CHRIS BRINK|

A PROFOUND change is taking place in our understanding of the mission of higher education. Increasingly, we have realised that academic freedom must be accompanied by the exercise of academic responsibility, in the sense of making a contribution to civil society.

Actively responding to societal challenges is one way of doing so – as many universities have demonstrated in the case of COVID-19.

It is by now a commonplace remark that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything, everywhere. We should all prepare for a ‘new normal’.

This is true, in particular, for residential universities, whose beautiful and comfortable campuses, in which they have invested so much care and money, were suddenly swept clean of students and professors in early 2020.

Since then, there has been a tsunami of changes: among them, an immediate pivot to online teaching and learning; rapid rethinking of pedagogy, assessment and curricula; emergency investment in digital infrastructure; re-evaluation of real estate; a blockage in the flow of international mobility; and behavioural changes among students and staff.

Underneath these surface phenomena, however, there is another and deeper change that has slowly been unfolding for some time – a shift in the tectonic plates of academia. A profound change is taking place in our understanding of the mission of higher education.

The changing mission of higher education is best understood at a conceptual level.

To explain what I mean, let me begin with our most fundamental tenet: the idea of academic freedom. There are many formulations, but essentially they all say that academic freedom is the right to create and disseminate knowledge on any topic we want, as we want, when we want, without external compulsion or constraint.

Such constraints, as there may be, are all situated within the academy, and exercised through the judgment of our peers; these include scholarly norms like originality, significance and rigour. It is external compulsion or constraint that we insist on being free from.

For academics of my generation (I’m 70), the emphasis on academic freedom created a space in which we could produce and disseminate knowledge without concerning ourselves very much with what happened to that knowledge.

In the knowledge economy, we operated very much on the supply side, secure in our conviction that an invisible hand would, in the fullness of time, deliver to society the benefits of knowledge, and thus satisfy demand. Excellence, we thought, would suffice.

Excellence is not sufficient

Increasingly, however, it became evident that, while this elegant argument might be true, it cannot be the whole truth, and, while excellence is necessary, it cannot be sufficient. The benefits of the invisible hand are slow in coming and unpredictable in nature.

While we may argue that, in the long term, it brings many unforeseen advantages, we must also admit that, in the short term, it fails to address many palpable needs. From the point of view of societal need, the invisible hand argument looks uncomfortably like an abdication of social and moral responsibility.

It should not have surprised us, then, that over the past few decades there has been an increasing impatience in civil society with the supply-side model of academia. There has been a shift in societal expectations of higher education, demanding more than just a supply of knowledge.

While no doubt delighted to hear that we have clever professors who write clever papers which are cited by other clever professors, society no longer considers that to be enough justification for our existence. No longer content to hear only about what we are good at, society wants to know in addition what we are good for.

Academic responsibility

Given the urgency and importance of many global challenges (and their local variations), it is a fair question to ask of academia whether and how we are responding to these challenges. In other words, more is expected of us on the demand side of the knowledge economy.

While very practised at responding to the ‘good at’ question, we are much less fluent in responding to the ‘good for’ question – in fact, it often still seems to catch us by surprise. There is something lacking in our conceptual framework, and in the absence of that something, we have difficulty in offering a concise, coherent and convincing response to the question about our role in society.

To look for what is lacking, here is a question. Academic freedom is clearly a supply-side concept. Is there a corresponding and equally fundamental concept on the demand side of knowledge production and dissemination which will augment our academic endeavour and allow us to respond adequately to the question of our role in society?

Yes, there is. It is the concept of academic responsibility.

No freedom can exist without responsibility, because freedom unrestrained by a self-imposed sense of responsibility becomes self-destructive. We saw this on 6 January 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, and history has shown us similar examples many times before. In principle and in practice, freedom without responsibility undermines its own foundations.

Why should we think that academic freedom is any different?

This is what the changing mission of higher education is about. It is an increasing realisation that, without relinquishing any of our cherished convictions regarding academic freedom, we should add to them in equal measure a sense of academic responsibility, and act accordingly.

Such a process of change has been unfolding for some time, manifesting itself in various ways and in different domains of discourse.

University Social Responsibility Network

Consider, for example, the work of the international University Social Responsibility Network (USRN).

Since 2015, this excellent organisation has been practising and preaching its belief that universities have a responsibility to work together to address the economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges in the world and to find solutions so as to make society more just, inclusive, peaceful and sustainable.

Their forthcoming summit, hosted as a virtual event by the University of Pretoria from 3-5 February 2021, will be considering priorities for the next decade, and inputs are welcome from any reader of this article (which also serves as a preview of my keynote address to be delivered at that event).

Nor is the USRN the only organisation working in the arena of academic responsibility. A broadly similar agenda is espoused, to mention only a few more examples, by the Civic University Network in the UK, the International Consortium for Higher Education, Civic Responsibility and Democracy, and the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities.

These organisations operate in what might broadly be called engagement mode, reflecting a good idea with an unfortunate nomenclature, the so-called ‘third mission’ of universities.

Challenge-led research

But the idea of academic responsibility is also manifesting itself more broadly, as an integral part of the academic endeavour. A good example is the increasing insistence that universities should be able to demonstrate the societal impact of their research.

This was affirmed, for example, by the Global Research Council, in its 2019 Statement of Principles titled “Addressing Expectations of Societal and Economic Impact”. As will be familiar to academics in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and some other jurisdictions, ‘research impact’ is not about citations or journal impact factors.

It is rather a particular version of the ‘good for’ question: Universities are asked to provide evidence of how their research has changed people’s lives for the better.

Moreover, this is not only about societal impact that came about by happenstance, through the workings of the invisible hand. It is also about research consciously responding to societal challenges.

More and more we hear of challenge-led research, as a counterpart of traditional curiosity-driven research. A frequent example is research conducted in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but the same impulse is evident in many countries at national level and in many cities at regional level.

Challenge-led research is, by definition and by intention, responsive to societal need, in a way that classic curiosity-driven research is not. It, therefore, operates within the context of academic responsibility, whereas curiosity-driven research operates in the context of academic freedom, the two modes of operation complementing each other.

At a conceptual level, responsiveness is not a synonym for responsibility, but at a practical level it serves as a more than satisfactory proxy. Responsiveness to the needs and demands of society is, therefore, both a moral imperative and a strategy with much to commend it, as I and others argue in a forthcoming book, The Responsive University and the Crisis in South Africa.

COVID-19 has shown the way

For a final example of the exercise of academic responsibility, I return to where I started: the COVID-19 pandemic. It is generally agreed that universities responded to the crisis very well, implementing almost overnight an online presentation of their teaching and learning portfolios.

But that is not all. Academics and universities also put their expertise to work to help understand, model, combat and ultimately prevent the spread of the virus. Hardly ever has the saying ‘from each according to their ability’ been more vividly demonstrated.

Universities with medical schools joined the urgent search for a vaccine, or contributed testing labs, or made available health sciences staff.

Other universities contributed epidemiological modelling, or statistical analyses, or data scientists. Engineering labs helped to produce urgently needed medical equipment.

Social scientists analysed the effect of the lockdown measures on local communities. Economists and philosophers considered the difficult moral issue of lockdown measures introduced to save lives but which also exacerbated poverty and inequality.

It is gratifying to think that all of this was done in the first instance from no other motive than a sense of responsibility.

If we have the will and the energy, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic could yet prove to be not only an example of academic responsibility, but an inflection point in the changing mission of higher education.

In the case of COVID-19, we rose to the occasion. But there are other pandemics: poverty, hunger, inequality, the climate emergency, dirty energy … Will we devote the same attention to these as we did to a virus? Without relinquishing our cherished idea of academic freedom, academic responsibility should compel us towards this end.

The author of the commentary, Chris Brink, is emeritus vice-chancellor of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and former rector of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is the author of The Soul of a University: Why excellence is not enough, and the editor of a forthcoming volume, The Responsive University and the Crisis in South Africa. He will be a keynote speaker at the virtual conference titled “University Social Responsibility: Priorities for the Next Decade”, which will be hosted from 3-5 February by the University of Pretoria and the University Social Responsibility Network.

GODWIN SIUNDU|

As I suggested last week, the world of letters widely recognises, rightly in my view, that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in partnership with Owuor Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong, initiated and oversaw an important revolution in how the teaching of literature in universities in Africa should be structured, if the curriculum is to mediate communication between the people and their immediate or broader environment.

Not only did the three destabilise the intellectual platform on which the colonial project had been mounted, thus, the indoctrination on the nature of knowledge and civilisation, and their manifestation as and in literature, they also introduced an important trope by which later debates on the thought patterns of continental and diasporic Africans could be held.

The trope of decolonisation, which was popularised by Ngũgĩ’s 1986 essays, continues to capture the imagination of many scholars who view the legacies of colonial domination as largely responsible for the continued inequalities that damn some people to lives of misery while rigging opportunities in favour of a small elite.

In all these, the grammar of decolonisation, which animated the Ngũgĩ-Anyumba-Taban initiative, finds relevance among those of us who still think that despite the initial triumphs of anti-colonial initiatives, classical colonialism only retreated to repackage, and is now back in other equally vicious but relatively subtle forms that rely on what appear fair and objective forms.

I am talking about the seemingly universal acquiescence to the force of neoliberal market machinations to extend racialised and gendered inequalities – leave room for a few exceptions – while propping up many unhelpful myths, such as that hard work is a precondition for material success. We now know that this is hogwash, because generally people inherit the blessings of privilege or the curses of poverty and, however far they may run, they never quite break off the chains.

Sisyphean struggles

Part of these Sisyphean struggles by human beings to find their level at the market place have seen humanity become more reckless in their dealings with the earth, for example, leading to wanton extraction that has led to the unfortunate and now undeniable tragedy of global warming, whose ramifications we are yet to understand fully.

As Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe noted in a recent lecture, the earth is hurting and in dire need for repair. To Mbembe, significant changes beneath the surface of the earth are diminishing its capacity to carry us on its shoulders, and soon we shall be unable to pin it beneath our feet.

 If one needed more evidence of this, they only need to look at the plight of our compatriots in Baringo, who have to leave their earthly achievements to flee uphill from raging water levels.

So, what has the revolution of literature curriculums at the university level got to do with all these? One, the current trajectory and underpinning philosophies of literature have a narrower scope and vision that tend to prioritise rather dated concerns. For example, the overarching ideological frame of the 1960s when the Ngũgĩ-Anyumba-Taban partnership inaugurated the curriculum decolonisation agenda was largely predicated on a biological fiction of race that was measured, almost exclusively, using phenotypic indicators of the colour of one’s skin, eyes, or hair.

What happens now, given that race and racism have been relocated beneath the skin, when pretensions of post-racialism go hand in hand with racial profiling in transit points such as airports?

 What kind of literature should we teach that adequately prepares our students to appreciate and push back against normalised forms of exclusion and marginalisation?

These and related questions demand that we look at the literature curriculum more closely to imagine possibilities of centering new genres of literature that allow our students to enjoy the magic of literary creativity while learning how technology has been appropriated to extend racial and other inequalities. So, for instance, where we had the African Novel as the ultimate literary unit at college, how about a unit in Sci-Fi?

After all, the biosphere that was the reason colonialism was attractive to Europe, and what informed the hunger for European imperialism generally, was the desire to ‘own’ and control part of a biosphere that has now been so ravaged by industrial capitalism to the extent that not much of the earth is now habitable without modification.

The daily fog of India’s and China’s cities attest to this. Clearly, we need to focus on a literature that appreciates historical concerns but also prepares our learners to ask the right questions to fit meaningfully in the current world of technology, travel, and reconfigured value systems. This way, it should be possible for us to mount literature units that illuminate ecological and other concerns aimed at ensuring sustainable existence in the biosphere.

Reading literature

Second, the need to revolutionise the literature curriculum is informed by the concerns with the value of the discipline in the prevailing circumstances where people pursue education for utilitarian purposes, primarily for employment. Why should a student spend years reading literature from Classical Greek days to current urban legends when all they really want is to meet credit requirements for a BA, after which they proceed to be bank tellers, among other openings? Shouldn’t it be possible to tailor units such as Literature for Engineering? Or Literature and Legal Reasoning?

I have it said by many colleagues that literature is useful in equipping learners with critical thinking skills. This is definitely true, but how do we proceed in an era when algorithmic and other forms of artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly available and affordable?

It is clear to me that literature is an important subject that, if I had my way, every professional would be required study. But I also think it should not be curated in a rigid or one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, the curriculum could be rejigged to accommodate different interest groups; those who have a passing interest in it need not be taken through the whole nine yards just.

Indeed, given the reality that most people in the world have bought into the trap of neoliberal economics – in which STEM is touted as the panacea to all problems of underdevelopment and personal achievement, it is time we thought of packaging literature in ways that meet our and ‘their’ needs. That is the only way that we can alter the pro-market thinking that privileges STEM and business courses at the expense of the humanities, including literature.

That is the only way that we can complete the project of decolonisation that Ngũgĩ-Anyumba-Taban crew initiated. At the core of this strand of decolonisation is the idea that we need a radical openness of discipline, as opposed to the implied insulation that made literature attractive to the ideologues of yore and dreadful to repressive regimes of the 60s and 70s.

That double attribute, of attraction to progressive minds and repulsive to reactionary ones, is what ultimately made it marginal in the preeminent neoliberal world of thought. It is what, logically, complete decolonization can cure.

(SOURCE: NATION.AFRICA)