The UKZN Griot. of Humanities and Charters

BY: .

Keyan G Tomaselli*

The Humanities are on the national agenda. Those of us in the Humanities often feel like orphans, the marginalised, the forgotten.  When I first got to UKZN in 1985 we Humanities scholars were often derided by scientists, engineers and mathematicians in Senate and resource meetings, scorned because our students earned less state subsidy, and scoffed at because we tended to be barefoot and wore tatty T-shirts.  When students trashed the campus a Dean of Arts would remark in Senate that the students had good organisational skills.  Must say, we weren’t our best self-promoters in those days.

But all that’s changed.  We still feel like orphans, getting the downside of SAPSE publication incentive returns ‘cos our articles are philosophical and take much time and many pages to write.  No matter, while the Humanities everywhere else are under threat, the national South African horizon has dramatically changed in recent years.

UKZN-linked professors contributed significantly to this change of fortunes.  It helps of course that we have a UKZN sociological graduate at the helm of higher education.  The Chair of his working group that resulted in the Humanities Charter was none other than Ari Sitas, a previously esteemed UKZN Professor who supervised the Minister’s PhD.  Sitas’s national committee was ably supported by Mike Chapman and Nhlanhla Mkhize, amongst others.

But another earlier panel that had worked behind the scenes laid out the actual the philosophical ground work. This was the ASSAf Consensus Panel on the Future of the Humanities.  ASSAf is not a rude acronym – it stands for Academy of Science for South Africa. The constitution of the panel reveals that UKZN  does not always get lost in the hooked dog’s leg between the Wits-Pretoria-UCT-Stellenbosch axis. On that panel from UKZN was Pearl Sithole and we asked Derek Wang for some input regarding the relationship between science and indigeneity.

It was our panel that learned that Humanities graduates do get jobs; indeed they get jobs in the sectors in which they want to work.  No only that, but they are hugely self-reliant, more often than not they work as consultants, being their own bosses.  Bliss – no dreary school boards to attend!  Humanities graduates might earn less than engineers but they are nevertheless greatly appreciated by scientists and engineers as attested to in their invitations to ASSAf membership. Even Bobby Godsell, that most reputable of UKZN social science graduates, an Anglo-American honcho, served on the panel for a while.  If big business can release someone of his stature to work pro bono to shape the Humanities, well, that’s a very good omen.

The ASSAf panel addressed conceptual, employment and related issues, while the Charter wants to reorganise the Humanities.  Man, does this exhausting and distracting reconfiguration/transformation/restructuring never stop?  I recently found this take on change-mania:

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised.  I was later to learn that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising and for a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, its produces confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

This observation is sourced to Roman General Caius Petronius in AD66.  I found it on a notice board at a Swedish university.  It speaks volumes. 

Here’s the “challenge” – to use current management-speak:  universities  post  the Cold War have become intellectual factories serving business, policy, politics and global capital.  Humanities scholars think of themselves as the last bulwark against capitulation to socially alienating neo-liberal technicist, ahistorical and economistic imperatives. 

The humanistic high ground is claimed by Humanities scholars.  They aim to protect the practice of critique, the dialectic, and thus democracy itself.  Social issues are best resolved through research and dialogue. As the word ‘humanities’ suggests, critique should recognise that it is people (who feel, hope, love and fear) who occupy instrumentalist structures created by often alienating regulation and governance. 

ASSAf recognises that the Humanities are in “crisis”, resulting from contemporary overemphasis on science and technology, career pathing and financial gain, in the context of the ‘developmental state’.  Given the stark class disparities in South Africa, the Humanities are often, foolishly, considered a luxury. 

ASSAF recommends the institutionalisation of the Humanities within national science policy. In calls for

·                     Revitalisation, better funding, and Humanities research output internationally published;

·                     An ageing academic workforce that needs to reproduce itself.  Reproduction is best secured through PhD acquisition, a key UKZN objective;

·                     While temporary employment often occurs before settling into the full-time professional sector, a clear fit exists between graduates’ Humanities subjects and their professional work. 

The DoHET Charter attracted sustained national media exposure.  The significance of the unpublicised ASSAf report is that it directly dismisses popular myths that denigrate a Humanities degree vis-à-vis employment prospects. 

The Charter speaks to policy-makers and institutions.  The ASSAf study addresses student, parent, employer and Humanities lecturer concerns.  The principle of academic autonomy assumed by ASSAf will be a factor to consider when the Charter is implemented. 

Significantly, the Charter fractures the common-sense notion derived from the Berlin Conference of “Africa” as a homogeneous, isolated, entity. It proposes an open-ended definition that tactically locates Africa-in-the World.     Wonderfully, it calls for recognition of the full spectrum of research output, including books and better staff- student ratios.  Is this an illusion perhaps?

The Charter’s planning is in the detail, but the budgeting is in the realm of (a perhaps welcome) idealism that is going to test the neoliberal imperatives that are, ironically, pushing the academy in the opposite direction - towards instrumentalism, managerialism and massification. 

The Charter aims to elevate our institutions into the global arena in which  Africans will begin to think of their futures, and not just take refuge in imaginaries of “the past”.  The two reports when read together provide both the analysis and the strategy.  The “Year of the College” (2013) proposals intersected well with this imperative.

* Keyan G Tomaselli was a member of the ASSAf Consensus Panel on The State of the Humanities in South Africa:  status, prospects and strategies (2011).

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the author’s own.