‘Imperial mindset’ can distort partnerships
Universities in the developing world look forward to sharing more equally in the many benefits of globalisation, says
COSTLY HONOUR: The University of Johannesburg choir was invited to the US on a trip for which it incurred huge expense ‘to entertain wealthy New Yorkers for a night’, says Ihron Rensburg
WHEN those of us involved in the struggle for liberation in South Africa emerged from exile or, in my case, from an apartheid prison in 1989, we undertook to transform the educational system so that it would embrace the new democratic realities in our country.
Before I became vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, I was intimately involved in this process, a process that saw a national system of 36 universities trimmed down to 23 through a series of institutional mergers.
South Africa’s public schooling system is still heavily weighed down by its apart- heid planning legacy, which is especially reflected in its aggregate low teaching capacity, teacher competence, teachers’ low self-esteem weighed down further by massive public criticism, and thus overall quality, and even more specifically, in the weak output of the volume and quality of math and science school-leavers.
So, for example, the national benchmark tests, a South African vice-chancellors-led programme to supplement the school exit examinations as a means of assessing the university-readiness of applicants, show that applicants’ academic literacy comes in at 33% proficiency, their quantitative literacy at 20%, and their mathematical competence at 10%. This situation places considerable strain on universities to set aside valuable resources to enable an effective academic transition from school to university. Some are taking on this challenge unreservedly, others not.
At UJ, our firm commitment is to take responsibility for bridging this gap, especially in light of the tectonic shifts in the profile of our student body from mainly white and middle class to mainly black and blue collar, rural poor and lower middle class.
As things stand, South Africa’s university system is small (an 18% participation rate that is dramatically racially skewed, with white participation at 60% and black at 16% ) and inefficient (only 50% of entering students graduate).
UJ reflects the polyglot nature of Johannesburg, and of the democratic and nonracial South Africa.
The result of our efforts at UJ, nine years in, is South Africa’s most successful university merger, a tripling of our research output and a doubling of our share of national research output to almost 8%. Graduate output is up 11% to 11 650 annually, with almost half being first-generation university graduates.
UJ is now also Africa’s cosmopolitan new-generation city university that is transforming the racial character of South Africa’s graduate population, and of its professions. The university is South Africa’s second most admired university brand, Africa’s leading comprehensive university without a medical school, and is ranked in the top 4% of universities worldwide.
In many respects the university, which has already undergone tectonic shifts in the socioeconomic profile of its student population with profound consequences for its teaching and learning and its research ambitions, symbolises the ambitions of our society for a more inclusive rather than an elite university, a nextgeneration rather than a Middle Ages university, a reflexive rather than frozen university, a critical rather than obedient university.
As a result of the global recession, which in turn was a consequence of global financial excesses, one million people in South Africa lost their jobs.
Real unemployment stands at a staggering 33% of the population and at 52% for African females. Because of the extended African family system that relies almost entirely on women, this has had a huge impact on poverty, which officially now stands at around 40%. The negative social consequences are obvious.
This is how Emma Makhaza, one of the one million newly unemployed, described her circumstances to the poverty hearings hosted by the South African Human Rights Commission, the NGO Coalition and the Commission on Gender Equality: “I am having seven children and nothing to depend on. I am making bricks and sometimes it rains and then I can’t do it. And I collect food and take it to people. I fetch wood and collect cans of cold drink and sell them.
“When I am without food then I go next
The obvious answer is collaboration with local scholars who can take research to the next level in the communities under investigation
door and if they don’t have, then the children will have empty stomachs and I cry. Yesterday I left with my children fast asleep because they will ask me what we are going to eat.
“I am very thin because when I bought a bucket of mealie meal, I won’t eat it at all if I am thinking of the children. They say: ‘Mom you are going to die.’ ”
This then is the collateral damage attendant also on globalisation; positive benefits are shared as much as negative ones, albeit unequally within and across states, and within and across developed and developing nations.
Now, for the academic community the unstoppable tsunami of globalisation presents profound opportunities. Rich banks of new knowledge can be mined as research projects embrace widening collaborations across the globe.
Perhaps we are just at the “beginning of the beginning”, as the IT futurist James Martin might put it. Martin’s lead gift of $100-million to Oxford to kick-start the Centre for 21st Century Studies at that great university is precisely an investment to research the challenges we are confronting in a globalised world and to find solutions.
And the day may yet come when this kind of generous investment in research will be linked to an academic institution outside the developed world. Then we will know that globalisation of the academic community is truly becoming a reality.
For all the benefits, however, we also need to understand the unequal nature of many academic partnerships.
If I may offer a simple analogy: my university choir recently performed at the Lincoln Center in New York City.
While this speaks to the choir’s abilities and stature, and while it is certainly flattering, I find it ironic that 50 choristers, most of whom come from poor homes in Soweto and Johannesburg, should have to find around $200 000 (R2.2-million) to entertain wealthy New Yorkers for a night. This is certainly not a democratic engagement.
The same principle applies to academic collaborations.
One challenge relates to what I might call the “imperial mindset”. Well-resourced research teams fly in, do their groundwork and leave to write up their findings before moving on to the next project. In many instances, they leave behind a bemused community with an expectation of positive change that hardly ever comes. Only disillusionment and alienation can flow from this kind of engagement.
The obvious answer is collaboration with local scholars who understand the local conditions, speak the language, share the culture and can take research to the next level in the communities under investigation once the partner leaves the field. This is surely a much more sensible and sustainable model.
Rensburg, UJ’s vice-chancellor, has been awarded the President’s Medal by the University of South Carolina in the US for outstanding service to higher education. This is an edited extract from his lecture in Columbia, South Carolina