Mail and Guardian - 01 Nov 2013
JM Coetzee
Novelist and academic JM Coetzee's foreword to University of Cape Town fellow Professor John Higgins's new book.
Dear John,
Thank you for letting me see your essays on academic freedom in South
Africa. The general question you address - "Is a university still a
university when it loses its academic autonomy?" - seems to me of the
utmost importance to the future of higher education in South Africa.
Hardly less important is the junior cousin of that question, namely:
"Is a university without a proper faculty of humanities (or faculty of
humanities and social sciences) still a university?"
As you point out, the policy on academic autonomy followed by the ANC
government is troublingly close to the policy followed by the old
National Party government: universities may retain their autonomy as
long as the terms of their autonomy can be defined by the state.
The National Party had a conception of the state, and the role played
by education within the state, to which such tenets of British liberal
faith as academic freedom were simply alien.
The indifference of the ANC to academic freedom has less of a
philosophical basis, and may simply come out of a defensive reluctance
to sanction sites of power over which it has no control.
But South African universities are by no means in a unique position.
All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty
to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers
of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to
turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the
skills required by a modern economy.
To read more...
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