This Tuesday morning on the other side of the world I opened my email to a strange subject line: “withdrawal of invitation”. I thought it was my jetlag playing up but there it was, the third South African university to issue a warm invitation to keynote a major conference only to withdraw its own request to the speaker weeks or months later.
The first time was a Durban university. The invitation was to present some of my recent research on decolonisation which had made it into book form after the historic student protests. I was happy to oblige because this invitation from some of my former students and colleagues was an opportunity to test my ideas with some of the country’s brightest minds. Then came the chilling email. We have to withdraw your invitation. After some probing, I discovered that one of my articles in this weekly column had been critical of rioting students and “management’s” handling of the crisis and the higher-ups decided I was to be disinvited.
The next disinvitation was equally bizarre. I was asked to speak at a Cape Town university’s Summer Lecture Series after a packed-out event the previous year. Once again, I obliged, shifted things around in my diary and started to plan the lecture based on our research on the lingering racism of the medical sciences in the cases of human genetics and anatomy. Then came the weird email explaining that enrolments for my proposed lecture were down and so the talk would not happen. Strange, I thought, given attendance at the previous lecture. Then came the truth from someone who had resigned in disgust. I had written a shout-out (that crisp, positive marketing message on the back cover of a book) for a monograph that was critical of this university and the disinvitation was my punishment. “You were to be told enrolments were down” was the instruction from the university management.
What is at stake? The very idea of a university in a democracy.
Now the third withdrawal of an invitation from a Pretoria university and it is very clear that in response to my media columns critical of the management and council of this institution, I was to be cancelled. Now to be clear, I get about 12-15 invitations to speak at universities or other groups (companies, NGOs, religious institutions and so on) every week. I turn down most of them simply because of a packed diary. When postponements sometimes happen, I am relieved because then there is more time for my research, writing and school development work.
But these three invitations are something different. I see a trend, a way of doing things in this public institution we call “the university”, and I am deeply concerned. The pattern is remarkably similar across the three cases. An enthusiastic professor or staffer from an academic unit invites me to speak. I accept and arrangements are made such as flight details and accommodation (where required). The event is advertised, the title finalised and the contours of the invited speech negotiated; all kinds of conference logistics are painstakingly put in place. Then the big man or woman comes to hear about the invitation to this academic who sees it as his devotion to write critically, and their angry response is personal retaliation, a petty vindictiveness.
The poor colleagues who invited me are now in a spin. They are expected to lie either out of brute fear of “management” or as a result of a simple calculation: if I tell the truth, I lose my job. Where the inviter is white and the manager black, there is the added possibility of being called the “R” word if you do not become complicit in the egregious violation of academic freedom let alone the attack on an academic person. Make no mistake, these staff find themselves morally and ethically diminished by their leaders.
What is at stake? The very idea of a university in a democracy. The university is the one place in which any person can hold any idea, think and write about it, and defend that position in the public sphere. A university is not a church or a mosque; it is not a private club; and it is not the personal belonging of a vice-chancellor or anyone else.
These disinvitations made me realise that our university managers (I struggle to call them leaders) are behaving no differently than the apartheid regime; if you do not like other people’s ideas, then shut them down. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling; one of these universities actually has an Academic Freedom Lecture! I also realised that these colleagues have no idea what a university actually is; they occupy institutions of higher education with scant appreciation for how hard academics fought to keep our universities open to all people and to all ideas in this vital space for democracy and freedom. Their behaviour also reveals an emotional insecurity; after all, if you do not like what a speaker writes or says, let him come and challenge his ideas with good arguments and solid evidence.
Over the next few days, I am delivering invited lectures at Harvard University and New York University. I envy the openness of these venerable institutions and how far they have come in the struggle for academic freedom, one that continues in other parts of this country. I will have sharp words to share with them about the state of American democracy and its university leadership even as I talk about my research on education in South Africa. And yet I know the chances of being disinvited is zero.
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