Responding to misrecognition from a (post)/colonial university

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education (HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use Bernstein’s model of pedagogic rights and Fraser’s model of social justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice. Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to students’ calls about ‘black pain’, ‘black debt’ and for the ‘decolonisation’ of South African universities. In particular, we focus on theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some impediments to implementing this response and conclude by asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition and representation as well as redistribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Education for democracy
• higher education
• misrecognition
• pedagogic rights
• public good
• South African universities
• student protests

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Professor Sue Clegg for her advice and guidance on an early draft of this article.

Notes

1. Brazil, Russia, India and China – all middle income developing countries with large populations.

2. By 2012 state spending on HE in South Africa had decreased to 0.65% of GDP and to 40% of university budgets, despite massive increases in student numbers (CHE, 2015).

3. Africans makes up 80% of the total population of South Africa, while the ‘participation rate’ (total enrolment in HE expressed as a percentage of the total 20–24-year-old cohort) was only 20% in 2013 (CHE, 2015).

4. In fact, Carnoy et al. (2014) argue that it is mistaken to assume that increased public funding for HE directly causes economic growth. Historically, the opposite has occurred – namely economic growth has enabled the new middle classes to access HE for its intrinsic worth as well as for its economic externalities.

5. The White Paper on Higher Education (1997) states that a goal of HE in South Africa is to ‘contribute to the socialisation of enlightened, responsible and constructively critical citizens. HE encourages the development of a reflective capacity and a willingness to review and renew prevailing ideas, policies and practices based on a commitment to the common good (1997, pp. 7–8).

6. One of the pathologies of locating educational failure as an individual deficit is that it encourages compensatory educational interventions focused only on individual students (special treatment for special people) and fails to address the structural disadvantages they face.

7. Ironically, this paper is no exception.

8. In South Africa, the more recent addition of the #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing demands to those of the #RhodesMustFall (primarily focused on issues of misrecognition and symbolic power) suggests that South African student movements are holding these dimensions together.

9. Currently termed ‘epistemic access’ by the social realist school.

10. In a similar vein, Biko’s injunction to white liberals ‘to fight for justice within their white society’, the #RhodesMustFall statement encourages white students to work for the conscientisation of their own communities, thus tackling both sides of the dialectic, but not necessarily deconstructing racialised identities.

11. This debate invariably arises in undergraduate classes when we lecture on ‘race’ in South Africa.

12. For Habermas, a ‘public sphere’ is an institutionalised civic space where, in democratic societies, political participation takes place between citizens through unconstrained deliberation.

13. Author’s field notes, Student Assembly, University of Cape Town, 25 March 2015.

14. Survey questionnaire data from first and second year students on the Extended Degrees Programme, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, (2012–2014).

15. Survey questionnaire data from first and second year students on the Extended Degrees Programme, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, (2012–2014).

16. In South Africa government subsidy has decreased by 9% in the period 2000–2013, while the proportion of the 2015–2016 GDP allocated to HE is only 0.72% compared with over 2% in Norway and Finland and 4.5% in Cuba (Cloete, 2015, p. 3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under: [Grant CPRR 13091339042 Number 91543].

Notes on contributors

Kathy Luckett

Kathy Luckett has a D.Phil in Social Science from the University of Stellenbosch. She lectures in the sociology of knowledge, curriculum and higher education. She also has a Masters in Linguistics.

Veeran Naicker

Veeran Naicker has a Masters degree in Religious Studies from the University of Cape Town. He is currently registered for a PhD at the same.