‘Anti-humanism seeping through varsities’
UNIVERSITIES are no longer the sanctuaries of learning they would like to think they were‚ Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka said yesterday.
“They find themselves often on the frontline of sudden and bloody violence‚” Soyinka said at the third annual Brics and Emerging Economies Universities Summit at the University of Johannesburg.
Soyinka was addressing the summit on his vision for the university of the future.
He said anti-intellectual and disruptive intellectual forces had long found root in institutions of higher learning.
Soyinka said religious intolerance was not something new‚ recalling that on a visit to the University of Barcelona‚ he was shown heavy tomes that still bore the bullet holes of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
He also referred to Garissa University in Kenya where 147 were killed by al-Shabaab militants.
Soyinka said “the religious night raiders”‚ reading from list provided by some college students‚ called out the victims one by one‚ then knifed‚ bludgeoned and shot them to death.
“Those victims were the supposed unbelievers‚” Soyinka said.
Soyinka said an “underground seepage of anti-humanism” was sweeping through universities around the world and this should be addressed by creating an environment for students to make their own discoveries.
Soyinka’s vision of a future university would see all first-year students undergoing a multidisciplinary course where the aim would be to dehumanise the extremist views they might have.
Soyinka said after a year of study‚ students should then be allowed to exercise an intense mental discipline.
He said while he believed in democracy and freedom of speech‚ there must be a limit: “But I believe that many communities are beginning to understand that there is a limit. There is a point at which even we must recognise something called hate speech.
“A weapon is used to take advantage of the positive‚ the progressive notion of freedom of speech‚ liberty. . . to erode the very communities which are founded on those human principles.”