The tragedy of Professor Bongani Mayosi’s death has opened up a conversation on the conditions of working, learning and leadership in higher education today.
The deepest motivations of a person’s heart can never be completely discerned or known, so I will not speculate further on Prof Mayosi.
However, it is important that we continue to expose the toxic and demoralising culture that has set in at so many of our tertiary institutions.
Last year I wrote an article published here in the Dispatch titled “Time to Deal with Higher Education’s Dirty Secret”. It described the deteriorating teaching, learning and research quality in our universities, and linked this to the subsidy funding model.
When this article was published, it shocked many members of the public.
Academics responded to me in private, thanking me for talking publicly.
It disturbed me that many of my colleagues were terrified of speaking the truth in public.Who do they fear, you ask?
They are afraid of intimidation, bullying, losing their jobs if they upset their university bosses, managers, departmental heads and even their own colleagues.
They fear being marked as whingers, complainers – of being seen to “badmouth” their universities.
One would almost believe that academics and universities have forgotten that the right to academic freedom is explicitly protected in the constitution in section 16.1.d under the right to freedom of expression.
But genuine academic freedom is in short supply in most of our universities.
The reality is that our universities were never liberated in 1994. They simply transitioned from apartheid authoritarianism to conservative corporatism.
By corporatism, I mean the imposition onto universities of management and production practices derived from factories.
Instead of strengthening the community of scholars after 1994, we saw the introduction of performance management systems, the “executivisation” of university management, performance bonuses, “quality assurance” and branding.
Academic work, which is meant to be the core activity of a university – and ought to be defined by the quality of human-to-human interaction and exploration – is now subject to the language of key performance indicators, performance scores, outputs and incentives.
And to be honest, it just doesn’t work. Everybody is stressed out and in turn stressing each other out.Put aside white conservatives, black people in this system are stressing black people out. In order to meet their outputs, people have mastered the art of setting themselves easy-to-measure targets while toxically micro-managing subordinates.
People are fixated with trying to tick boxes to prove they deserve their promotion and bonus, or just to show they actually did their work.
Academics have refined the art of publishing the same paper in a million different guises so that we can maintain a high research output.
In order to graduate high numbers of postgraduates, we have worked out formulaic methodologies and we use the same predictable networks of people to examine our students’ dissertations.
Standards are lowered to favour production.
The transformation project has been reduced to the number of black academics we have on our books, not their quality of scholarship or academic contribution they make to society at large.
And by the way, while we are busy counting numbers of blacks at formerly white universities, young black women academics are being subjected to the worst sexism and career curtailment in historically black universities.
On top of teaching and administration, academics have to do community engagement and conferencing to prove that their research is relevant, and to showcase the university.
Naturally, we have found ways to make inconsequential activity appear as worthwhile engagement.
In this context, cost-cutting and other financial measures are used to discipline and control.
Academics scramble to produce more, contract lecturers and tutors do more work for less pay, executive managers put the squeeze on everyone to meet targets and meaningful education becomes a pipe-dream.
None of this is healthy or producing groundbreaking work. We need a liberatory approach to higher education transformation and academics need to speak out...