By
Xolela Mangcu
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Picture: THINKSTOCK
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I
have eight books to my name, four of them edited, and four of them
single-authored. By the end of next year, that number will be 10, and six of
them will have been peer reviewed. I have been published in international
journals and have chapters in peer-reviewed books edited by distinguished
academics around the world.
I
have been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the world’s most
prestigious think-tank. I hold a distinguished fellowship at Harvard, which was
most recently held by Achille Mbembe and Charles van Onselen. This is an
addition to the three fellowships I have held at Harvard since 1998.
And,
of course, I have an Ivy League PhD, and have held fellowships at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rockefeller Foundation. Hey,
that’s not too bad, right? And I didn’t get in by asking for favours. So why do
I brag about it? Most of the time, it would be because I am just narcissistic.
But this time it is to make a point about race and higher education in SA.
There are many white academics who are full professors with hardly this record.
When
I asked a distinguished African scholar why some of these guys are being
"invited" to full professorships while those of us who have done much
more are still associate professors, his answer was to the point: "They
are white and you are a darkie, it does not matter what your record is." I
then asked: "But how long are we going to stand for this?" His answer
was just as swift: "We are still well colonised."
Now
let me hasten to make the point that I have not been denied promotion where I
work. And that’s because I have not applied for it. I am being strategic about
when to apply, so that I am not turned down on a technicality. This brings me
to a larger point about the promotions system in our universities.
The
system of getting individuals to apply for promotion is traumatic for a lot of
individuals. So they spare themselves the humiliation by just not putting
themselves up. Some of them, though by no means all, just hang around until
retirement.
If you have demotivated people like that in your faculty, what
effect do you think it has on your students? How about this line as a motto for
our universities: "Happy professors make happy students, happy students
make happy professors." I should patent that.
It
is my considered view that our universities should do away with the system in
which aspirant professors have to compile mounds of documents and jump through
bureaucratic hoops before they are admitted into the professoriate.
If someone
is good at what they do, you can smell them from afar. Make the institution
accommodate the individual, instead of making the individual spend his time
navigating the institutional architecture of the university, trying to figure
out who they should ingratiate.
I
have been in academic programmes in the US where PhD students are identified
for the tenure track even before they have finished their dissertations. Should
our universities not do the same for black academics, instead of telling them
about impossible 20-year horizons before they become full professors? I like to
use the examples of Larry Summers, who was made economics professor at Harvard
the moment he finished his PhD. He must have been 25 or something.
At
28, Alan Dershowitz became the youngest full professor in the history of the
Harvard Law School. There was no 20-year wait for these guys. One may find them
disagreeable, but no one could quibble with their achievements.
That is why
institutions such as Harvard remain at the top of the pecking order. They smell
that talent from a distance and that is what we ought to do with black
students. That is what the universities are doing for their friends in any
event.
Imagine
that these were black institutions doing this — it would be cronyism right?
Right. The point is that whoever does it must be called out, if we are going to
improve our institutions. As a start, we need greater transparency in the
entire rewards system of our universities, particularly on promotion.
What
irks me is that universities receive public funding, which they use not only to
maintain these processes of racial exclusion but also to fund foreign
academics. No doubt we need these individuals if we are going to remain
academically competitive in the world. But surely those who pay the taxes also
deserve a foot in the door? No, at the head table.
•
Mangcu is associate
professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town.
Source: http://www.bdlive.co.za
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