Professor Jonathan Jansen pretends to have a monopoly in the transformation debate, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
I see Professor Jonathan Jansen, the vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, continues his melodramatic and condescending analysis of, and attacks on, mostly black students. These are students who rightly agitate for overdue transformation across our university campuses.
I think I’ve figured out why he sounds increasingly more alarmist every time he opines on the protests: if he has to admit that there is substantive merit in the student activists’ grievances, then he would be admitting that his record in the higher education sector – as a self-styled Desmond Tutu of education – is a record that isn’t as great as many might think.
Of course, if you speak into an echo chamber of mostly white applause then you can go to bed thinking you had saved the country from itself that day, on your way to the next Kumbaya-themed public-speaking gig.
Jansen’s latest melodramatic pronouncements appeared in the Sunday Times. He asserts, for example, that “at places like Wits, common thuggery has long displaced progressive protests, and this has serious consequences for democracy”.
When discussing “largely black mega-campuses, the products of mergers”, he insists “these students here target the wrong source – university leaders and campus property... the managers of these campuses simply do not know how to break the cycle of violence other than call in the riot police”.
Oh cry me a river, Jonathan Jansen. You sound worse than ANC politicians trying to justify the use of violence in Parliament to deal with “thugs” among opposition parties. What a pathetic attempt to justify unimaginative and irresponsible non-leadership among too many vice-chancellors in the country and their management structures.
First, it isn’t true that vice-chancellors and universities lack the powers to engage students and their allies among staff and the wider public, more effectively. The transformation agenda has been spelt out with incredible and patient detail by leaders of the protests, ranging from staff composition to curricula reform to more enduring questions about access to higher education, holiday accommodation and a long list of well-articulated, salient agenda items.
Second, students don’t pose a security threat justifying the use of apartheid-era riot policing methods as soon as you hear them knocking at the door. If you look at the damning photographic evidence of how my alma mater, Rhodes University, for example, pathetically called the SAPS’s dog unit in Grahamstown to attack peaceful students a few weeks ago, you would struggle to make a reasonable case for why this use of the dog unit was proportionate to an innocuous, peaceful protest.
In some cases where property does get destroyed, the use of law enforcement officers is legally justified, like in KwaZulu-Natal most recently. That, sure, I concede. But which self-respecting academic starts and ends his analysis by looking at the responses to violence that are open to university leadership?
The key question is: Why did student protests in KwaZulu-Natal get to a point where violence was even a morally acceptable choice for students? The question was not flagged by Jansen in his analysis piece yesterday.
I’m not surprised that Jansen doesn’t wrestle with this nexus question. Because to ask why violence is used – without thereby endorsing the use of violence one iota – requires one to imagine that student leaders might be worth listening to, closely.
But if you don’t respect students as adults and equal partners in a joint conversation to transform society then you will not engage them with goodwill or ascribe to them due legitimacy and agency. That, ultimately, is why Jansen and others routinely condescend to students and pretend they have an epistemic monopoly in the transformation debate just on account of being, frankly, old.
But here is the irony of this ageism and epistemic arrogance: If Jansen and others were half as intellectually curious as they wrongly imagine the student leaders to not be, then they would better articulate what students have been saying before critically engaging these students.
All you get are exhibitions of straw-person fallacies from critics. They don’t listen to or carefully read the intellectual activism from the students and many progressive academic staff members.
Jansen might get a prominent spot in a weekly paper, but the really impressive thought-pieces live in the blogosphere, on social media platforms, excellent online sites like Daily Maverick and in speeches, position papers and talks that the students organise daily and weekly in an impressive number of conferences and talks.
I could point critics to these materials so that they engage the content and not assume they know their interlocutors. But that would be a waste of time because the use of straw-person claims, like Jansen thinking thuggery is in the DNA of some Wits students, is evidence of a refusal to take others seriously.
That refusal to take others seriously is itself a marker of a vicious rather than a virtuous intellect. Students must not be disheartened.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
THE STAR