BY JOHN HIGGINS
A central aim of the newly published monograph Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance: Within the academic profession at Makerere University is to seek to get hold of an animating contradiction at work in global higher education policy by looking at the impact of global higher education policies on the academic profession as it has been experienced at Makerere University in Uganda.
In so doing, it presents an important update to, and engaged dialogue with, Mahmood Mamdani’s searing 2007 study, Scholars in the Marketplace: The dilemmas of neo-liberal reform.
Academics, administrators and policy-makers today live in, and think through, the contradictory space produced by what, in essence, are two competing and opposed definitions of the aims and goals of higher education.
The first of these is the understanding of higher education as a human right, one dedicated to the public good through the enhancement of the lives of citizens.
The second is that of higher education construed as an essentially private benefit, one whose central purpose is the servicing of the economy through the provision of appropriately skilled person-power.
Article 26 of the United Nations’ 1948 Declaration of Human Rights stated that “Everyone has the right to education” and that such education should be compulsory, and free of charge “at least in the elementary and fundamental stages,” while higher education “shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”
This support followed from the centrality of education to the democratising project undertaken by the United Nations (UN) as it set itself against the “disregard and contempt for human rights” evident in the Second World War and its “barbarous acts” and set out to promote “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.”
Thinking on education in the UN’s parallel institution, UNESCO, was driven by its roots in the democratising tendencies of the UN’s promotion of human rights, tendencies which focus above all on the importance of dignity. Education here is understood with a strong emphasis on the dimension identified in the German language as that of Bildung: the formative and socialising aspects of education.
Human capital perspective
The original UN and UNESCO initiative was an affirmation of education as a means of developing dignity and self-esteem in individuals.
Education was meant to encourage the active, critical and creative aspects of human understanding with the sense that these all contribute to the strength and maintenance of democracy and act for the public good.
At the same time, though, and in and through this same post-war period, an alternative representation of the aims and goals of higher education was developed.
This was established and promoted in and through the work of another post-war international organisation, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or as it later became known, the World Bank.
The policy discourse of the bank represents an economistic and instrumental view of the substance and aims of higher education, one which stands in contradiction to UNESCO’s founding emphasis on dignity and the democratising force of education and higher education.
From this perspective, higher education was understood and represented as a literal investment that had a calculable “rate of return,” and so reframed the idea of higher education as a benefit to the user, and, as such, an essentially private benefit.
In the human capital perspective, students became “entrepreneurs of the self,” and made their decisions about higher education in an entirely (economically) rational fashion, based solely on their calculation of the balance between the costs of self-investment and the future financial benefits likely to accrue to them.
In the same manner, (and as Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance demonstrates) the human capital perspective also works to produce – for the academic profession – a damaging and distorted view of relevance.
This is one that threatens to undermine or even displace the critical, democratising and public good functions of the university, its research, training and professional formation.
Academic freedom
Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance: Within the academic profession at Makerere University gives empirical substance and human depth to the general contradiction sketched out above.
Engaging particularly in how this has played out in Africa, it also poses sharp questions to global higher education policy as a whole.
Africa – and, notably, the higher education system in Uganda – has been a testing ground for key World Bank policies.
Claimed by some as an exemplary product of the successful implementation of these policies, Makerere University in Uganda has also been the site of multiple disruptions, and cited as key evidence for the failures of policy.
The product of several years of interviews, discussions with and spirited feedback from academics and deans at Makerere, this study presents the views of those who are usually safely consigned to the “third person” in policy discourse: those who are talked about, but never allowed a voice themselves, the academic profession.
In this book, it is on-the-ground academics and deans (rather than the global policy-makers, and the local government departments and university administrations whom they address) who provide their own perspectives on the impact of policy on the very nature of the academic profession, and on individual working lives within that profession.
Those interviewed are drawn from several key faculties at Makerere University, including the college of engineering, design, art and technology; the college of agricultural and environmental science; the school of law.
It closes with an in-depth engagement with the new Makerere Institute of Social Research and its ambitious plans to rethink the material practice of academic life in Africa.
Again and again, in the in-depth interviews with staff and deans of key faculties at Makerere University, the question of academic freedom insists on coming forward as a central but usually neglected aspect for any serious discussion of one of the buzzwords of contemporary policy: the idea of relevance.
Haunting the discussion is the sense that perhaps the main threat to the academic freedom that everyone claims to hold dear and assumes is a central value in higher education is not the variety of external challenges posed by government interference or civil conflicts that are widely reported on by invaluable institutions such as Scholars at Risk, but rather the internal challenge generated by global higher education policy itself.
What emerges in this book as the centre of concern may stand as the key question for higher education of our time. Should higher education – and the academic freedom that stands at its shadowy core – serve the interests of self-realisation or self-reification?
The work, Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance: Within the academic profession at Makerere University, by Andrea Kronstad Felde, Tor Halvorsen, Anja Myrtveit and Reidar Oygard, is published open access by African Minds.
This review was first published in University World News at https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210908130047567 and is reposted with permission.
John Higgins is a senior research scholar in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa (2014) and An Excluding Consensus? Grants, Loan Schemes and the Need for Equitable Access to Global Higher Education (2019). He contributed a chapter to Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance titled “Getting Academic Freedom into Focus.”
