University responses to the war in Gaza headlined news reports over the past weeks, most notably on a recent decision by the Senate – the penultimate academic oversight body at universities – at Stellenbosch University.
It rejected a motion to condemn the destruction of academic institutions and call for an immediate ceasefire, among others.
The argument that won centred on academic freedom, meaning that a university should protect the freedom of diverse views rather than take singular positions as if it is a political lobby.
The decision was widely condemned, with Dr Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology leading the charge.
The minister rejected the decision, declaring it to be shameful, blatantly racist, repugnant and one “that takes us back to the dark days of apartheid”.
In the same statement, the minister however confirmed his commitment to academic freedom.
He explained that his official denunciation was justified and did not violate academic freedom because academic freedom did not include the freedom to be racist.
In contrast to the decision at Stellenbosch, the Universities of the Western Cape, Cape Town, Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela called for an immediate ceasefire.
The decisions however did not draw a major response, also not by the minister, presumably since the decisions align with the official government position regarding the war, and its case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
The crux of the principle of academic freedom is that for new truths to be discovered, academics and researchers must be able to develop, test and express opinions without fear of censorship or reprisal – of course always within constitutional, ethical and other appropriate parameters, and tested for rigour, for use of proper scientific method.
As a rule, definitions of academic freedom also include that knowledge work will be for the benefit of society, for the public good, but depending on the particular subject area, perspectives on what this looks like in practice often differ.
Academic freedom is first taken as a rule for individual academics, but also applies to a university as a whole as part of the principle of institutional autonomy – the freedom that a university has to, within the ambit of the law, decide on and run its own affairs, such as to take a position regarding a matter of national or international concern.
The contrasting responses by analysts and officials to welcome or condemn the range of formal positions taken by different universities regarding the Gaza war highlight at least two challenging realities that campuses, higher education managers and academics face – a tension between individual endeavour and collective agreement on truth, and a tension between the organisational and ecological nature of an academic community.
The first tension relates to the freedom of academics to discover unique truths, but that a discovery is considered fully true only after the wider academic community in the subject field recognises the finding as fact.
It is the balance between defining your truth and then presenting it to a wider collective for scrutiny.
The second tension relates to the formal decision-making forums of a university, such as seen in motions at a senate, and how it is made up of a wide range of loosely interconnected academic groups that work on very different subjects and questions – an ecology of knowledge gathering where collective decisions emerge from the ground up and over time.
It may well be true that a Senate decision will as a truth only succeed when freedom and scrutiny, and motions at meetings and emerging consensus come together and intersect at a particular point in time. Or is it?
* Rudi Buys, NetEd Group Chief Academic Officer and Executive Dean, DaVinci Business Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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