Xolela Mangcu
9 July 2009
column
Johannesburg — SOME years ago I introduced the concept of the public intellectual into the centre of our public discourse. I defined myself as one, and argued for the development of public intellectuals as one of the great challenges facing our democracy.
I attributed the problem partly to the existence of what I called a "knowledge-ideas complex" that consisted of universities, think- tanks and the media. The media has made the greatest strides in having black voices. This has not been without a struggle as recent debates around the Jacob Zuma affair sadly showed. As I argued in column after column, much of the writing around Zuma was nothing short of racist stereotyping. But on the whole I would argue that our presence as black writers has been a force for good in our media.
Sadly, the same cannot be said about our universities. Even though the number of black students has increased tremendously over the years, the professoriate in these institutions remains lily-white.
Interestingly, the university has become the proverbial Oreo cookie with black vice-chancellors at the top, a white professoriate in the middle, and black students at the bottom.
How can we break this pattern, Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande? Part of the problem is that we have sought to resolve the situation by having black intellectuals integrate into the existing model of the university. And yet the system itself is archaic and dysfunctional.
In a New York Times article appropriately titled "End universities as we know them", Columbia University's Mark Taylor summed up the crisis of the modern university as follows: "Most graduate programmes in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over 100000 in student loans)."
The main reason that the university is hard to transform is that the professors we seek to replace are the very ones who preside over who should take their place and when.
In our situation, black scholars in white academic departments are at the mercy of the very white professors who have hoarded professorial jobs for decades, often through incestuous, self-referential publications networks. The same old white professor teaches the same thing he has been teaching for three or four decades, and recycles the same journal article in several publications edited by his graduate school friends.
But we cannot change the racial make-up of our universities without changing the model of the university itself. In the US there are creative initiatives to put civic contribution at the centre of the appointments and promotions process. Indeed, if we were to bring a public intellectual dimension to the appointments and promotions process, then the pool of people who would qualify as professors would suddenly expand, and universities would suddenly be socially relevant and accessible to many young, capable kids.
I can already anticipate arguments about standards. But what standards, I ask, when our "best" university scrapes in at only 200 in the world rankings of universities? To think that we will get to the top with a system that sustains such mediocrity, and that draws on such a limited pool, is even more ludicrous.
Our universities need an injection of new blood that can only come from a combination of academic achievement and public work.
Suffice to say I am the best example of what I am proposing -- straight from the Ivy League into the townships and villages, working with youth in all corners of this land for a good five years. Young people were enriched by my knowledge just as I was enriched by their new insights.
Had I entered the university from the start I would never have reached the people I have reached through public writing. The books I have written and edited would not have been nearly as exciting without that public experience. With that combination of academic and public experience could anyone seriously argue that I could not be a professor?
Of course not.
Our universities will only make it to the top of the world by being sites of public creativity here at home, with that lily-white inner middle occupied by an increasing number of young, smart, black, public-minded intellectuals.
Mangcu is affiliated to the University of Johannesburg and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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