Black profs in a Catch-22

Iwas heart-broken reading Neo Ramoupi’s article on higher education (“Why are there so few black profs?”, June 15). If a black guy with a PhD from Howard University cannot get a job with our universities, then who is qualified — white academics with hardly his international experience and recognition?

It is all too common in our country for white academics to spend their entire academic careers in one institution — from undergraduate to full professor and head of department — and still reject internationally respected black academics. Some of these very same white academics are the first people to raise the meritocracy card, even though they got to where they are as beneficiaries of the largest affirmative action for white people in the history of the world.

When I applied to study law at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983, I was denied the government permit required to study at a white university. I finally got in through a technicality when the quota system was introduced in 1984. I then joined a class of white kids who got into Wits because they were legally protected from competition with 90% of the students in the country. Would those white kids have become the lawyers and professors that they ultimately became if they had received competition from the hot-shot black students who were passing with As in township schools but legally prohibited from coming to Wits?

We cannot say for certain, because we cannot answer counterfactuals. But we can make logical inferences, one of which is that any system that is built on exclusion is bound to be suboptimal. The system will continue to be suboptimal for as long as black academics do not have a sense of ownership of our universities.

To make matters worse, we have white alumni who influence the direction of the universities from the grave, including what we teach. That is the worst way to think about a university as a site of knowledge production.

So Ramoupi is right to advise the minister to ask the right question, which is not what holds black academics back but why they leave the system. And, by the way, the exit of senior black academics is not a problem limited to junior academics, and it is not just a matter of them chasing greener pastures.

The racism I have experienced from my white colleagues at the University of Cape Town has driven me to despair, whether it is being mistaken for a delivery boy or being told to go to the students’ bathroom or being policed by colleagues who have absolutely no authority over me. These things are known to our universities but nobody does anything about them, let alone pick up the phone to find out. The experiences are either explained away or covered up.

And so, if you are a black academic, even at the level of full professor, you are damned if you stay and damned if you don’t. Staying means putting up with the bigotry; leaving means ceding the space to the bigotry. Just as free education is beyond the capacity of the individual institutions, rooting out racism that drives black academics away cannot be solved by individual institutions.

I cannot help but think that the issue is even bigger than the minister of higher education: the systematic exclusion of black academics from our universities cannot be consistent with the letter and spirit of our Constitution.

The time may have come, or even long passed, for a chapter nine institution to remedy this situation. If we can have such an institution for broadcasting and for the promotion of languages, why should we not have them for arguably the most vital sector of our society — the universities. Like all other chapter nine institutions, the new body would not be accountable to the government of the day but to Parliament and protected by our much-celebrated Constitution.