Ihsaan Bassier
Following calls for the decolonisation of universities, the UCT School of Economics has been identified as a site of anti-poor, disengaged teaching that reproduces current power structures. Conceding that there is a problem, the school is currently seriously rethinking the curriculum, a good step in the right direction. Two recent incidents, together with the tellingly anti-black silence of the department, compel this process to go beyond the material.
An associate professor in the School of Economics a few weeks ago remarked to his first-year economics students (about 1 300 in total) that Rhodes built his wealth off his masterful manipulation of the diamonds sector. While partially true, the role of the exploitation of black mineworkers in creating this wealth was erased, leaving Rhodes the hero whose ingenuity earned him wealth.
Outraged e-mails from a group of economics students to him and the department were ignored. Eventually, in a reply to a student, he said that all firms debatably exploit labour. Take note of how Rhodes’s usage of colonial policies is trivialised to the actions of any firm owner, and how theory is used to abstract away from painful historical context.
Then, Dr Ken Hughes, lecturer for the History of Economic Thought (HET) course, wrote in a recent article titled “Appeasing the Taliban”, published in the Daily Maverick: “When UCT was an all-white university, it always tried to treat students as if they were adults. It offered them advanced difficult courses (such as post-1970 mathematics) and it despised courses like the current crop of politically correct fillers and ‘soft options’. Student politicians were expected to be masters of Roberts’s ‘Rule of Order’. Academics were hired on the basis of their knowledge and capacity for scholarly rigour, and for possessing a critical attitude. And students were subjected to a challenging education (which included exposure to challenging works of art). But after UCT was opened up to blacks all this was dumbed down.”
HET is the flagship critical, pluralist thinking course in the school – taught by Dr Hughes as well as the professor mentioned earlier. The school’s response has been contentious internal debate – on academic freedom. A collective, complicit silence (and some support) has met what may generously be termed one of the most violent, offensive verbal attacks on black students.These incidents have left me and many other students in disbelief: these are attacks on who we are fundamentally, a fantastically ahistorical retelling of our very identities. This is who teaches UCT economics. Behind unchecked and alleged claims to academic freedom, lecturers openly teach violently racist, colonial views. Moreover, these lecturers (along with others who are a little more sensible in keeping their prejudices secret) subtly shape standard material using these conceptualisations of our identities. In the process of learning, students are forced to trust these very lecturers to decide what is important enough to teach, and when the material applies. It is no surprise that nearly all the thinkers taught in HET are white males.
Rethinking curriculum and teaching needs to include an understanding that the colonial legacy found therein is upheld by gatekeepers. Sometimes gatekeepers take the form of a default: everybody hates it but nobody dismantles it because of the time and effort required. The burden of proof is always on the changer to prove discrimination, despite many legacies having explicitly been set up on white supremacist principles. This is not trivial.
Gatekeepers also come in the form of key, but quiet decision-makers who retain their place through accumulated networks and skills. Here, gatekeepers come in the form of lecturers celebrating colonialism.
The decisions involved in curriculum design are subtle and may hide insidious motivations. Hard questions need to be asked: When government intervention is ridiculed as inefficient, is it related to the designers’ ignorance of its importance for the country’s poor or, worse, their fear that this entails threatening the elites’ position? When minimum wages are bluntly dismissed as a mechanism for improving the welfare of the black poor, is there a hint of a colonial subtext that black workers are undeserving of decent lives?
The teaching of South African economic history, so fundamental for understanding poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country and yet neglected in the economics curriculum, necessarily entails that these same gatekeepers face up to the historical violence their positions rest on.
It is necessary but insufficient to include pluralistic economic models and history in reformulating the curriculum. Who teaches, who designs the material, and the process by which these decisions are made need to be examined. Decolonisation can only be realised when the underlying mechanisms, the gatekeepers and other remnants of an explicitly white supremacist past, are thoroughly interrogated. There are some progressive lecturers in the UCT School of Economics. Many of them have “self” excluded after years of their attempts to change the school were blocked.
Still, there is strong contestation within the staff. And so this is a debate that can be won.
● Bassier writes on behalf of Decolonise Economics, a new organisation at UCT