Monday, November 9, 2015

Opinion on the South African Academic Revolution

David N. Smith wrote in his book titled WHO RULES THE UNIVERSITIES that the decision to fire Angela Davis in 1969 came neither from her fellow faculty members, not from the administration, but from the Regents of the University of California. The final decision to change from semester system to the quarterly system in the 1960’s came not from faculty, students, or campus community at large but from the Regents. So, even though the example is drawn from an American analogy, the same applies to all universities throughout the world, where a small group of conservative wealthy white males have absolute power to alter the size and mission of the University in response to the needs of the state and the growth of knowledge deemed necessary. Most of the Regents are corporate moguls who sit on various Boards of Directors in some of the world’s largest Banking Institutions, Weapons Manufacturers, Pharmaceutical Companies, Food Retail Chain Stores and so forth. He thus concludes that the Regents’ sphere of influence extends from the smallest details of administrative concerns to the largest questions confronting the Universities’ complicity in war research.
So what are the parallels with our South African condition?

When I had to drop out of University due to unforeseen financial difficulties, the bilious taste left in my mouth by what I saw as a personal failure made me want to find answers to some mind boggling events that could have been the exegeses of my retraction from academia. My search for answers thus let me down a byzantine rabbit’s hole, and what I discovered was not to make me admire academia but loathe it as an institution within a developing country and the capitalist social construct as a whole.

I first had to understand that since the turn of the century, as the process of industrial concentration and monopoly capital formation gained momentum, as the technological needs of capitalism grew more complex (with for instance the emergence of chemical and electrical industries), two Americans – Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockerfeller – established giant foundations designed to impose order on the chaotic world of higher education. Their blueprint has been adopted by every country in the world gearing itself towards capitalism, where the need for an educated wage-labour force capable of coping with sophisticated administrative and research demands of the modern, war-oriented capitalism are becoming an essential commodity. So, universities became high-powered centres of research and an essential instrument for capitalist rule, in that needing huge pools of the new worker, the ruling class (Regents) channeled a large flow of potential blue-collar and traditional service workers through a university system reconstituted to socialise a technical and administrative work force.

It thus followed that universities within capitalist economies, their governing structures would be dictated their objectives by the needs of capitalists monopoly. These capitalist needs dictate priorities of curricula and instruction, leading for an example to the emergence of business studies with profit-making orientation. Subordination of higher education to business interests of the Regents also led to the development of faculties such social sciences imbued with the ideologies of the capitalist monopolists.  But this trajectory, in the lacerated context of institutions reshaped to train and socializes the students to be authority-fearing college-educated workers, seems to be confronted by dissidence from all spheres of education.

International competition between economies is undeniably also competition between schools, so the powers that be have figured that the battle for productivity will be won on the playing fields of schools. Another contemporary of David Smith, Michael Kidron therefore accurately predicted that in such a scenario, monopoly capital will see vast growth in student numbers, and this is in response to capital’s appetite for technical and socio-manipulative skills.

To a degree, one can argue that the present education system is designed to safeguard white supremacist monopoly interest on earth’s resources, by creating education curriculums that serve their profit demands. Furthermore, these regents (the ruling white monopolists), though I still suppose that part function of their education was primarily for the benefit of their white children who were to be equipped with classical education, managed to shoot themselves in the foot. And most will agree, understandably so, the mediocritization of education was inevitably going to cross class borders. Now, their children who believed they were being pruned to be administers of industry, the nation, and often the army, are now finding themselves to also be members-in-training for the college-educated strata of our contemporary economic exploitation.

The current radical student movement sweeping our country is truly refreshing in that it stands to dismantle a variety of socializations and to provide total overhaul of the education system as designed for capitalist benefits. This overhaul should begin at basic education of course, by synergizing the struggles of tertiary student with those of the broader primary and secondary scholarship. These protestations are indeed a prelude to a symphony of protestation that will also unfold when capitalism tries to absorb and exploit these new university-educated workers into larger institutions of monopoly capital. Consider that most of these university-educated workers would enter the job market already under strain of unredeemable debt, therefore employers in the new economy will be left with a conundrum that has its roots in a far and distant monopolist language.  

And I am willing to bet two pints of my own piss that a large number of conservative white parents are fuming seeing their children become part of a 1976 RELOADED sequel that has shattered well preserved reserves of privilege. Being convinced that even though there are some subversive neo and pseudo-liberalist agenda embedded into the overall mission of the campaign, the crux of the matter is that the students actually know they are all getting mediocre education. And that might be the wellspring of the solidarity which seems to go over the heads of conservative white parentage with regards to these protestations. Before the parents can accept that they are paying for sub-standard education in South Africa, the student movement will have to work harder. And before the parentage accrues all it’s might in support of their children, which a clear revolutionary mandate, the students will be incurring debt from loans supplied by the self-safe banking institutions that form part of the Boards of Trustees at all these tertiary institutions.

So in the context of global rebellion against capitalist orders in their various shades, we are now partaking in an insurrection that will even uproot the canonised foundations of educational content. Perhaps student will in effect call for the world of academia not to ever print books that glorify the Theory Of Combustion, and begin branches of applied Science that are more friendly to the planet. I can imagine student psychiatrists abandoning pharmaceutical remedies in the next three years. An exploration of ‘the doors of perception’. Medicine taking leaps beyond anti-biotics; but only if the content of each subject is brought under scrutiny for its contemporary social benefits.

But, as intrigued as I am by the dynamics of this new revolution against tertiary education fees, thinking about how, for instance, the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns had actually physical structures to attack and bring down, I find that students are now fundamentally at war with a global abstraction used for mass classless slavery - MONEY. And by money I mean POWER. And by power I am speaking of the billionaires who form part of various Boards of Trustees of various Universities in the country. I still wonder who the REGENTS of WITS University are, for instance.
For lack of a better and mildly rational diagnosis of the current situations, I would say the country is at a precipice of WAR. A war that is actually too multifaceted that it will eventually become a mass protestation for health care, decent salaries for parents who pay fees and debts incurred by their children, and even better nutrition for students so they can be mentally fit for the said education. This war against economic monopoly on education will therefore start a snowball effect which could be harnessed by those who aim eradicating various social ills ushered in by capitalist democracy.
I am posing a plethora of questions to my drop out self, such as:

                    What stake does BIDVEST have in the university as a ‘brain library/factory’ of a future labour force?
                    What does BARCAYS want with WITS Business School graduates? Remembering how strenuously Anti-Privatizations activists campaigned against Barclays buying ABSA, it is puzzling to find certain Government Departments banking with this institution.
                    What does NASA want with Astrophysics Departments of the Potchestroom University for an example?
                    What does SASOL intend to do with the future of graduates from Universities and FET colleges in the Sedibeng municipality?



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