Apartheid's odd role in the vibrancy of the social and human sciences
November 5, 2013 2:36 PM   Subscribe

JM Coetzee's foreword to John Higgins's new book Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa, which among other topics, includes an extended interview with Nelson Mandela ally and academic Jakes Gerwel on the importance of the humanities in both the anti-apartheid struggle. In an excerpt from the interview, Gerwel stated that Apartheid was to a large degree also “a battle of and over ideas, a battle of the priority of one set of ideas over another, and in this struggle the human and social sciences played a great and liberating role.” A (pdf) history of South African education under apartheid.
posted by spamandkimchi (9 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
You argue - cogently - that allowing the transient needs of the economy to define the goals of higher education is a misguided and short­sighted policy: indispensable to a democratic society - indeed, to a vigorous national economy - is a critically literate citizenry competent to explore and interrogate the assumptions behind the paradigms of national and economic life reigning at any given moment. Without the ability to reflect on ourselves, you argue, we run a perennial risk of relaxing into complacent stasis. And only the neglected humanities can provide a training in such critical literacy.

I hope that your book will be high on the reading list of those politicians busy reshaping higher ­education in the light of national priorities, as well as of those university administrators to whom the traditional humanities have become alien ground. I hope that, having read and digested what you have to say, those politicians and administrators will undergo a change of heart. But alas, I do not believe that your hopes and mine have much chance of being realised.


I think he is right, and I find this almost indescribably sad.
posted by rtha at 2:45 PM on November 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


You mean Feynman wasn't right, and we shouldn't be able to understand art by means of equations? Metafilter denizens will be gravely disappointed, but will nonetheless find a way to dismiss this idea.
posted by OmieWise at 3:37 PM on November 5, 2013


It's interesting, and by that I mean the "you could write a dissertation on that and still not exhaust the topic" kind of interesting, how much the real nonfictional J.M. Coetzee and his various recent fictional avatars agree about the death of the humanities, even though they disagree with him politically and intellectually about so much else. His version of the history is gentler, sad rather than angry, but not really any more optimistic than theirs.
posted by RogerB at 3:38 PM on November 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's interesting, and by that I mean the "you could write a dissertation on that and still not exhaust the topic" kind of interesting, how much the real nonfictional J.M. Coetzee and his various recent fictional avatars agree about the death of the humanities, even though they disagree with him politically and intellectually about so much else. His version of the history is gentler, sad rather than angry, but not really any more optimistic than theirs.

This is part of what makes reading his essays, particularly, in my opinion Doubling the Point, so indispensable and fascinating.
posted by OmieWise at 3:41 PM on November 5, 2013


And the Gerwel interview is great, too — thanks for that. A really interesting reflection on the neoliberalization of the social imagination in a very different institutional and political context than the ones I know personally.
posted by RogerB at 3:42 PM on November 5, 2013


This is part of what makes reading his essays [...] so indispensable and fascinating.

And what makes reading "his" essays in Diary of a Bad Year so interesting, too! He seems to be generally so much more interested in arguing with himself, in fictional form, these days, than in making (as they used to call them) "interventions" in the public sphere that it seems to me it's well worth paying attention when he's willing to drop the mask and stand up to be counted like this. Though the last time didn't go so well, either.
posted by RogerB at 3:55 PM on November 5, 2013


There are two main reasons for my pessimism. The first is that you somewhat underestimate, in my opinion, the ideological force driving the assault on the independence of universities in the (broadly conceived) West. This assault commenced in the 1980s as a reaction to what universities were doing in the 1960s and 1970s, namely, encouraging masses of young people in the view that there was something badly wrong with the way the world was being run and supplying them with the intellectual fodder for a critique of Western civilisation as a whole.

The campaign to rid the academy of what was variously diagnosed as a leftist or anarchist or anti-rational or anti-civilisational malaise has continued without let-up for decades, and has succeeded to such an extent that to conceive of universities any more as seedbeds of agitation and dissent would be laughable.
Back when I was in college and agonizing over what subject I should try to research a story on, a friend of mine wondered aloud what the hell had happened to colleges between the 1960s and 2010. He didn't see the kind of rebellious spirit on campus that he had expected to find. I replied that I didn't know where to start with a story that big. I didn't end up starting it, but Coetzee's version sounds right.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:27 PM on November 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


the importance of the humanities in both the anti-apartheid struggle.

And....?
posted by pwnguin at 11:01 PM on November 5, 2013


pwnguin - whoops! I copy-pasted from the Wits University Press description and missed the "both" when editing! It originally read "the importance of the humanities in both the anti-apartheid struggle, and for contemporary South Africa."
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:26 PM on November 5, 2013


« Older Fifteen   |   Find out your 'fitness age' and get fit Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments