Thursday 12 November 2015

Beyond coercive politics? (further interim reflections on events at UWC)

Thursday 12 November 2015
Andries du Toit

Again I share these reflections on recent events at UWC with real awareness of their limitations.

 For one thing, events on campus have taken a turn for the worse since the Chair of Council’s illadvised public email of 10 November wrecked the fragile peace established by the agreement between the Rector and the FMF students. For many, the violent events that followed serves as final ‘proof’ that rational discourse with the striking students is impossible and that a forceful crackdown is the only option. For students, on the other hand, the experience of yesterday’s confrontations and arrests may well have deepened grievances and hardened resolve. As before, the situation is fluid and rapidly moving, and trying to stand back and make some sort of coherent sense of it seems almost impossible.

For another, there is the politics of voice and intervention. Very few people so far have publicly intervened in the ‘sense making process’ at UWC and these have hardly been representative of our campus community. I am aware that my ‘reflections’ of 1 November have provoked one public response, a detailed rebuttal by my friend and colleague Ben Cousins. Much as I am tempted to respond in detail, I don’t think it would be useful. I don’t think there is much profit in a game of what-the-Rector-should-have-done. More to the point, I don’t believe this is an appropriate moment for an epistolatory exchange between two middle-aged white male academics in a historically black University!

At the same time, I am also aware of many pressing questions. The last few days have raised with painful urgency the question of how members of staff should respond to the rapid polarisation of groupings on campus, how we can support the eventual aims of the FMF movement, and how to accommodate the legitimate and pressing bread-and-butter issues put on the table by our students. For my part I have been time and again struck by the intense ambivalence I have experienced as someone who is predisposed to ally myself with the aims of the mobilising students – but finding myself repeatedly unable to agree with their actions.

 One issue has been that while Fees Must Fall is indeed a broad national movement, we encounter its actions as they play out on this particular campus. And from early on, the issues in contention at UWC have not been primarily the demands of the students (with some of which we might agree, and others not); rather, what has in contention is the form of these politics - their political strategies, tactics, and (crucially) ethics.

The issues raised here have been deeply troubling, and make it much harder for me to adopt the rather idealising stance many of my colleagues have seemed to be advocating towards our 'student spring'.

The most obvious of these has related to the allegations and evidence of violent, destructive and intimidating behaviour. Now selective or essentialist readings won’t be much good here. Interpretations that dismiss violence as a distracting and irrelevant side issue in an essentially peaceful movement are as unhelpful as those that see the student as ‘a bunch of hooligans’ and seize on violence as the ‘real’ meaning of the movement. Rather, it seems to me that we are seeing a complex political practice with a wide and varied repertoire in which both violent and non-violent elements are salient. In the last few weeks we have seen central figures in the FMF movement display both great idealism and alarming immaturity, using the language both of peaceful protest and of explicit threats. I should point out that far from being confined to the words and actions of a fringe minority, the language of violence (e.g. ‘we will destroy this campus’ / ‘this campus will burn’) has also been part of the lexicon of prominent leaders and spokespeople in the movement.

Now I agree that the spectre of violence should not be used as an excuse to refuse negotiations or to discount the importance of the issues FMF has put on the table. But at the same time we can’t simply dismiss it. Simply saying in passing that of course violence ‘must be condemned’ without engaging explicitly and honestly with its implications both for the ‘movement’ and for ‘our’ support of it is pretty much to condone it. So is belittling or dismissing the very real experiences of humiliation, intimidation, and threats that have been experienced by our colleagues and by students.

Furthermore, the matter of violence and vandalism is only the 'hottest' and most easily-taken-out-of-context aspect of the broader problem raised by the often coercive and confrontational tenor of much of the politics that we have seen.

Doubtless many will disagree with me here. But I think that vital and valid as the issues the students have raised are, it cannot be denied that their central methods and tactics (disrupting classes, seeking to shut down the University, forcing fellow students to be removed from the University library, threatening to stop exams) are coercive in themselves. These tactics have involved impinging on the rights of other students and members of our campus, and have threatened to cause real harm to their futures. They have pitted students against students and have put the UWC FMF movement, at least since 26 October, on a collision course with the authorities. In my mind this is deeply problematic, and it is not something we should ignore or fail to question.

Three points may be helpful here.

(1) Firstly, I think we need to move beyond a politics of alignment – beyond symbolic ‘support’ and ‘condemnation’ – to a process of trying to understand. Why is it that so many students seem to need a language of coercion, of dominance and command, of ritual humiliation of authority figures, and of the public performance of violent acts to experience any sense of social agency on campus and in our society? Are these inclinations rooted in their everyday experience of the ‘slow violence’ of inequality and marginalization in present-day South Africa? Or in the ‘ordinary violences’ of crime and patriarchy? What are the responses that can contain, ameliorate and engage with these demands? What can be done to give our students a sense of agency and recognition, and can they find ways of claiming these in less extreme, less confrontational forms of action?

(2) Secondly, I think we need to come to a critical and constructive strategic evaluation of the tactics of the movement. What are the strengths and weaknesses of forms of mobilisation in which everyone (and therefore no-one) is a leader, in which mandates can be unilaterally revoked, in which there is deep distrust of formal political process and negotiation? How do we deal with a political practice in which the performance and invocation of the status of ‘outsider’ is such a powerful legitimising strategy, and in which the dance of ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts familiar to us old-timers is supplemented by the often incendiary and invisible realtime Greek chorus of internet commentary? And more to the point: how can the theatre of protest be turned into a genuine and concrete politics of change?

(3) Thirdly, as Ben Cousins’s final paragraphs remind us, what of the future? What, for example, of the need to think through the meaning of the idea of the University at UWC?

My take: Our University is a complex assemblage of communities. Even the big, ready-made categories ("students", "academics" "staff") are not homogenous entities. Rather, they are each a congeries of complex, internally disunited, diverse, dissimilar and fissive groupings each of which is entitled to respect. This goes even for those whom ‘we progressives’ (ah, the arrogance of that term!) might want to dismiss as 'conservative' or 'middle class' or what have you.

This is a crucial point to be borne in mind as we enter the process of debating transformation at our University. Such a process of transformation is likely to be complex, slow, difficult, and argumentative; if it is to be worth anything at all, it will be a process of changing minds (in my experience never easy, especially when the mind in need of changing belongs to onself!) Any such process can only happen if these disparate groupings are held in some kind of container of mutual respect (of each other and of process), and a commitment to tolerance. This puts the ethics of political process and difference right at the heart of transformation.

So I am deeply worried. I am worried about the ease with which we can slide into a politics of 'alignment' in which questions of ethics, respect, democracy and the rights of other members of this campus community are trivialised or ignored. I am also worried about the aftermath of such politics , their implications for the quality of our social relations on campus, and what they bode for critical and thoughtful debates on the future of our University. Rather than celebrating the current moment as the opportunity for ‘real change’ I fear that it is moving us over a threshold beyond which trust is plummeting, coherence is fragmenting, and unilateral acts of power are the order of the day.

Rather than turn a blind eye towards or refusing to engage with aspects of political practice which are unacceptable, I think we have moral duty to consider how we, as members of the UWC community and as educators can encourage students to broaden the political vocabulary of protest beyond the lexicons of confrontation, domination, coercion and political command that have so often surfaced on our campus in recent times.

At the very least urgent thought is needed by all who have a stake in the future of our institution as to what (if anything!)can be done in the next few days to try to bridge the widening gaps that are threatening to engulf our University.

3 comments:

  1. I find it troubling that no leader in society, except the attempt by our Chancellor and the religious leaders that were with him, bothers to engage the protesting students to provide guidance to the struggle for free education, improved university conditions for the benefit of students and political change that translates to socio-economin change for the benefit of the disadvantaged.

    None of the leaders of the major political parties are talking to our protesting students to make them realize that peaceful protest is a powerful tool to have their plight attended to, the leaders are mute on helping these students realize that violent protest takes away the support that they would otherwise gain for the legitimate issues that they are raising.

    None of these leaders take it upon themselves to let the students know that the destruction they engage in on their campuses (e.g. at UWC) destroy the gains that the country, especially in the advancement of the competitiveness of historically disadvantaged institutions of higher education, has made.

    None of them are talking to our students to make them them realize that economic freedom will be brought about by change in policy but also by education that will assist them in participating in the economy of the country.

    None of the leaders talk to them to make them understand that those who rejoice in seeing a derailment of the advancement of the disadvantaged people of our country are laughing at these disadvantaged groups for destroying one of the major tools that the same group needs for their own advancement, laughing at them for 'proving' (although we know better that the contrary is true) that the same group is capable of nothing else other that self-destruction, dependency and entitlement.

    Why is there no clear, evident and proactive political will backed by action from these leaders to provide solutions for a sector of our society in which the future prosperity of our country lies? Why is there no active engagement in dialogue, with the protesting students, by these leaders? Why are the political leaders silent?
    Is it political bankruptcy led by political opportunism that gives less priority to national interest? Is education of our nation not intrumental in advancing us as a nation? When all the destruction is done, how will we feel when previously disadvantaged institutions retreat back to the muddy state they were 20 years ago? Will we rejoice at seeing those, like UWC, that have now gained international stature as some of the leading universities in Africa (and indeed the world in several discilines) going back to being regarded as poor performing institutions that are collapsing?
    History will judge our leaders harshly if the collapse of the historically disadvantaged intitutioms is allowed, especially if this happens at the back of a plight of previously disadvantaged students fighting to have access to education while government makes mockery of their plight and leaders do nothing about the turmoil.

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  2. I find it troubling that no leader in society, except the attempt by our Chancellor and the religious leaders that were with him, bothers to engage the protesting students to provide guidance to the struggle for free education, improved university conditions for the benefit of students and political change that translates to socio-economin change for the benefit of the disadvantaged.

    None of the leaders of the major political parties are talking to our protesting students to make them realize that peaceful protest is a powerful tool to have their plight attended to, the leaders are mute on helping these students realize that violent protest takes away the support that they would otherwise gain for the legitimate issues that they are raising.

    None of these leaders take it upon themselves to let the students know that the destruction they engage in on their campuses (e.g. at UWC) destroy the gains that the country, especially in the advancement of the competitiveness of historically disadvantaged institutions of higher education, has made.

    None of them are talking to our students to make them them realize that economic freedom will be brought about by change in policy but also by education that will assist them in participating in the economy of the country.

    None of the leaders talk to them to make them understand that those who rejoice in seeing a derailment of the advancement of the disadvantaged people of our country are laughing at these disadvantaged groups for destroying one of the major tools that the same group needs for their own advancement, laughing at them for 'proving' (although we know better that the contrary is true) that the same group is capable of nothing else other that self-destruction, dependency and entitlement.

    Why is there no clear, evident and proactive political will backed by action from these leaders to provide solutions for a sector of our society in which the future prosperity of our country lies? Why is there no active engagement in dialogue, with the protesting students, by these leaders? Why are the political leaders silent?
    Is it political bankruptcy led by political opportunism that gives less priority to national interest? Is education of our nation not intrumental in advancing us as a nation? When all the destruction is done, how will we feel when previously disadvantaged institutions retreat back to the muddy state they were 20 years ago? Will we rejoice at seeing those, like UWC, that have now gained international stature as some of the leading universities in Africa (and indeed the world in several discilines) going back to being regarded as poor performing institutions that are collapsing?
    History will judge our leaders harshly if the collapse of the historically disadvantaged intitutioms is allowed, especially if this happens at the back of a plight of previously disadvantaged students fighting to have access to education while government makes mockery of their plight and leaders do nothing about the turmoil.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good questions. The narrative of 'violent students' being beyond the pale of reasonable engagement continues to gain hegemony. What are the chances for concerned groups at UWC to call for talks to be restarted?

    ReplyDelete