- Title
- Language policy, symbolic power and the democratic responsibility of the post-apartheid university
- Creator
- Alexander, Neville
- Subject
- Academic Freedom -- South Africa Universities and colleges -- South Africa Equality Liberty Education and state -- South Africa Education, Higher -- South Africa
- Date
- 2001
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/696
- Identifier
- vital:19982
- Description
- Recent articles by John Higgins (1999) and André du Toit (2000), both of the University of Cape Town and a forthcoming article by Roger Southall and Julian Cobbing have contextualised the discussion of this perennial question in both time and place. Du Toit, in particular, has put the cat among the pigeons by querying the relevance in the era of globalisation and the corporatisation of institutions of higher learning, of the classic liberal interpretation of the T.B. Davie formula deriving from the 1950s, i.e., the freedom of "the university" to decide whom to teach, what to teach, how to teach and who should teach. The gist of his argument is that the danger no longer comes from outside the walls of the university, in the guise of the racist apartheid state, for instance. Instead, the threat comes from inside the institutions themselves as the result of the so-called managerial revolution, which is a manifestation of the shift of power from the collegium academicum to the administrative officials, since the curricular and pedagogical, i.e., academic, freedom of the lecturing and research staff is thereby put at risk. He maintains that the manner in which Higgins and others have addressed the question is anachronistic in that the political terrain and the institutional dynamics in which universities operate in post-apartheid South Africa are light years removed from the apartheid university. At the very least, one-quarter of the composite formula, that which refers to "whom to teach" has been rendered irrelevant, since there is no longer any barrier to access to tertiary education, besides those that operate in any "normal" capitalist democracy.
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Daantjie Oosthuizen Memorial Lectures, D.C.S. Oosthuizen Memorial Lectures
- Rights
- Alexander, Neville
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