​apartheid] South Africa has actually lived up to its Constitution. There have been slight amendments to the Constitution (I read recently that there have been eighteen amendments), but these were on peripheral matters. It seems to me that the current debate – noises that we’ve heard about the Constitution being counter​revolutionary and so on – revolves a lot around the so​called Property Clause.10 The issues raised by this clause were very comparable to those raised by the language issue. South Africa has, as you know, eleven official languages, and this came out of the fact that the negotiated settlement was, in the end – if you want to talk about it in those terms – principally a settlement between African aspirations and African nationalism on the one hand, and Afrikaner nationalism and concerns on the other, and a compromise had to be found. With regard to the language issue, we previously had the two official languages, Afrikaans and English. I think if the ANC had come to power through a revolutionary seizure of power, we probably only would have had English as an official language. But with the negotiated settlement, you couldn’t just have English. Afrikaner nationalist interest would have been very much against that. But then you couldn’t just have Afrikaans and English either, given the demographics. So now we sit with the rather unusual position of having eleven languages of state and of government. And, similarly, the Property Clause was also important, if once again we set the dominant contradiction against the principled one. The Property Clause in the Constitution was important in the negotiations, and I think it’s still important for South Africa’s

stability, but it is obviously a contentious clause. HIGGINS: I was also thinking, in this regard, of the mounting attacks on the separation of

powers, and the critique of the idea of judicial independence … GERWEL: I thought that was just plain politics from people who had found themselves on the

wrong end of the law. In my view our judiciary, particularly the Constitutional Court and our Supreme courts, have been quite exemplary in the way that they exercise their powers. Those who cry foul are normally those who deem themselves to have suffered under the law. It’s purely self​interest. Our Constitution, as you say, is one of the proudest achievements of our society. HIGGINS: Maybe you could say that the Constitution is like the spirit of Mandela, embodied

and given form as a material institution: it seeks to both embody and promote democratic values. GERWEL: And another thing we should remember about Mandela and his legacy is that one of

the first Constitutional Court judgments was against him. I remember in his office that day he said, ‘We should respect this judgment, and make it clear that we respect it.’ HIGGINS: I’d like to turn now to some questions concerning another legacy, the legacy of

Marx and Marxism. There is, of course, a certain circulation of Marxist terminology in public discourse in South Africa – phrases such as ‘national democratic revolution’, for instance. Given the fact of your own early training in and commitment to a particular moment of Marxist theory during your studies in Afrikaans literature and culture back in the seventies and eighties, how do you see that legacy today in South Africa? Is it still an active resource? GERWEL: One question looking back now is how ‘Marxist’ was much of the ‘Marxism’ in

popular public discourse even then? At UWC, students would read a text like Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? [1902] and we used to ask them – who were often such ardent Marxists – how much of that version of Marxism was Marx’s own? But now, what happens when ‘socialist​inclined’ people live in a post​Marxist period? How do we deal with that? The collapse of the Soviet Union was a great blow to the socialist ideal, and with it, to the broader concept of human solidarity, and the related concern to organise societies in ways that were less unequal and less destructive of human life. You will recall that part of the argument – part of the concerns and anxieties of that moment, when it was clear that things were going fundamentally wrong or not working out – led to the rediscovery, for example, of Gramsci and others. Part of the reason for the problems facing socialism could very well have been the closure of spaces for liberty because liberty was regarded as almost a ‘bourgeois liberal concept’. Certainly, concerns about the absence of freedoms in the Soviet Union were too easily described by many of us as a bourgeois concern. The question is, what

are the post​socialist lessons that we take from Marx? For me Marx’s thinking still provides the best analytical tools for understanding societies in conflict, societies of inequality, and societies seeking change. And are we talking of that kind of Marxism today? HIGGINS: Indeed. And it seems crucial to me to historicise the key terms: does ‘national

democratic revolution’, for instance, mean today what it did for Lenin or Gramsci in the 1920s? GERWEL: The other day I read that the South African deputy president [Kgalema Motlanthe],

referring to the debate within the ANC about a so​called ‘second transition’, described that discussion paper as full of smatterings of Marxist jargon. Which put me wondering, given his background – he comes from the trade union movement – shouldn’t Marxism have positive connotations in his frame of reference? Was Motlanthe really saying with that remark ‘Let’s totally get away from Marxism and all of its concepts’? But on the national democratic revolution [NDR], if I were an ANC theoretician, I would try to get away from that term and reconceptualise the problem to which it once sought to offer a solution. I’m not sure I know any longer what they exactly mean by the NDR. As you say, in Russia at the time, it had a specific and tangible meaning that could be concretised and realised. I am not sure that I quite understand what the NDR, in today’s South Africa, can signify in a realisable way, in a practical, pursuable way. Maybe it’s just useful as an ideological hammer with which we can strike anything that goes out of kilter. And I am not sure that everybody in the ANC understands equally or understands the same thing under the NDR conceptual rubric. HIGGINS: I have been doing quite a lot of work on Marx recently, seeking to find a frame for introducing his work to the generation of students born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.11

For these students, Marx’s writing is no longer guaranteed, as it were, by the automatic authority of Marxism as a global political force. The frame I’ve chosen is a simple one: Marx as the great public thinker or public intellectual of his time, alive and alert to his situation, and constantly seeking to find the tools to understand the world he lived in, with the emphasis on the seeking and the difficulties of that intellectual and political endeavour. Representing him in this way, as a public intellectual, responding to the ever-changing urgencies of the moment, brings him – I hope – closer to our time and place, where one of the most striking – and hopeful – features of contemporary South African political life postapartheid is the range of movements in civil society that continue to fight for social justice, in various forms, from the Treatment Action Campaign12 to the Right to Know group,13 and Equal Education14 … How do you see the role of such groupings in post-apartheid society? Why should they seem to be so necessary after the 1994 transition? GERWEL: Probably one of the big agents of change that kept the idea of change alive in South

Africa was the strong civil society. Just as we spoke of with regard to the humanities and the social sciences: immediately after 1994, there was a lull or lack of activity in civil society; but

that is ending and organs of civil society are strongly coming to the fore again. There may be a parallel here with what might have gone wrong in the Soviet Union, where there was the absence of that counterbalancing civil society. After the ANC came to power, I said to myself – in a kind of Stalinist way – with regard to concepts such as ‘civil society’, that there was almost an ‘anti​revolutionary’ guard against the ANC. Many of the old anti​apartheid civil society organisations responded in the same way by saying to themselves: ‘This is our government; this is our democratic government; this is our progressive government.’ It is the way that the ANC​in​government has since then disappointed people that has given rise again to civil society movements. Of course one should understand, as Jeremy Cronin15 [2012] pointed out in an article a few months ago, that civil society ranges from class​conservative agencies like chambers of commerce to real progressive agents on the other end, and that one should be able to make those distinctions. But a strong civil society is the counterbalance to governments that can become authoritarian and unaccountable, and I see that arising more and more. Trade unions, of course, are also important parts of civil society. HIGGINS: And how do you see the role of the Afrikaans language today? What has happened

to the ‘language of the oppressor’ in the new democracy? GERWEL: There is a lot of anxiety among Afrikaans speakers – and particularly white Afrikaans

speakers – about the prospects for the language. It is flourishing in many ways, though of course it is under pressure as a public language. Under apartheid, it was the language of the state and the courts, but that is happening less and less. And then there is this whole debate and struggle about Afrikaans as an academic language. But the language is doing quite well and indeed flourishing in many ways, as you can see in the publication of Afrikaans books, Afrikaans magazines, and Afrikaans newspapers. Afrikaans music is growing. Of course, the particular favour it was shown as a protected state​sponsored language has fallen away, and that has led to the anxiety about it, but it has itself strong backing from civil society organisations such as AfriForum16 and Solidarity,17 an Afrikaans Academy for Science and Art18 and a number of cultural formations. In the triumphalist days of Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaans was often spoken about in terms of ‘die wonder van Afrikaans’ (‘the wonder/miracle of Afrikaans’), and it should be remembered that the development of the language really was an achievement, moving from being just a ‘spoken’ language – often referred to as ‘a language of the kitchen’ – to becoming a language of academia, and of science, arts and culture. It has a remarkable apparatus of expression in all fields. But, again, as with most things, there was a material base to all this. It wasn’t simply a miracle. When Afrikaners came to power, they put resources and infrastructure into place to support the language: universities, publishing houses, distribution networks, and of course the economic advancement of the dominant section of its speakers. There is no immediate danger to the language. It is a widely spoken language, indeed, one of the most widely spoken languages in the country. The long​term future of the language, all languages for that matter, depends on the maintenance of those infrastructural and material bases, while of course there is also the attraction of English as the dominant international

language at the moment to be reckoned with. There are signs that younger Afrikaans speakers may in fact emigrate towards English; and its student numbers as a university subject are going down. The traditional English universities used to have some of the strongest Afrikaans departments, such as those at Wits [University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg], UCT [University of Cape Town], Rhodes, and Natal [University of KwaZulu​Natal]. But these are dwindling. Rhodes, for instance, now has a very small department and I understand that UCT’s department is also much smaller than it used to be. HIGGINS: Indeed. This shrinking of disciplines and departments in the humanities appears to

be widespread, as the vocational impulse, and the emphasis on science and technology becomes predominant in higher education policy globally. More generally though, could I ask you what you think about the decisive shift in government policy – a shift that perhaps somehow works in parallel to the move away from the humanities – the shift from RDP19 to GEAR20 as the guiding government policy framework? GERWEL: Many people behind that policy shift thought of themselves as progressives – if not as

actually part of the Marxist project, but as progressives nonetheless. You know that first we had the RDP as the macroeconomic policy. The argument in the economic cluster in government at that time was that given the circumstances we faced, there was no way that you could have achieved what we hoped to achieve without taking the Washington Consensus seriously. We simply had to stabilise the South African economy. We had inherited a virtually bankrupt country: with massive debt, deficit before borrowing, and inflation. At the time, the argument was, ‘Let’s stabilise that, let’s not fall into a debt trap.’ GEAR saw itself as a working refinement of the RDP as a necessary stage before we could go onto infrastructure and social spending. And it did achieve many of those things: the deficit came down dramatically, inflation was targeted and kept under control. And it did deliver on social spending; our social safety networks are actually greater than in most countries in the world. That was the whole argument behind it. The world had changed in ways so that you couldn’t go any other way. From a revolutionary perspective, our political change in many ways actually came at the worst possible moment, given the state of the world economy and the shift in global international relations. The Marxist project globally had a setback but the defenders of GEAR would say, ‘We have achieved what we wanted to achieve by stabilising the macroeconomic framework.’ A term that was used a great deal by the government was that our ‘macroeconomic fundamentals’ were sound. COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions] was the first one – as far as I can remember – who raised this question: ‘Can you say that your economic fundamentals are sound if unemployment is as high as it is?’ The labour market clearly failed in addressing that. The world political economic situation almost forced that onto an ANC government. But it was clearly retrogressive in terms of addressing it. If you ask, ‘What is a socialist or a Marxist project?’ it is about addressing inequality. And that we clearly haven’t done. The question is, if we had kept on going with RDP, given the state of the economy, would we have achieved a different outcome, would we have achieved greater equality? Following the adoption of GEAR, South Africa experienced the most positive economic growth that it had

had for a decade or more. Those are its triumphs. But that growth didn’t go with job creation so growth was accompanied – according to all measurements – by increasing inequality. HIGGINS: To frame it a little differently: unemployment is clearly one of the key areas of

social inequality. Looking back to 1994, and then looking at where we are now, to what extent was unemployment a central focus of attention in the euphoria of that post-1994 moment? How was it framed or conceptualised then, and was this done so powerfully enough? GERWEL: The term ‘unemployment’ perhaps didn’t feature that much but job creation, the

positive side of that, was central. One of the ANC’s election promises in 1994 was ‘jobs for all’. So job creation, clearly the flip side of unemployment, was a very strong priority. We had job summits in that first period of democracy; how are we going to create jobs? But I think what we and I’ve learned is that job creation is not a simple thing. A central aspect to it is capacity building. You need people in order to build the economy which creates jobs, and that brings us back to education. One of our major failures has been in the area of mass education. There are good schools in the country, but the majority of youngsters in South Africa are not getting quality education. And maybe not just quality education, we are not even sure if they are getting the right education for what the country needs. So inequality and unemployment to me are closely linked to our failures in other areas. HIGGINS: Why do you think education in the country is in such a bad state, despite the

attempts to deal with it? GERWEL: I largely think this is a question of management. We had a lot of things to undo about

apartheid education. But I also think we went ‘fancy’ in too many ways. Take, for instance, outcomes​based education [OBE]. OBE is a good thing … if you have the proper infrastructure, if you have the material to do it. If I look at what my grandchildren do as part of outcomes​based education, and the facilities that they have to do it, then I wonder what a poor kid in the township can do. There was an unplanned way of tackling challenges, and we just don’t have the human capacity to manage it. Too many school principals are not able to manage schools, and teachers are not attending to the basic things that they should be attending to. There is a massive failure of management. And, yes, we did a couple of silly things (I was Cabinet secretary at the time), like the closing of teacher training colleges and other colleges, and the ending of the apprenticeship system, which has totally fallen by the wayside. There was also the changed focus of some universities, especially those which formerly taught technical subjects. We got a lot of systemic things wrong. HIGGINS: Is it fixable? GERWEL: It has to be fixable. I often wonder about the management of state institutions and state

departments. We have a number of Schools of Government, and a number of Schools of Public Administration. I wonder whether there isn’t a way that there can be a combined effort by them to ‘speed train’ people towards greater administrative and management efficiency and competence. One mustn’t romanticise the past, but after the Cuban revolution, one of the things they did was to send thousands of people into the countryside to do basic literacy training. And look where Cuba stands today in the provision of doctors and teachers! HIGGINS: Yes, it’s not as if there aren’t significant examples of countries with less or similar

resources to ours getting their health and education systems right: Cuba immediately comes to mind, as you say, and – if we look at the new Happiness Index – Costa Rica.21 South Africa figures very poorly on that index, which suggests that two of the main constituents for people’s happiness is good healthcare and good education. GERWEL: One of the other things that Mandela frequently repeated (in the beginning, we were

sometimes embarrassed by him saying the same thing over and over again, but that is part of his integrity): he always said what most people in the world want is good education for their kids, good healthcare when they need it, decent shelter, and being able to work. And that is happiness. HIGGINS: In terms of higher education, it was striking that the Framework for Transformation

document of 1997 explicitly stated the importance of fostering ‘critical citizenship’ in students, for the greater public good. But it is striking that policy implementation over the years has (as I said a moment ago) tended to encourage entrepreneurship rather than citizenship. In your view, what exactly is the social role of university education? Is the vocational emphasis the only necessary one? GERWEL: I studied in Belgium in the early 1970s, and my supervisor at the time bemoaned the

fact that universities were more and more becoming places which the bureaucrats had taken over from the humanists, as he put it. At that time, this wasn’t the case in South Africa, and we were booming as places of debate. But now it has come to that here. Is this not a question of university leadership too? At some of the universities which I am acquainted with I have seen how the leadership of the institutions assertively promote the humanities in the face of current trends. Yes, the emphasis should be on critical citizenship. Look, there are these systemic issues of funding but I think university leadership in our circumstances should also be making a stronger case for the universities as cultural or humanistic agencies in a society that is dearly in need of that input. So, I’m saying there is the global trend towards bureaucratisation, but I think this can also be combated or steered differently by strong leadership. HIGGINS: Or to frame the question of the university in terms of Marx’s Thesis Eleven, do you

see the role of the intellectual as understanding the world or changing it? Or, more precisely, how do you see the relation between the two?

GERWEL: I suppose this is also a question of orientation. Coming from where I come from, if I

speak of my own experiences, I share the Marxist maxim. What I felt had to be done was not only understanding the world, but also changing it. We grew up in a world that clearly and patently needed changing so I suppose it wasn’t difficult to adopt that view. I remember the critic George Steiner – not everyone’s cup of tea, I know – wrote in one of his essays that, in the twentieth century, it is difficult for an honest man to be a literary critic because there are so many other urgent things to be done in life, and so many demands on one.22 But then he spoke about Georg Lukács who had ways of dealing with that problem, and argued that adopting humanist practice did not mean abdicating on having to change the world. At UWC, when I was VC, when we got into this concept of an ‘intellectual home of the Left’, often I had to say to activist academics, ‘Just handing out pamphlets in the township isn’t necessarily your change​seeking responsibility. An intellectual can change the world or contribute to the changing of the world through intellectual activity.’ So I always unpack that Marxist phrase. Clearly understanding the world is an important form of changing the world, and Marx himself is an exemplar of that: what is needed is clear understanding, profound understanding. HIGGINS: In conclusion, I wonder if we could, as it were, look at a few snapshots of you from

some different moments of your life. Let’s begin, say, when you were thirteen years old. How then did you see yourself and your future? GERWEL: Look, my father was a farm worker in a rural Eastern Cape community and the sense

that ‘things were not right’ was always there. That went for most black people in this country. I come from a family of ten and we were a debating crowd; where we lived, we had no neighbours. One of the conversations I always remember were the ones that started with ‘one day when we take over …’. There was a sense that one day there would be a revolutionary change and things wouldn’t be the same. I admire current crops of kids who have their worlds so worked out and organised, but I can’t remember at that age that I thought about where I would be. My parents were very insistent on education so I knew I would have some education. But I also had the strong sense that this country not only must change, but will change. HIGGINS: And a decade later? GERWEL: At twenty​three I was married already. I was involved in political organisation and

that sense of a ‘changed world’ became more real. This whole concept of ‘change in our lifetime’ – well, we didn’t bet on it, but it was a kind of a driving initiative. As a thirteen year old, I was a young Eastern Cape schoolboy who had good teachers. Our teachers were not political as such, but they were political in their education. People like Dennis Brutus23 and others were my teachers. They taught us in the sense of political responsibility. At twenty​three, I was more actively politically involved, and at thirty​three I was teaching Sociology of Literature.

HIGGINS: And how was it that the love of literature first grabbed hold of you? Were there

books at home? GERWEL: This was a strange thing. At home, on that isolated farm, there were always books.

We had a room in the house that was always full of strange books: encyclopaedias and so on. I am number six in a large family and my elder siblings were all teachers. And then I had good teachers in both Afrikaans and English. At university I majored in sociology, Afrikaans and Dutch. But – recalling Steiner again – it’s difficult to be writing essays on belles lettres when the world is burning. So I combined sociology and literature and studied at the Centre for the Sociology of Literature in Brussels that the Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann had set up. HIGGINS: Thank you for all your time and energy.

NOTES 1 N Tolsi, ‘Jakes Gerwel: The epitome of integrity and courage’, available at www.mg.co.za. 2 The Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by joining the previously separate British colonies of the Cape and Natal to the two former Boer Republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. 3 The generic term for the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC has been in power in South Africa since 1994. 4 The Mandela Rhodes Foundation is dedicated to providing post​graduate scholarships to promising African students with leadership potential. See http://www.mandelarhodes.org. 5 Ebrahim Rasool (born 1962) was a United Democratic Front activist and later premier of the Western Cape. Rasool is currently South African Ambassador to Washington. 6 The National Party (NP) was founded in 1914 to present the interests of Afrikaners. The NP came to power in 1948 and enacted the apartheid legislation for which they (and the country) became notorious. From 1990 until 1993, the NP led the negotiations which culminated in South Africa’s first democratic election in April 1994. The NP ceased to exist in 2005 when it was subsumed within the ANC. 7 Inkatha, or the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), is a Zulu cultural organisation established in 1922 and revived in 1975 by Mangosutho Buthelezi to serve his political ends. Initially, Inkatha threatened to boycott the country’s first democratic election but on Mandela’s invitation, entered the Government of National Unity. 8 Nelson Mandela’s clan name; often used as a nickname. 9 Steven (Bantu) Biko (1942–1977) was a student activist and founder of the Black Consciousness movement in the early 1970s. He was murdered by the apartheid security police. 10 Property Clause: The property issue is central to the redistribution of wealth in the country where, under colonialism and apartheid, the white minority acquired the majority of land and natural resources. The Property Clause aims at achieving an equitable balance between protecting existing property interests and promoting wider and more equitable access to land and natural resources. Section 25 of the South African Constitution 1996 therefore has three features: all aspects of property are bound into a legal regulatory framework; any expropriation of land for a public purpose or in the public interest will be based on the principle of just compensation; and the Constitution mandates redistributive and other land reform measures. 11 See Higgins (2009). 12 The Treatment Action Campaign or TAC was formed in 1998. This NGO successfully spearheaded the campaign for public sector antiretroviral treatment in South Africa. See www.tac.org.za. 13 The Right to Know campaign was launched in 2010 in response to the Protection of State Information Bill. See http://www.r2k.org.za/. 14 Equal Education was formed in 2008 in Khayelitsha on the Cape Flats. Through research and community​led campaigns, the NGO advocates for greater equality between schools through what it calls ‘evidence​based activism’. See http://www.equaleducation.org.za/what is EE. 15 Jeremy Cronin (born 1949) was a political prisoner under apartheid and then exiled in the United Kingdom. Cronin returned to South Africa after the ending of apartheid and has been a stalwart of the South African Communist Party. He is currently deputy minister of Public Works. 16 AfriForum is a civil​rights organisation and is part of the larger Solidarity Movement (see below). AfriForum’s main task is to

protect the civil rights of its members and their communities, mostly in the white Afrikaans​speaking community. This is done by taking up rights and protecting rights. This is not only done through the courts but also by setting up structures in communities. 17 Solidarity, known more commonly by its Afrikaans title Solidariteit, came into being in 1902 with the establishment of the Transvaal Miners’ Association. Since then the trade union has undergone four name changes. In 1913 the name of the Transvaal Miners’ Association was changed to the Mynwerkersunie (MWU). In 2001 the MWU changed to MWU​Solidariteit and since 2002 the union has been known only as Solidariteit. The union has more than 20 offices countrywide and members are serviced by more than 200 staff members and 1 275 trade union representatives in thousands of companies. Its main concern is with South Africa’s Afrikaners. 18 This is formally called Die Suid​Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. See www.akademie.co.za. 19 The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is the short​lived neo​Keynesian economic programme implemented by the ANC after coming to power in 1994; replaced by GEAR in 1996. 20 The Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme is a neo​liberal macroeconomic policy introduced by the ANC government in 1996. 21 The Happy Planet Index was introduced as a measure of human well​being and environmental sustainability in 2006, as a counterpart to the usual measures of Gross Domestic Product and Human Development Index. Costa Rica topped the bill in both 2009 and 2012. 22 In ‘Georg Lukács and his devil’s pact’, Steiner remarks, ‘In the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. There are so many more urgent things to do’ (1984: 54). 23 Dennis Brutus (1924–2009) was an activist educator and poet. Brutus was best known for his contribution to the development of the international boycott of sport against apartheid teams.

REFERENCES Badat, S. 2013. Jakes Gerwel (1946–2012): Humble intellectual, scholar and leader. South African Journal of Science 109(1– 2). Available at www.sajs.co.za. Cronin, J. 2012. ’Civil society’ ... or democratic popular power? Umsebenzi Online 11(2). Available at http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=3564. Accessed August 2012. Gelb, S. 1991. The political economy of the black middle class in a democratic South Africa. Working paper presented at a National Education Policy Initiative (NEPI) workshop. Gerwel, J. 1983. Literatuur en Apartheid. Konsepsies van ‘gekleurdes’ in die Afrikaanse roman tot 1948. Kasselsvlei: Kampen​Uitgewers. Higgins, J. 2009. On representation: Citizenship and critique in Marx and Said. In P Vale and H Jacklin (eds) Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-Apartheid Society. Durban: University of KwaZulu​Natal Press. Lenin, VI. [1902] 1965. Selected Works. London: Progress Publishers. Mandela, N. 1995. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Abacus. Steiner, G. 1984. A Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wolpe, H. 1988. Race, Class and the Apartheid State. London: James Currey.

Conclusion

In different ways and from different perspectives in this book, we have often returned to two main threads of argument and analysis: the question of what academic freedom is, or could or should be, in a democratic South Africa, and the related questions arising from the positioning of the humanities in higher education policy, both globally and locally. Rather than offering the traditional summary associated with a conclusion, I rather invite further debate by revisiting these core themes, but now from the perspective informed by the book’s arguments as a whole, as well as by more recent events and occasions.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM: INDIVIDUAL RIGHT OR INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICE? One of the key features of the debate around academic freedom in South Africa is the way academic freedom is largely defined as an individual right in ways that many of the issues raised in this book render problematic. I’ve come to believe that the central question here is whether academic freedom is best understood as an individual right, or as an institutional practice. The main source and guarantor for its definition as an individual right is undoubtedly South Africa’s new Constitution, as it was adopted on 4 December 1996.1 One of the many positive things about the South African Constitution is that it takes the trouble to include academic freedom as one of the rights it sees as essential to democracy, and therefore necessary for society as a whole to defend. But a less positive aspect lies in just how the Constitution defines academic freedom in order to achieve this. Whether by accident or design, academic freedom is framed by the Constitution in such a way that it becomes difficult (if not downright impossible) to defend in actual practice. That not one of the individuals involved in the growing number of cases the public regards as infringements of academic freedom appears to have formally invoked their individual rights to academic freedom under the Constitution in their defence suggests something may be fatally flawed in the Constitution’s formulation. The Constitution undoubtedly valorises academic freedom by placing it alongside such core human rights as freedom of religion and freedom of association. It took centuries of democratic

struggle to gain recognition for these individual rights; indeed, they are still notably absent on many parts of the continent and in many parts of the world. Placing academic freedom alongside them suggests that it too has a crucial role in the development and maintenance of a vital and living democracy, and this constitutional emphasis is to be welcomed. In a similarly welcome mode, the Constitution emphasises that academic freedom is important not only to academics; it is – as the recent Council on Higher Education report, Academic Freedom, stresses – ‘everyone’s right’ (CHE 2008). Yet it is precisely here that the difficulties and complications of the concept begin to emerge. Academic freedom: anyone and everyone’s right? In some ideal and utopian sense, perhaps; but in the reality of the here and now, academic freedom – either in its exercise or in any encroachment upon it – is restricted to academics and researchers as they are employed in diverse public institutional and educational settings. The problem is that in focusing on academic freedom as an individual’s right, the Constitution effectively marginalises – or perhaps even puts out of the picture altogether – the complex institutional setting in which alone the practice of academic freedom makes sense. For any right to academic freedom must in reality depend upon how far the institutions in which it is practised observe their constitutive duty to enable it and make it possible.2 The Constitution’s idea of academic freedom as the right of any individual, akin to, and on the model of, the freedom of creative expression, is, I suggest, a red herring. It distracts attention from the real dimensions in which academic freedom operates: the complex and politically charged exchanges within institutions between academics and the new managerial class of administrators; the struggles between universities and the state in relation to the control of teaching and research priorities; and the all​encompassing ideological battle between liberal and neo​liberal ideas of the very purpose of higher education which most commentators prefer to pretend is not happening. Attention to these real dimensions is one of the tasks of the book as a whole, both in its various chapters and in the accompanying interviews with key humanist thinkers Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and Jakes Gerwel. In reality (and as I argued in Chapter 1), individual freedom of expression is not context​bound or dependent in the same strict fashion as academic freedom is. While anyone can stand on Hyde Park Corner and say whatever they like in the name of freedom of expression, parents of children at universities expect their academic teachers to be qualified to hold the opinions they put forward. Unlike the right to freedom of expression, the right to academic freedom is the hard​earned right of a qualified individual, and not of any and every individual. Indeed, in its core meaning, academic freedom refers to the right of qualified academics to challenge the paradigms of knowledge and understanding current in their field of specialisation, but with the proviso that they may only do so once they have shown adequate mastery of their field. The whole point of the research PhD is not just to understand but to perform what it means to make a contribution to knowledge through mastering a field of study. The PhD is intended – as it were – to enable you to perform knowledge rather than just to repeat it; to be in a position to argue an expert opinion rather than just hold an opinion. Academic freedom proper expresses the necessary and inescapable tensions between the university as a place for teaching, the passing on of received ideas, but at the same time as a place where these received ideas are constantly subjected to pressure, and must be kept open

to challenge and change – with the restriction that the challenge comes from those qualified to make the challenges. The importance of this restriction – and with it, the differences between academic freedom and freedom of speech or religion – comes through with some force in recent debates in the United States around the teaching of evolution. Here the American Association of University Professors – the voice of the academic profession in the States – has come out against the adoption of a number of Bills promoting the teaching of creationist rather than evolutionary theory. The Association did so on the grounds that while freedom of expression enables anyone to both privately and publicly hold creationist views, academic freedom rules that only scientifically credible theory should be taught in schools. For the social value of the university is that it – ideally at least – is the place where knowledge and understanding are pursued free of ideological or commercial pressures. It is in performing this function that academic freedom is in everyone’s interest, though its practice is largely restricted to academics and researchers. At the same time, it is precisely this simple fact of the social value of academic freedom as the practice of independent critical thinking within the university that does much to authorise the popular extension of academic freedom to the freedom of speech of public intellectuals trained in or associated with the university. Public intellectuals who are academics or who were academically trained have, through the fact of their institutional and disciplinary formation, internalised the values of academic freedom and critical independent thinking, so that their voices are particularly valued in public debate, thus inextricably intertwining academic freedom with freedom of speech. A prime example of this inextricable intertwining is surely to be found in the figure of Noam Chomsky, the world’s most cited intellectual. Few would argue that his academic work in linguistics is in any direct way related to his writings as a public intellectual, but, at the same time, the hard​won values of analysis and objectivity earned in his academic discipline nonetheless do something to authorise his public arguments, and perhaps help to explain the appeal of his public writing. I suspect that it is precisely this intertwining that may well be one of the grounds for the constitutional definition of academic freedom as a right akin to freedom of speech, as well as going some way to explaining the usual conflation of academic freedom with freedom of speech that has led some to understand it as an unjustified claim for academics to enjoy (as it were) an extra portion of free speech.3 In many ways, it is easy to see why the issue of academic freedom becomes such a fraught and often confused one, and why it may be politically convenient as well as understandable to seek to figure academic freedom as an individual right rather than as an institutional practice. For in today’s South Africa as well as in the larger world of which it is a part, there is considerable pressure on universities to become more and not less responsive to ideological and commercial pressures in the name of a public accountability. Focusing on academic freedom as the right and responsibility of the individual usefully consigns to the margins all the issues relating to the responsibilities of state and institution with regard to the safeguarding of academic freedom. It enables the duty of the institutions to protect academic freedom to disappear from the picture, and make it the sole preserve of the individual academic. So it is that in practice, the restrictive definition of academic freedom as a purely

individual right can be put into play by university managements that prefer to forget their duty to preserve and support it, as appears to have been happening with some regularity at the University of KwaZulu​Natal.4 Academics who – for instance – question or bring to public attention authoritarian managerial policies can be and are disciplined for ‘bringing the institution into disrepute’. The common​sense response to this – that such silencing of academics itself is the main engine of bringing an institution into disrepute, and must be contrary to a broader understanding of academic freedom – is absolutely correct, and points to the weakness of the constitutional definition and defence. A further implication of the restrictive definition of academic freedom as solely an individual right is that it leaves out of the picture the complex questions that emerge regarding the place of particular disciplines in universities with regard to resourcing (or closure). Does the possibility of practising academic freedom depend on the maintenance and existence (or creation) of particular disciplinary spaces in universities? The turn towards economic instrumentalism in global higher education policy suggests that perhaps it does.

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE One way of summing up the present state of the humanities in South Africa is perhaps to say that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is that of a global higher education policy template which increasingly favours applied science in preference to all other forms of knowledge, enquiry and training, while the hard place is a local one: the hard place of what we might call or refer to as that of an applied nationalism. The rock is that described at length in Chapter 5, where I drew on a series of reports issued by the British Academy (which was formed by Royal Charter in 1902 for the ‘promotion of the humanities and social sciences’) that have pointed to the existence of a ‘dangerously polarised debate’ in higher education policy. While this policy (the rock) recognises the contribution to society and wealth creation made by the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), it fails entirely to acknowledge ‘the equally important contributions made by the arts, humanities and social sciences’. How has this polarisation come about? How was this rock formed? The answer is undoubtedly complex, and features a number of push and pull factors, including simply the massive post​war success and growth of higher education. But one part of the answer – and one often neglected in many existing accounts, which somehow see changes in higher education policy as a ‘natural’ and inevitable response to economic shifts – is an ideological one: Margaret Thatcher’s avowed hatred of all those academics – and notably social scientists and historians – that she saw as ‘putting out poison’ into the public mind, and her determination to curb the university as a site of irresponsible critical thinking.5 With the Education Act of 1988, Thatcher took the first decisive step in what was to become – over the next thirty years or so – a fundamental reframing of the purposes of higher education. Through the simple replacement of the University Grants Committee by a new University

Funding Council on which, for the first time, academics were outnumbered by business people, Thatcher opened the door to an increasingly instrumental and economist view of the purposes of higher education.6 As we have seen, the dominant legitimating idea of higher education shifted from a focus on serving the public good to that of simply servicing the economy. From a commitment to promoting professional training and critical thinking across all disciplines in the sciences and humanities, the central idea of the function of higher education moved to servicing the needs of the economy in as direct and immediate a fashion as possible. In the decades that followed, and as discussed both in Chapter 5 and in the interviews with Eagleton, Said and Gerwel, many critics have pointed to the dangers of too narrow and exclusive a focus on the economy at the expense of the other social functions of higher education. Higher education serves a variety of complex social needs and interests, and effectively seeking to reduce knowledge to applied science is not only bad for the humanities, but also bad for science, bad for business, and, ultimately, bad for the entire social order of which the economy is only a single interactive dimension. The big problems in the real world are complex and tend not to admit of simple solutions. All the creative resources of thinking in many different disciplines, across the sciences and humanities, are required to face the challenges of climate change, food shortages, migration, and HIV/AIDS. Every economy has not only to respond to the external challenges posed by the pressures of increasingly global economic and political forces, but the internal challenges posed by social cohesion and integration, intercultural communication and also ordinary translation. The twenty​first century is not one that can afford to continue the CP Snow style of ‘two cultures’ thinking, yet (as argued in Chapter 3) this is the polarised thinking inscribed in much higher education policy, with its substantial division in support for work in the sciences and humanities. The question instead becomes what role the critical literacies associated with the humanities should play in the development of the interdisciplinary work which is likely to be more important to universities in the decades to come. The rock is a substantial one, and any attempt to get over it must mean in the first instance to recognise its existence and its capacity to trip you up! At the same time, though, I think it is also by now necessary to try to recognise or identify another set of instrumental pressures that the critical humanities need to resist in the hard place that is present​day South Africa. These pressures – which I shall call the pressures of an applied nationalism – are everywhere apparent in discussions of the future of the humanities, and have surfaced with some force in the work and recommendations for the future of the humanities made by Minister Nzimande’s Charter for Humanities group.7 It is worth remembering that charters have historically played a significant role in the constitution and extension of democracy. It was the Great Charter of 1215 which, in setting limits to the arbitrary authority of the king of England, first opened up a space for constitutional democracy, while (again in England) the People’s Charter of 1838, with its demands for universal suffrage, secret ballots, payment of MPs and regular recall, established the basic structures of parliamentary democracy. Similarly, the Kliptown Freedom Charter of 1955 – with its declaration that South Africa ‘belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people’ – set the scene, and many of the key complications, for the democracy to come.

The syntax of participation is built into the very form of the democratic charter; it belongs to the people whose rights and duties are constituted in and by it. The proper grammatical form of the democratic charter is that of subjective genitive, in which the subject – the people – establishes and founds the charter as the people’s charter, a charter based on or emanating from the will of all the people. A charter for someone is, grammatically, not quite the same; it rather dictates to a community a prescribed set of rules which constitute the conditions for belonging to that community. I stress and even perhaps place undue emphasis on this seemingly trivial point of grammar as a way of pointing out that much of the substance of the Charter’s proposals and recommendations continues to subordinate the humanities and social sciences to an instrumental agenda. Not the instrumental agenda of the applied science of the STEM disciplines addressed by the British Academy, but rather perhaps that of the applied nationalism pointed out by Edward Said in a prescient lecture on academic freedom in liberated societies given in Cape Town back in 1991. Here Said asked whether, in a post​liberation society, universities should ‘substitute for a Eurocentric norm an Afrocentric or Islamo​ or Arabo​centric one’ (Said 1991: 77) and argued that they shouldn’t. To make universities the ‘proving ground for earnest patriots’ was a mistake, he suggested, and threatened to ‘nullify intellect altogether’ (1991: 73). The intellect, he asserted, ‘must not be coercively held in thrall to the authority of a national identity’ (1991: 75).8 The temptation is, of course, in the hard place of an instrumental world, that the easiest defence of the humanities is precisely the appeal to an applied nationalism of the kind Said warned about on several occasions, particularly since it is this appeal which appears to underwrite the core proposals of the Charter initiative.9 For one of the dangers presented by the recent Charter for the Humanities initiative exemplifies the dangers presented by mistaking the part for the whole. The Charter is celebratory and poetic in mode, and makes no attempt to assess the place of the humanities in the higher educational system as a whole, preferring instead to advocate support for a particular set of intellectual and academic projects largely within the heritage and celebratory mode.10 In this, for all its progressive intent, the Charter paradoxically represents – in my view at least – a somewhat conservative and authoritarian project, akin to that launched by George Bush in the United States, where ‘at a time of shrinking budgets for arts and humanities, [he] launched an initiative to support historical studies of iconic figures and achievements’.11 While there would, of course, be benefits for some in this focus (and it is entirely natural that those who are likely to profit from the initiative are likely to support it with considerable enthusiasm), the danger here is that the part is taken for the whole in an incomplete synechdoche.12 Against this partial defence, which is likely to exclude as much of the humanities as it includes, I think we need to step outside our own highly specific research interests and projects, and look to protecting the teaching/research nexus across all humanist disciplines and not just some, and a much wider range of projects within the different disciplines. While the higher education system certainly should have a place for a certain instrumentalism, humanists must assert and policy makers need to recognise – just as many of

their colleagues in the natural sciences do – that ‘applied research’ often depends in the end on the ‘pure’ curiosity​driven research that precedes it. On these grounds alone, I believe that the defence of the humanities has to be a defence of the humanities, rather than one restricted to particular projects within them. To this end, I suggest (as argued in more detail in Chapter 5) that we base our defence less on particular projects and more on the underlying common grounds of methods and skills which unite the disparate disciplines of the humanities. It is this common ground – rather than the more specialised contents associated with specific academic and research projects – that identifies the most visible skills which humanities students take away with them into the public world, into their activities in the economy and their action in society. In this sense, the defence of the humanities is best made in terms of form rather than content.13 All in all, I believe that recent discussions suggest that applied science and applied nationalism make up the Scylla and Charybdis that threaten the humanities in South Africa today. In my view, it is only by steering carefully between the two that the frail bark of the humanities may hope to preserve the resources of that critical and creative thinking that is figured in Homer’s Odyssey in the character of Ulysses. That supremely wily and resourceful hero is surely the exemplar of the energetic, imaginative and innovative thinking that South Africa needs. It is my contention that such thinking has the best chance of developing under public and institutional conditions in which academic freedom is recognised as a central element of academic practice, as well as a significant contributor to the conduct of the open public debate and criticism that helps to constitute and maintain a democratic society.

NOTES 1 The most relevant sections are ‘Freedom of religion, belief and opinion (1) Every person shall have the right to freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion, which shall include academic freedom in institutions of higher learning’; and ‘Freedom of expression (1) Every person shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression, which shall include freedom of the press and other media, and the freedom of artistic creativity and scientific research’. 2 In this respect, the suppressing of the Council on Higher Education’s report on UKZN and its concern for precisely this institutional setting of academic freedom leaves much to be desired. 3 As Mamphela Ramphele (1999: 201) put it, ‘Why do academics demand a special freedom over and above all the other freedoms they enjoy as citizens … What makes academia special?’ 4 At least according to the description of some of the Council on Higher Education’s audit report on the university offered by the chair of the audit panel, Martin Hall, which apparently insisted that ‘one of UKZN’s greatest transformative challenges is to rise above the ingrained, destructive tendencies that are stifling debate and to create a new culture of participative and democratic debate that supports academic freedom in its broadest sense’ (‘Varsity’s voices of dissent gagged’, Mail & Guardian 14 January 2011). That the audit report was itself controversially banned after protests from the vice​chancellor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, only emphasises the extreme sensitivity to academic freedom questions in South Africa. 5 I criticise this strand of determinist thinking in Bill Readings’s influential The University in Ruins (1996) elsewhere, arguing that (along with much analysis in the area) ‘despite the book’s most explicit commitments to poststructuralist thought, [it] is written from within the explanatory framework offered by the most orthodox and least flexible form of Marxist base and superstructure theory’, one which results in a ‘disablingly static notion of conjunctural struggle’ (Higgins 2000: 367). See, similarly, my reply to André du Toit, ‘From academic analysis to apparatchik thinking’, where I suggest his arguments display the characteristics of a mode of hegemonic thinking which ‘tends to rest [as Raymond Williams put it] “on a (resigned) recognition of the inevitable and the necessary”’ (Higgins 2003: 195). 6 Given the nature of the changes made to the higher education system, it is difficult to understand Thatcher’s claim, in her memoirs, that a ‘philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training was certainly no

part of my kind of Thatcherism’ (cited in Campbell 2008: 400). 7 As with the Higher Education and Training Laws Amendment Act of 2012, the recently gazetted Draft Regulations for the Establishment of a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences may well face considerable – and even legal – challenges. The first of these will regard the very short space of time allowed for comment on the new regulations: just three weeks instead of the usual six. 8 Suren Pillay objects to this characterisation of Said’s thought, and defends the Charter project in his article ‘Decolonizing the humanities’, available at http://mg.co.za/article/2013​04​05​decolonising​the​humanities. For my reply, see ‘Recolonizing the humanities’, available at http://mg.co.za/article/2013​05​10​recolonising​the​humanities. 9 And notably, see the Introduction to Said’s Culture and Imperialism, where he writes in defence of the ‘Utopian space still provided by the university, which I believe must remain a place where … vital issues are investigated, discussed, reflected on’ (1993: xxix). ‘For it to become a site where social and political issues are actually either imposed or resolved,’ he warns, ‘would be to remove the university’s function and turn it into an adjunct to whatever political party is in power’ (1993: xxix). 10 For some significant reservations concerning the project, see Higgins in the Mail & Guardian Getting Ahead supplement (24–30 June 2011: 49–50) and Paula Ensor in the Mail & Guardian (4–10 May 2012: 32). For a robust engagement with these reservations see Nzimande 2013. 11 See P Kitcher, ‘The trouble with scientism’, The New Republic, available at www.tnr.com. As Daniel Herwitz (2013: n.p.) argues, at its best, ‘Heritage practice is not merely about preservation, memory, acknowledgment but also the desire to intervene in contemporary realities around issues of memory … The past becomes a living form through which human rights are articulated and unfolded in the public sphere.’ At its worst, it tends to ‘denature real politics, turning history into memory, or litany, or resolve or reverting to monumentalizing mythology’. 12 I leave aside the host of legalistic questions concerning structure and funding which may well explode once the proposal for the Charter’s Institute for the Humanities is gazetted and made open to public comment. 13 A point made with some force by Ulrike Kistner. See her ‘Humanities row displays bad “form”’ in the Mail & Guardian Getting Ahead supplement (3–9 May 2013: 2).

REFERENCES Campbell, J. 2008. Margaret Thatcher Volume II – The Iron Lady. London: Vintage. CHE (Council on Higher Education). 2008. Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and Public Accountability in South African Higher Education. Task Team Report of the Council on Higher Education. Herwitz, D. 2013. The heritage of politics. Unpublished paper presented at Archives and Public Culture Seminar, University of Cape Town. Higgins, J. 2000. Academic freedom and the university. Cultural Values 4(3): 352–373. Higgins, J. 2003. From academic analysis to apparatchik thinking: A reply to André du Toit. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 12(2): 191–197. Nzimande, B. 2013, We will not uphold the status quo. Mail & Guardian 5–11 July 2013. Ramphele, M. 1999: The responsibility side of the academic freedom coin. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 18(2): 201. Readings, B. 1996. The University in Ruins. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Said, EWS. 1991. Identity, authority and freedom: The potentate and the traveler. Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 3(1–2): 67–81. Said, EW. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus.