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Staff Reporter
Academic Freedom and Institutional Autonomy: A View from the Tyhume Valley was the title of a no-holds-barred address by University of Fort Hare Vice-Chancellor Sakhela Buhlungu in Cape Town last week.
He said the autonomy of universities had been eroded, and tertiary institutions were struggling with heavy bureaucratic demands placed on them – ironically, by a democratic government.
Buhlungu was delivering the 57th TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT) last Wednesday. Davie, who led the university from 1948 until he died in 1955, is remembered as a fearless defender of the principles of academic freedom, and this legacy continues in the memorial lecture series.
After joining the University of Fort Hare from UCT on 1 February 2017, the Prof said wonders whether accepted a poisoned chalice at UFH?
“However, the six and a half years that I have spent at the helm of the University of Fort Hare have provided me with invaluable insights on issues of academic freedom and its handmaiden, institutional autonomy,” he said.
When he joined in 2017, Fort Hare was an unstable and fragile with power structures that generally did not put a premium on matters of academic freedom and autonomy.
Some of the manifestations of the fragility, he noted, were frequent and often violent student and staff strikes, a weak resource base, a skyrocketing student debt, deeply ingrained cultures of ungovernability and advanced levels of breakdown of governance.
“The magnitude of the task I faced was summed up to me by an alumnus who observed, “I think you have a good vision for Fort Hare. Unfortunately, you do not have an executive team”. Deep down, I knew he was right. But I also knew that taking short cuts was not an option.”
In the second week after his arrival, Buhlungu said a strike erupted in one of the campuses and crippled teaching, learning, administration and other operations for seven weeks.
“In that context, debates about academic freedom seemed to be the least of concerns to most. For some the main concern was to extract more concessions from the institutions, all of which had no bearing on academic freedom, while for me and others the task was to negotiate a truce that would ensure that at least teaching, learning and other operations were restored and the institution stabilized,” he said.
In the years that followed the cycles of instability – almost always violent – and negotiation to restore order repeated themselves over and over. “Running Fort Hare seemed like mission impossible!”
Buhlungu said the university he inherited suffered severe resource constraints, but it was not the poorest in the country.
Lack of resources and untenable conditions for staff and students rank among universities being the most common triggers of unrest and instability. “I did not have much insight into the web of vested interests lurking in the shadows every time there is unrest and protest action. Many participants are known to the university authorities, the media and the public.”
However, he said that many others operate behind the scenes using money and promises of positions of power and positions to ensure that the institution is in perpetual crisis.
“In other words, it is common for legitimate grievances to be turned into weapons against the university and its administrators, regardless of the reputational harm that such chaos causes.”
One of the paradoxes of the democratic dispensation for higher education, according to Buhlungu was the growing bureaucratic burden on universities. “Although there are very good reasons for keeping universities accountable, the amount of reporting has two main implications. The one is that the report imposes a huge administrative burden on institutions to produce reports, many of which still need to be read or processed after submission.”
Buhlungu added that It is not uncommon to receive requests for information previously provided in the form of statutory submissions, such as the Annual Report submitted in June each year.
Add to these requests for submissions to other bodies such as the Portfolio Committee, the Public Protector, the Commission for Gender Equality, the Human Rights Commission, etc. It is worth noting that virtually none of these requests have been about academic freedom or autonomy of the university.
The second implication he added was that increased demands for reports is that it can be a Trojan Horse for micromanagement and, therefore, incursions into institutional autonomy. “It has happened that a group of students who are not happy with their course marks will write to the national department, and the following week, a request for a report will land on my desk. There are numerous more serious cases one can cite.”
He said that the increased reporting and accountability mechanisms, necessary as some of these are, have yet to help the cause of academic freedom and university autonomy.
INSIDE EDUCATION
