Comment on Fort Hare revival thesis contested

A STORY is told of an academic who was delivering a brilliant public lecture. He kept on quoting profusely from the works of a world-renowned professor. At some stage, that professor was heard from the back of the auditorium irately exclaiming: “Don’t misquote me in my presence!”

Except that I’m not a renowned professor, I feel like protesting to Professor Leslie Bank: “Don’t misrepresent me while I still live!” This he does in an article “Fort Hare’s double act: equity and excellence” (Saturday Dispatch, March 15).

Bank was responding to my recent article about how to make historically disadvantaged institutions, the University of Fort Hare included, the best in the country.

Let me catalogue the misrepresentations which Bank claims to have picked up from my article. I will attempt to quote him verbatim.

He says: “Jordan accuses universities like Fort Hare of ‘attracting poor black students’.”

Bank can read my article for the umpteenth time, but nowhere will he find such a claim. On the contrary, I am on record as affirming the academic prowess of black students. These students are as the song goes, Young, Gifted and Black!

Virtually in all disciplines these students take the colours nationally, despite their disadvantaged background.

The worst accusation against an innocent soul is when he says that I said these universities “offer... second rate education”. Read that article once more, Professor Bank. How could I say that in the face of these universities having produced auditor-generals, heads of treasury, accountants-general, managing partners of international firms of auditors, directors of national prosecuting authorities; just to mention a few who are close to my discipline? In fact, that is partly how I found my thesis that a University like Fort Hare can be the best in South Africa inside 10 years. Bank goes on to say that the reason Fort Hare and others need new academic programmes, so I argue, is “to attract the best and brightest staff and students” .

With all the six reasons I advance for transplanting of these lucrative qualifications, he will find none as he attributes to me.

It is also not true that I want Fort Hare “to be one of the leading universities”. My standpoint is that I want Fort Hare to be the leading university in South Africa. And why not, given the reasons that I advance?

He also imagines that I want Fort Hare “to be a gateway into the African continent”. I cannot have such a restriction about a university which, perhaps Bank needs to be reminded, etymologically means universus – brought or combined together.

With all the accolades I showered on the historically disadvantaged institutions, no Bank or bank can conclude that “Jordan presents an image of Fort Hare as a washed up struggle university with little academic merit”. I put it to Bank to provide proof thereof.

So his earlier question, “is the university really so very far behind the high achievers academically?” becomes irre-levant.

Later in his article, Bank states that Fort Hare can only survive through “a relatively highly trained cohort of staff and graduate students mainly from elsewhere in Africa to attend to its research agenda. Over 70% of Fort Hare’s post graduates are non-South Africans from Southern Africa. A similar profile applies to the university’s top researchers.”

I would wish to read this approach, together with Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, from the university’s strategic plan.

I also want to point out that although Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda are indeed among Fort Hare’s alumni, they received honorary doctorates and were not actual students.

The only two academic debates I could glean from Bank’s article is that firstly he disagrees with my strategy that there should be transplantation of some qualifications from previously advantaged institutions to these previously disadvantaged institutions.

He proposes duplication in the face of scarce fiscal resources. He is entitled to this view. But the consequence is inescapable. You will merely see more of the same, without an organic change in these institutions. Black will forever be black.

The second debate is that he sees my approach of reformation of South African universities as a zero sum game. My mathematics teacher did not introduce the zero sum theory as equivalent to rationalisation which I here propose.

Further, I do not hold a brief from Bank’s students. It is up to them to agree or disagree with his assertion that “like their Afrikaner predecessors, the easy ride from village, township or farm to university and government office has engendered a sense of entitlement. There is a belief that if you are local you should get something, a certificate, at Fort Hare, even if you do very little. In some circles, Fort Hare is still more a badge of entitlement than a mark of achievement.”

Are we South Africans in Shakespeare’s world “where to do harm is often laudable; to do good, sometime accounted dangerous folly”.

Mncedisi Jordan is a former professor of accounting at the University of Fort Hare and Walter Sisulu University. He is currently a researcher in indigenous cultures