Programme Director;
The University of Zululand Convocation Executive Committee;
Dignitaries Present;
Ladies and gentlemen;
All protocol observed.
We wish to start by thanking the executive members of the University of Zululand Convocation for inviting us to this august occasion where this university’s alumni are meeting to discuss what role they can play to ensure that this institution is at the cutting edge of knowledge production not only for the African continent but for global community at large.
Programme Director, an event such as this where one is called upon to address some of the leading minds that have emerged out of a university that has produced luminaries and scholars in various disciplines is not only overwhelming but is intellectually daunting.
Although, some of us do not belong to the ranks of the robed ones and the learned scholars, having spent our formative years in the trenches of the liberation of this country, we will, within the limited knowledge of our understanding of the world, attempt to say a few words.
Programme Director, we have been asked to address a specific topic today which is: “Building a strong university that benefits all of us.” We are encouraged that you have chosen such a theme for your gathering because, we feel, it is in line with our democratic project which is to build a society in which all of our people have a stake.
In this regard, universities as key pillars of the civil society, of necessity, need to ensure that what they do is aimed at benefiting the whole of society. Because many of you have affinity with the written word we have no doubt that you are aware of the enduring African saying that a cock belongs to its owner, but when it crows it is heard by the whole village. In this regard, while universities are centres of learning for the few, however the knowledge that they produce should help the whole society to be a better one.
However, before we delve into the subject matter at hand we feel that we need to start by addressing the question that: what is the role of universities in society? Addressing the topic the role of universities in knowledge societies at the World Universities’ Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Prof Ravi Shama and Prof N Ghista, wrote thus: “A university is a laboratory for the development of a progressive society. This is seen through institution’s ideals in all fields of human thought and endeavor and by the development of education and research programmes that impart these ideals. A university needs to have a handle on the problems confronting society and a clear understanding of its own role. One of the tasks of a university is to develop a framework wherein the knowledge assets of society (human structural and social capital) may be effectively enhanced and sustained through the mission of a university.”
The important point that these two learned professors make is that universities should not only produce knowledge for the sake of it. But, they should produce knowledge that is geared towards assisting their society in order to overcome its challenges. In this regard, in our view, universities should not only be the fountain of knowledge but are the repositories of the collective knowledge of any society. This means that universities should be a cauldron of independent thought in society.
Given that knowledge or should we say the confluence between knowledge and epistemology are not objective concepts, the question that arises is ,therefore, how should universities treat the process of knowledge production? In an era where some of the biggest economies in the world are not those which have natural resources but are those which are excelling in the knowledge economy, how do we ensure that the process of knowledge production is not contaminated by our subjective understanding of the world so that our country can, too, be a knowledge based economy?
In his Memoir, entitled “Known and Unknown”, the former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld poses an interesting question in relation to the question of epistemology and knowledge. Addressing a press conference, Rumsfeld said: “Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knows: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknows: that is to say there are some things (we know) we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the one we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.”
Essentially, what Rumsfeld says here is that the quest for knowledge is eternal. In other words, the bounds of knowledge are only limited by our imagination. This, therefore, means that the process to search for knowledge is limitless. In this regard, this convocation working with this university has a bigger role to ensure we push the boundaries of knowledge. But, more importantly, to ensure that, understanding that knowledge production is not an objective process, we adopt an open minded approach to our process of knowledge creation.
We say this because you will, we are assure, agree with us that before the arrival of colonialists Africans have always had their own systems of knowledge be it in the field of science, medicine, conflict resolution, astronomy etc.
However, the reality is that we have failed to tap into this endless well of knowledge because those who dominated us have taught us that theirs is the superior knowledge. Instead, indigenous knowledge, which is the name we give to our knowledge to denote that it is something that belongs to the ancient times, is being gradually wiped out of the collective body of knowledge of our society. Sadly, indigenous knowledge is now something that we talk about when we are romanticising about the glorious days of our past.
Yet, we know that nations that are emerging as super powers do so on the back of their collective body of knowledge, their way of life, traditions and social mores. More often than not, we take indigenous knowledge system as something that needs to be stored in the wardrobe of history only to be dusted off and be used as and when it is needed, as if it has no relevance in our day to day existence.
Yet we all know, that, for example, the concept of multilateralism which, has gained currency in the West after the two world wars, is as old as the African hills themselves in our continent. Ours has never been a society of winners take all. We have always been a consensus building society, long before those who have always believed in unilateralism learned about something such as multilateralism.
Given this reality, what should universities do to ensure that knowledge production is neutral? To respond to this question, we need to look at the challenges facing universities today. In an article which appeared in the influential British newspaper, the Guardian, Jon Baldwin, who is the registrar at the University of Warwick, identifies three points about the challenges facing universities today.
“What marks out the best US universities from ours is the scale of endowment. Harvard’s endowment is $34.9 billion, far in excess of Cambridge’s $4.1 billion or Oxford’s $3.6 billion- and the rest of us get less. Competing without money is like Bolton hoping to challenge Manchester United. This leads to our third challenge - globalisation. In the coming years there will be a change in the international higher education sector with countries such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia significantly developing their own capacity.”
In fact, there is a correlation between the ranking of the best universities in the world and the economic powerhouses of the world. According to the World’s Best University rankings, the University of Cambridge, Harvard, Massachutes, Yale and University of Oxford are all in the top five. Only the university of Oxford is from the United Kingdom with the rest from the USA.
We all know that the US is the biggest economy in the world and Britain is in the top ten of the biggest economies in the world. Funding is, therefore, key in knowledge production. With the change in the global economic landscape, there is no doubt that universities from the developing world will also take centre stage and knowledge production will reflect this. But, we will come back to this.
Now, that we know that funding is key in the production of knowledge, how does this affect knowledge production?
To deal with this question, allow me to quote one of the leading intellectuals of our time, Naomi Chomsky, who, in his work, academic freedom and the corporatisation of universities wrote:
“Outside funding has other effects on the university, unless it’s free and unconstrained. Corporatisation can have considerable influence in the independence and integrity of an institution. It can shift the balance of academic activity. Corporate managers have a duty. They have to focus on profit making and seeking to convert much of life as possible into commodities.”
The point that Chomsky makes is that in an era where some multi nationals have a bigger market capitalisation than the Gross Domestic Products of some small countries, the production of knowledge, especially research, which is funded by corporates, cannot be entirely objective.
In our quest to answer the question posed to us that how can we build a university that benefits all of us we have tried to look at the role of universities in modern times, the challenges that they face in the production of knowledge and, critically, to highlight the point that knowledge production is not fault free.
Having looked at some of the structural challenges facing universities today, the question that we have to answer is what is the role of this convocation in building that ideal institution of higher learning?
Firstly, Programme Director, we meet today, as we have indicated earlier on, at the time when there is a tectonic shift in the global economic landscape. The 2008 economic contraction, which started in the United States of America and spread throughout the world, has changed the face of the global economy. The Eurozone crisis has only made the situation worse.
No one could have imagined that the developing countries such as China, Russia, India, and of course, South Africa would be asked to contribute to the firewall fund to boost the flagging global economic confidence. Such has been the change in the world’s economic arena that the developing economies are growing markedly while the established economies have gone belly up.
Closer to home, Africa has emerged as the next frontier of growth. According to the research which was done by the prestigious Mckinsey Global Institute Africa’s collective Gross Domestic Product in 2020 is set to reach $2.6 trillion.
Currently, it is around $1.6 trillion roughly equal to Brazil’s or Russia’s. We also know that our country has identified the challenge of unemployment, poverty and inequality as central to our efforts to create an inclusive society.
Just this week, the chairperson of the National Planning Commission Minister Trevor Manuel presented the final report of the planning commission to the joint sitting of parliament. The report contains a number of measures that this government needs to employ in order to be a winning nation in the next twenty years. Here in KwaZulu-Natal we have also developed the most ambitious plan yet, the KwaZulu-Natal Growth and Development Strategy whose vision is to ensure that in 2030 KwaZulu-Natal will be a better place to live in.
Programme Director, the reality is that all these plans cannot be a success if they are not supported by our universities which are centres of knowledge production. In this regard, this convocation has a duty to ensure that it influences the direction of this university by ensuring that this university benefits the whole society. This means that this university, especially at this stage in the evolution of our democratic project, cannot afford to be a spectator while we are hard at work building a prosperous, democratic, non-racial and non- sexist society.
This also means that universities such as this should be able to align their research with the greater goals of society. If government has identified poverty, unemployment and inequality as the biggest threat facing this democracy, we expect this university to also play a critical role in aligning its research with the overall agenda of society.
While we will be the first one to agree that the government’s agenda is not the sum total of society’s goals, however universities cannot afford to be centres of academic excellence without any benefit to society.
While universities should be melting pots of independent and critical thoughts, their responsibilities go beyond producing knowledge for the sake of producing knowledge. But they have to be at the service to of society.
Importantly, we must always be conscious of the fact that our responsibility as the alumni of this university we represent the ideals of a developed, self-sufficient Africa. No African university can be content for producing only graduates whose mission is to maintain the status quo. Graduates from African universities have a responsibility to take forward the ideals of Nkwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela and Cecilia Makiwane and build an African that can engage with the world on its own terms.
This means that as graduates and those who are yet to be produced by this university have no business pursuing the frivolous and individualistic culture of accumulation that has resulted in the erosion of social mores throughout the world.
One of our foremost thinkers, Ngugi WaThiongo recently said during a lecture at the Free State University: “Ours has to be a continuous return and reconnection with the creative base of our being, the working people of Africa. It’s this that gave Africa the power and the strength to fight against the armed might of colonial empires: it’s what will enable Africa to liberate and revolutionise its being. It’s the condition of the ordinary person that should be the gauge of what progress we have made, not that of the pampered middle class.
Most important, Africa must rediscover and reconnect with Kwame Nkrumah’s dreams of a politically and economically united Africa, rooted in the working people of Africa. If we brought together the might of our African and global presence, there’s nothing that could stop Africa being an equal global player. It’s only such an Africa that can contribute to the world and receive from the world on terms of equal exchange and mutual respect. The world begins at home. Home begins inside the castle of one’s skin.”
Programme Director, in conclusion in 1762 one of France’s most influencing thinkers Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote a treatise, which has been described by many scholars as the cornerstone and the bedrock of modern thinking, the social contract, which we have no doubt that as learned people you are familiar with.
The social contract begins with its most famous line that: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Of course, Rousseau was lamenting the social and moral ills that had been produced by the development of society at that time.
He argued that humans were essentially free and were born free in the state of nature, but the progress of civilisation had made them subservient to others. He further argued that humans needed a social contract because their fate was intertwined.
It is, therefore, our contention that universities cannot exist outside the ambits of their society’s development. They too have a social contract with their societies to ensure that societies reach their highest level of innovation and development. We have no doubt that this is a challenge that you will ensure that this institution rise up to in order to build a university that benefits all its society.
I thank you.
