Chapter 5: Universities, internal restructuring and mergers – academic freedom
3. A case study of restructuring at the former University of Natal and University of
3.7 Disciplines and identity
A third issue is related to disciplines and identity. Power and identity are closely linked, and as disciplines change or become part of larger wholes, senses of academic identity are compromised. As one academic put it, “there is confusion about the roles of people; loss of disciplinary identification”, and another that “a drawback has been the loss of disciplines. Students can no longer identify with what they are studying; this is further compounded by the introduction of the module system. [My discipline] looks to be very close to dead”.
478 Louis Menand, “The limits of academic freedom”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.18.
On the other hand, there is also greater safety in numbers and, in changing times, a need to create solidarity through the identification of a common external threat. One academic identified as a benefit of restructuring that “dealing with the often baffling requirements of both restructuring and outcomes-based education have brought academics within the Faculty into more contact and has created more unity than prior to these upheavals (unity against the common enemy).” There is some evidence that what is identified as an external threat has shifted, from other disciplines and critique emanating from within them, to a perceived increasing internal and external bureaucracy which has had the effect of helping to permeate the traditional disciplinary boundaries in favour of a (depressed) kind of collegiality. Menand argues, however, that specialisation and professionalism are still at the core of arrangements that make academic freedom possible, and help to determine who counts in the self-governing community of academics, and who counts as “an external meddler in the community‟s affairs”.479 The external meddler now no longer seems to be from another academic tribe, but from a perceived colonising force from without and from authoritarian management within.480
4. Conclusion
Menand finds that:
The structure of disciplinarity that has arisen with the modern research university is expensive; it is philosophically weak; and it encourages intellectual predictability, professional insularity, and social irrelevance. It deserves to be replaced. But if it is replaced, it is in the interests of everyone who values the continued integrity of teaching and inquiry to devise a new institutional structure that will perform the same function. Otherwise, academic freedom will be killed by the thing that, in America, kills most swiftly and surely: not bad ideas, but lack of money.481
479 Louis Menand, “The limits of academic freedom”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.19.
480 The reference to outcomes-based education indicates a threat from outside, in that outcomes-based education in a programme and module format was legislated by national government. See Chapter 7.
481 Louis Menand, “The limits of academic freedom”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.19.
The restructuring of disciplines and departments at the former University of Natal and UKZN illustrates a case of a university in transition, responding to some of the challenges to disciplinarity in ways that do indeed attempt to devise that “new institutional structure”. The case illustrates clearly the tensions between orthodox understandings of the role of disciplines and advocates of interdisciplinarity. While there was, inevitably, some resistance to change, many academics at that institution initially appeared to embrace the new and to find some benefit in the new structures. However, some years down the line, and the levels of alienation are much higher. While this undoubtedly can largely be ascribed to the perceived managerial culture ushered in by the change of scale of the organisation following merger and the new structures devised to manage it, it is also for many academics a continuation of the erosion of disciplinary autonomy begun in the initial restructuring process. This is perhaps consistent with Best and Kellner‟s analysis of a “postmodern paradigm”, which, “in the current conditions of crisis and ferment, … is only emergent and is strongly resisted by modernist orthodoxy as well as being conflicted among competing tendencies…”.482
In the above case study, the postmodern turn in South African higher education, arguably made manifest in the adoption of a programmes-based approach to curriculum which in turn inspired structural change within universities to accommodate multi- or interdisciplinarity, did not initially appear to be coupled with a discourse on academic freedom. Indeed, the initial phase of restructuring corresponded to a period of relative quiet with respect to academic freedom in the South African literature on higher education. However, as the conditions that pertain in Quadrant Four deepen, that is, as the greater responsiveness to external market forces attendant on globalisation manifest in academics‟ loss of individual control over curriculum, as the rise of the corporate university lessens academic authority, and as the implications of the epistemological challenges to disciplinarity become apparent, so the discourse has changed to highlight academic freedom issues. The current concern, evident in many national fora and local discussions,483 is about the price paid in moving so quickly into a Quadrant Four reality;
482 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, New York, The Guilford Press, 1997, p.19.
483 For instance, the CHE project on institutional autonomy and academic freedom, recent conferences of the South African Sociological Association, the Freedom of Expression Institute, letters to newspapers.