During the 40th Hoernel Memorial lecture at Braamfontein, South African public intellectual Jonathan Jensen delivered a brutally honest lecture that rattled his country’s higher education.
Titled ‘When does a university cease to exist?,’ the lecture was an appraisal of historically black universities in post-Apartheid South Africa, but has since become an enduring reference to the condition of universities across Africa. Describing a South African university campus he’d recently visited, Jensen’s could just have been a graphic portrayal of a local campus.
“The classrooms were dilapidated… the few good professors had left years ago. The management of the university did nothing else than try to keep student outrage down and manage constant threats of labour unrest. The university vice chancellor did not enjoy credibility as a scholar or exhibit the basic competences of a manager… there was constant uncertainty about meeting the payroll demands for each month. The library had not purchased any new books for years…books were routinely stolen or destroyed,” Jensen said.
He went on: “Scholarly publications by academics hardly existed; the few publications appeared in a little-known parochial and local titles posing as academic journals…there was no intellectual life; no stirring debates about development; no lively seminars on current issues…no steady stream of international scholars to lend face and substance to the academic project; no leading scholarly figures on campus — so crucial to establishing the modern university; no idealism about the future...The place was, quite frankly, dead.”
A university does not exist merely because a government decree on its establishment has been gazetted, or a signage proclaiming its name is hoisted by the road. Or an Act has been bludgeoned through Parliament, and the Commission for University Education (Cue) bullied to dole out a charter.
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Many ‘universities’ that have long seized to exist have undergone these rituals. A university does not prove its existence merely because it has concrete laid on a piece of earth, a few programmes approved and students admitted.
Inasmuch as each year a university enrolls students, lecturers show up for lectures, and decisions made on who passes or fails, this does not confirm the existence of that institution.
Annual graduation ceremonies led by hairless professors in drab academic regalia, in a procession accompanied with solemn music, and the chancellor proclaims ‘powers to read’ on graduants, does not establish a university’s existence.
A university ceases to exist when they are stripped by their leaders of both their material and intellectual assets, and the attendant corruption and massive financial theft is barely punished, but is rewarded and extolled.
Broke, debt-saddled universities that are unable to meet the most basic financial obligations risk non-existence. Newspaper reports indicate that nearly all our universities need some type of bail out to avoid extinction.
It ceases to exist if its sole mission is profit, and its logic transformed into a commercial centre, where students are ‘customers’ and all decisions are corporatised at the expense of the broader academic project. Institutions cease to be universities when they are asked to demonstrate profitability. A university is on life-support if quantity is primed over quality.
In Kenya, we brag of more than 60 universities when in actual fact only less than 10 exist. A university ceases to exist when its programmes’ popularity and attractiveness is celebrated over its competitiveness.
It ceases to exist when state control and interference closes down academic space and autonomy; and where senates are mere ‘endorsers’ of parochial state policy, where decrees and statecentric threats have long displaced argument.
When the heart of the university -- the senate -- is transformed into a mere talk-shop, the institution risks premature death.
A university risks demise if it is not allowed to determine its top leadership, and instead ‘surrenders’ this role to a Cabinet Secretary or some other state or political functionary.
A university is fast fading when it imposes on itself narrowing views of the future based on ethnic nationalism and political expedience.
Kenya’s few ‘existing’ universities risk non-existence when 600,000 of its students stay home for nearly 80 days as a result of a strike occasioned by government intransigence and contempt of academics.
Life support
A university is essentially on life support when it allows students to sit for examinations for lectures that were hardly taught. It ceases to exist when it summons (in) disciplined forces to tear gas picketing lecturers and where lectures might soon be delivered at gun-point.
You can tell a university is dangerously losing pulse when the measure of an academic is reducible to an annual salary increment of 0.43 per cent across four years. A country’s university education project is hemorrhaging if its affairs are not guided by a well defined higher education policy. I concur with Jonathan Jensen. ‘A university ceases to exist when the intellectual project no longer defines its identity, infuses its curriculum, energises its scholars, and inspires its students.’
If we do not salvage the academe now, much more will cease to exist. Kenya’s universities are in desperate need of a savior.
- The writer lectures on publishing and Media Studies at Moi University
