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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