Sue Blaine
5 December 2008
Johannesburg — SA NEEDS to have a proper, open discussion about academic freedom, say academics.
The international and South African academic community is outraged over the way the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has treated two of its academics who criticised vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba in the media.
Physicist Prof Nithaya Chetty, who is president of the South African Institute of Physics, resigned before his December 8 disciplinary hearing. Mathematician Prof John van den Berg signed a settlement agreement last week allowing him to keep his job and stop disciplinary action.
UKZN's actions over the issue could hinder research collaboration between it and universities across the globe, a group of 34 academics from universities including Stanford, Oxford, Chicago, New York, London and Denmark's Roskilde University said.
One of the instigators of a petition, written last month , is Prof David William Cohen, the University of Michigan's Lemuel A Johnson Collegiate Professor of African Anthropology and History.
Cohen has had close connections with UKZN for years and has supervised some of its PhD candidates.
"What I heard (from his PhD students) and from other sources seemed to me to be a terrible detour from the accepted principles of academic freedom . For me and for many people it was incredibly straightforward for them to see what the problems were," Cohen said.
Interestingly, the academics got into trouble when they tried to introduce a debate about academic freedom into a meeting of the university's senate.
Makgoba then pushed the debate towards a senate sub-committee but the two academics refused to comply and spoke to the media.
But the UKZN issue is not the only one that has got South African tongues wagging about what academic freedom means .
Late last month political scientist Anthony Turton was suspended from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) after it barred him from presenting a conference paper that argued that SA's water supply was vulnerable and the CSIR was "in trouble" because it lacked the capacity to address the looming crisis.
Several academics agree with the Council on Higher Education (CHE) that, increasingly, South African universities and research institutions' freedom is threatened not externally, but internally.
One of the larger concerns stems from the increasing reliance, in universities and research institutions such as the CSIR and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), on commercial funding for research.
This exerts a subtle pressure on them to toe particular lines and also to be careful about not "perturbing " potential funders, including the government, HSRC senior researcher Ivor Chipkin says.
Academic freedom is a concept that changes over time and within context and the discussion on what it constitutes is "never over", says Dr Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a project between the universities of Johannesburg and Rhodes.
UKZN claims the two professors were not disciplined on an issue of academic freedom, and that it "is committed to upholding the highest standards of academic freedom and no one is targeted for being outspoken".
"Action is only taken against those who flagrantly violate university rules and procedures and who often thereafter hide behind an obfuscated notion of academic freedom," says spokeswoman Smita Maharaj.
The UKZN incident has its origin in the merger procedure that brought together two very different institutions -- the University of Natal and the University of Durban-Westville -- at the start of the decade, says the University of Cape Town's Emeritus Professor of Political Studies, Andre du Toit.
In order to effect the merger, university management had to take a top-down management approach because of the short time they were given to complete the merger, which changed the structure of the university and sidelined the role of the academic senate and departments, he says.
The other problem is the one already mentioned by the CHE and other academics -- the increasingly managerial manner in which universities are run is changing the way in which they, and other research bodies, treat their employees.
Academics and researchers are more often treated in the same way as corporate employees, which means they cannot speak out and criticise their management.
The increasing commercialisation of universities is a worldwide phenomenon that has only affected SA in the past decade.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
