Black intellectual empowerment - now there is a phrase for our times, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Cape Town - Over the past week, I attended two events at Harvard University in the US that showcase what an inspirational university might look like. The first was a public conversation between distinguished American philosopher Cornel West and one of his former students, the distinguished professor of ethics at Harvard, Danielle Ellen.
The conversation started with Ellen speaking about how West had intervened so meaningfully in her life when she was an undergraduate student at Princeton. She almost broke down before she turned the spotlight on West and asked him what had inspired his career. West spoke about the privilege of being the second son of Clifton and Irene B West and about the influence of his philosophy professors - William James, John Rawls and Hillary Putnam.
I privately clamped up as I thought about the professors and administrators who never gave up on me at Wits University in the 1980s.
I remembered how Stan Kahn and Judith Hawardeen stuck with me as I battled the apartheid education department trying to get the ministerial permit to get into a white university.
When I was on the brink of packing up and going back home, distinguished legal scholars John Dugard and Etienne Mureinik urged me to hang in there a little longer because the law might just change to give universities some discretion in admissions.
They were referring to the quota system which allowed universities to admit a limited number of black students.
After a wasted year, I finally registered in 1984. However, getting in does not mean getting out. And so I also remember my constitutional law professor, Cathi Albertyn, who patiently cultivated my waning interest in whatever she was teaching me.
In those days, keeping a balance between course work and comrades who were dying like flies was not always easy.
My sociology professor, Duncan Innes, who had been a friend of Steve Biko, understood why Black Consciousness was so important in my approach to sociology. My final-year research project on the formation of Cosatu got the highest mark.
The last time I heard, that document was doing the rounds in London. So anyone who comes across it, please return it to the Wits library. Cosatu might need some reminding of its once-glorious past. But I digress.
In 1987, I abandoned my legal studies to study development planning with Alan Mabin and Richard Tomlinson, with whom I remain friends to this day.
There was also the lawyer and future judge, Kathy Satchwell, who represented a group of us when we were arrested in 1986. At Cornell, I had a PhD adviser, Pierre Clavel, who allowed me free range because he had faith in my abilities.
Radical and reckless as I was, no one ever hauled me in front of a disciplinary committee or threatened me with suspension and expulsion.
When #RhodesMustFall protests broke out at UCT I appealed to the vice-chancellor, Max Price, to look at the protesting students as “other people’s children”. I wanted him to bring his humanity to bear on the situation, especially in the light of racist cynics who were dismissing the pain of the black students.
As Cornel West put it, “justice is what love looks like in public”. Alas, the tit-for-tat policy of the past few years has been a recipe for the disaster that we now see unfolding.
A white colleague wrote to me the other day to express concern about the role played by foreign white academics at UCT. Some of them have been behind a scorched-earth approach that is reminiscent of the 19th-century British wars of conquest, taking a hardened approach to the student demands for decolonised, free higher education.
But should this not be something that South African taxpayers decide, including the parents of the persecuted black students? Surely we are no longer a colonial outpost, or what Biko called “a province of Europe”?
If they are to survive, our universities must break with the scorched earth policies of our contemporary frontiersmen and find more inspirational leadership, such as that on display at the second event I attended at Harvard this past week - the Hutchins Center’s WEB Du Bois Awards. In 2014, the honorees included Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Valerie Jarrett, and last year they included Muhammad Ali, Nasir “Nas” Jones and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
I was glad to be back to witness Cornel West introduce David Evans, Harvard’s black senior admissions officer.
Under his leadership, Harvard has graduated 15 times more black students than in its entire four centuries of existence.
Black admissions did not move the university one inch from its place at the top of the global academic totem pole, as some say would happen if UCT had a race-conscious approach to admissions.
The mastermind behind the WEB Du Bois Awards is my good friend Henry Louis Gates jr, arguably the most influential black scholar in the world today.
At the earlier event, the radical Cornel West said people sometimes asked about his close relationship with the liberal Gates. West’s response could be instructive in at least two ways.
The first and most obvious is that ideological differences should never make people lose sight of the prize of black people’s intellectual empowerment.
Now there is a phrase for our times - black intellectual empowerment.
There is no money to be made there but the future.
Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane is right that the trillions of rand planned for nuclear energy or some other corrupt multibillion-rand contracts could easily fund higher education in South Africa.
Let us not mistake lack of vision for lack of money.
Gates opened the Du Bois Awards by announcing that Glenn Hutchins - after whom the Hutchins Center is named - had that very day added a further $10 million (R142m) to the $15m he had donated a few years ago, taking his overall donation to $25m.
This took the Center’s endowment to $40m, which, Gates said, “ensured the Hutchins Center would be around for another thousand years”.
A big chunk of that money would go to a new initiative on racial inequality and cumulative adversity. All of this for the study of African-American history, by a rich white guy.
The second lesson for the protesting students is something that every philosopher from Antonio Gramsci to Bayard Rustin to Steve Biko has asked: After your demands have been met, will you have a game plan?
As is customary at these events, several Harvard faculty read pieces from Du Bois’ writings.
Distinguished literary scholar Homi Bhabha read from the essay, “Of Beauty and Death”, in which Du Bois argued that far more pernicious than overt racism was the quotidian racism that operates by constantly reproducing social anxiety about black people among whites.
The scorched-earth brigade we see at universities rides on this cultivation of social anxiety.
Our universities require a new and visionary black leadership such as I see in someone like Henry Louis Gates jr. It is long overdue.
* Mangcu is professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town and a Harry Oppenheimer Fellow.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent