Learning and academic identity
backgrounds have been a constant matter of concern and the focus of policies and interventions at UCT for a long time, never before has the preoccupation with inequality been as intense and as widespread.
Among the practices and behaviours introduced by the pandemic students reported academics becoming more understanding and flexible in the way of approaching students’ issues. Academics in turn have become more aware of their students’ conditions in which they live and study.
Thinking of the university as a social institution implies situating it as part of a concrete social formation that constitutes the boundaries within which the university operates. This is seldom the case.
The critique of the commodification of education and of higher education “responsiveness” to the labour market just to mention two issues, seldom reaches the level of the critique of the social formation and investigates what would the role of the university be in a post-capitalist world. Is this world possible, what would it look like and what should the role of the university be, if any, in contributing to its emergence?
All over the world, from the most advanced economies to the most precarious societies, the pandemic has exposed the cracks of the system: from the disproportionate toll of the disease on the poor and black populations to the multibillion profits that the 1% has made out the crisis.
South Africa, already ranked the most unequal society in the world, is having a difficult time in analysing the social effect of the pandemic on historical structural inequality. A historical preoccupation with disadvantage has reached untold centrality in institutional and sectoral discourse. Yet at the time of responding to the question of what is to be done to ameliorate inequality of access to ERT, the answer is buying computers and data, providing extra support, offering discounted fees.
The response is managerialist: management teams identify the
Dr Precious Moloi-motsepe is co-founder and chief executive of the Motsepe Foundation problem, analyse the risk and mobilise the necessary resources to manage the crisis. The real obstacle to access is not in the higher education system, universities are powerless to remedy the causes of inequality. This does not mean that something else on top of the immediate, managerial approach is not possible as a more comprehensive response from higher education to the event of the pandemic and the crisis of the system.
In the collective paper on the effect of Covid-19 at 15 public universities, the authors observed that the success of individual institutions in addressing the crisis should not leave off the hook those accountable for the structural conditions that make the work of universities so difficult and, in a sense, ineffective.
The pandemic is an event that is surfacing the contradictions inherent to the social and economic system in which we live. These contradictions, including the effects of the fossil fuel economy on the environment, have been flagged for decades.
Conclusion
I have argued that the move into ERT precipitated a deep change in the role of teaching academics at residential contact universities. This change not only questions concrete aspects of what academics do and who they are. At the same, ERT produced a change in the perception of time and space in higher education creating the opportunity of a new understanding of the contextual nature of both time and space and how they influence educational processes.
There is much universities have learnt in managing their core functions during the pandemic that is worth taking into the future. But universities need to enter the future from the critique of existing relations of power.
Lis Lange is the University of Cape Town’s deputy vice-chancellor for teaching and learning. This is an extract of her preliminary reflections on emergency remote teaching at UCT, which will be published online