Chapter 3: Academic freedom – the South African debates
6. Threats to academic freedom – managerialism
6.1 Individual cases
The view that the threat to academic freedom emanates from within higher education institutions themselves is also manifest in writings which take up the cases of individual academics who have in some way been in conflict with university management.315 Southall and Cobbing, for instance, take as their starting point that the new threat is increasingly internal, with academics becoming ever more subordinated to administrators, who in turn are becoming increasingly intolerant of robust internal dissent. They point to a shift in university governance in South Africa‟s open universities
312 Senate Academic Freedom Committee, University of the Witwatersrand, Submission to CHE/HEIAAF Task Team, October 2005, p.2.
313 Ibid.
314 Central University of Technology, Free State, Submission to HEIAAF, 2006, p.2.
315 Individual cases: Robert Shell, Caroline White, Malegapuru Makgoba, Ashwin Desai, Faisel Khan, Mahmood Mamdani, Robert Morrell, among others.
from what they term “racial liberalism”, towards corporate authoritarianism.316 They base their argument on a lengthy discussion of the dismissal of a leading academic from Rhodes University on the grounds of bringing his university into disrepute, among other charges, and interpret this event as a managerialist silencing of critique which should be guaranteed by academic freedom. Given that this particular dispute arose initially from a critique of the Rhodes University East London campus‟ staffing policies, this interpretation seems, on the face of it, to be justified.
However, other cases they cite as examples of managers infringing the academic freedom of individual academics do not necessarily serve as substantiation for this view, and indeed this is true of a number of the other instances noted here. For instance, one such celebrated case at the former University of Natal, although taken up by parts of the academic community as an instance of a breach of academic freedom,317 arose initially because of complaints from students to the Dean about poor teaching, and from colleagues about difficult behaviour, rather than from the academic issuing a critique of the institution or in any other way exercising a right to freedom of speech.318 In other cases too, independent external bodies such as the Council for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) have ruled in some instances that individuals who had protested alleged violations of their academic freedom, had actually committed some misdemeanour that in any ordinary organisation would have received censure. This begs the question of whether academic freedom, as understood in Quadrant One, is akin to diplomatic privilege which renders the right-holder immune from prosecution even if laws are broken. Does academic freedom in this sense include the right to teach badly, to alienate colleagues, to issue defamatory statements about individuals and factually- incorrect accounts of occurrences at a particular institution? And more than that, does this version of academic freedom hold in a democracy, where not only academics, but students have rights e.g. to be taught coherently? Is every attempt by an institution to
316Roger Southall and Julian Cobbing, “From racial liberalism to corporate authoritarianism: the Shell affair and the assault on academic freedom in South Africa”, Social Dynamics, 27 (2) 2001, p.2.
317 See for example, William Freund, “South African academic freedom today”, CHE Regional Forum on Government Involvement in Higher Education, Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom, Johannesburg, May 2006.
318 In this instance the case went to court, with the academic being found guilty of misconduct.
discipline staff in an effort to balance the rights and freedoms of different constituencies a breach of academic freedom? And is the recourse to the defence of academic freedom in a transforming society with different interest-groups needing to be accommodated not in itself a conservative move? The concern in advancing individual cases of academics as evidence of threats to academic freedom is that they are case-specific – some may be evidence of intolerance of university authorities for legitimate critique, others may be ordinary labour relations cases. In the absence of full knowledge around each of these, however, it is difficult to put them all together319 and ascribe to them a trend of management infringing rights to academic freedom. Not all issues of labour dispute between a university and its academic employees can be construed as issues involving academic freedom, but often academic freedom qua Quadrant One is invoked as a defence when expedient to do so, even as, in other contexts, it is claimed that the concept‟s sell-by date has passed.
Southall and Cobbing argue in defence of an individual against university authorities attempting to deal with maverick behaviour. In some senses they seem to be advocating a return to the traditional collegial model in which it was very difficult to do anything about aberrant individuals, even in instances where students‟ rights were being infringed, since there was limited executive power, and relationships and careers survived on trust and a laissez-faire policy. This may have been appropriate in small homogenous institutions, but it did allow for poor practices to persist in the system for a long time and prejudice the interests of other parties, for instance, students. In a transformation context, and in an era of complexity, or even supercomplexity,320 some management and executive decision-making powers may well be necessary to drive change or transformation of institutions. Institutions have become larger and more complex to run, and increasing diversity in the student body renders the need for more management in terms of organising curriculum and deliberately changing teaching strategies and programmes of intervention to help both students and staff members to cope with increasing challenges. Increased management capacity does not necessarily
319 As Jimi Adesina does in “Academic freedom and institutional autonomy in South Africa: internal and external threats in the context of transformation”, CHE Regional Forum on Government Involvement in Higher Education, Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom, Durban, 1 June 2006.
320 See Barnett as discussed in Chapter Seven.
imply managerialism, although managerialism as a phenomenon has increased in many higher education systems. Management of all organisations can be carried out in different styles; some are more participative and inclusive of the views of different stakeholder groups, where others may indeed be more corporate in the pejorative sense of power vested in management being wielded in a top-down fashion.
The above having been noted, there are indications that managerialism is increasing in South African universities, and that threats to the academic freedom of academics as a whole, as opposed to a new management cadre, are being experienced. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the strike by academics and support staff members at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006 over issues of perceived increased managerialism, which saw an unprecedented participation of academics on the picket lines.321 Habib notes that there is a new perpetrator of the crime of violations of academic freedom in “the institutional bureaucrat” and the corporatisation of the university, and like du Toit cautions that institutional autonomy could land up empowering the class of institutional bureaucrat rather than the individual academic,322 but he also notes that senior academics themselves might also be responsible for limitations on academic freedom. He refers to an article by Desai which tracks the writing of the leading Marxist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s, and finds that their research agenda is no longer determined by themselves, but “rather by those who are prepared to buy their research and writing skills, most often either the government or the private sector.” As he writes,
“academic freedom in this case is said to be violated by the senior academic‟s propensity to sell his or her skills to the highest bidder.”323 But this is a story explored further in another chapter.324
321 See “Varsity strike hits lectures”, The Witness, 14 February, 2006 and “Fight for a varsity‟s soul”, The Witness, 14 February, 2006.
322 Adam Habib, “The practice of academic freedom in South Africa”, CHE Regional Forum on Government Involvement in Higher Education, Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom, Pretoria 24 March 2006; Bloemfontein 04 May 2006, p.1.
323 Ibid. p.2.
324 See Chapter Seven.