STUDENT LEADERS OR POLITICAL CLOWNS - PROFESSOR JONATHAN JANSEN - RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE, SOUTH AFRICA

STUDENT LEADERS OR POLITICAL CLOWNS

Stes de Necker

PROFESSOR JONATHAN JANSEN - RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE,  SOUTH AFRICA

‘They cannot reason or sustain an argument. They find it difficult to hold a position on a sensitive subject without becoming angry’

07 MAY 2015

IN South Africa, politics is not simply lived or experienced; it is performed.

It is a form of street theater in which clowns mount a platform and entertain an audience hungry for any distraction from that daily grind called life. Disruptions in parliament are planned for optimal media coverage; and we long for it as the media prime us for the coming showdown as if it were a contest between boxing heavyweights — Julius Malema versus Baleka Mbete, for example.

The more outrageous you are, the more laughs you draw.

A student leader boasts that he admires Hitler; the young ignoramus knows he will become the centre of attention for weeks to come. He also knows there will be hundreds of supporters for this outrageous statement, including those who tell us to “understand” what he is saying; that his words were taken “out of context”; and that one can admire the mass murderer‘s “effectiveness” without condoning the racist killings of millions of human beings.

What should demand moral clarity and condemnation without qualification suddenly becomes a yes-but debate among many. When the heartless young man is rightly disciplined by the university, he does the next best thing — blames “Zionist” forces.

“Lucifer is a historical figure,” shouted one student from the floor in response to a debate on campus symbolism, “but that does not mean he should have a statue in the church.”

The laughs were predictable and the audience thoroughly enjoyed that one, as the speaker intended. In the process, historical figures some disagree with are equated with the devil. Instantly, a complex debate is trivialized for the benefit of public theater.

By some miracle of timing, the media are conveniently on hand to see another student pour human waste on the offending statue of Cecil John Rhodes. What follows is far scarier as the same performer tells a media man, “I don‘t have to justify anything to a white man or a white institution.”

Here the shameless presentation of the race card is held up as an excuse to avoid making an argument.

Students broke into and disrupted a meeting of the council of that university while dancing on tables in front of some of the elders of the anti-apartheid struggle, including the chairman, who was imprisoned on Robben Island so that these performers could be born into the freedom we enjoy today. The messages were clear — the time to talk was over and any public engagement on the issue was over-rationalization.

This is what concerns me about our universities today —places of higher learning are being reduced to episodic bursts of street theater performance, and by that I do not mean the drama department. Instead of rational debates we have public spectacle. On many campuses a student march comes with the familiar retinue of singing and dancing but also class disruptions, racial insults, physical confrontation, damage to property, and worse.

Most worrying of all, our campuses have become places that mimic rather than challenge the broader public culture of incivility and disdain.

Having taught young people in different parts of the world, this is my most striking observation about South African students — their inarticulateness in public. They cannot reason or sustain an argument.

They find it difficult to hold a position on a sensitive subject without becoming angry. They find their confidence not in the satisfaction of a powerful argument but in the applause of the similarly shallow. When university authorities yield not to argument but to anger, they unwittingly reinforce this anti-intellectual and non-progressive student behavior on their campuses.

University leaders have a solemn duty to listen to students and to learn from them. We must take our cue from their deepest desires for recognition and inclusion in the life of a university. When we do not listen to students in peace time, university authorities will remain on the back foot in times of crisis.

That is the most important lesson from the campus upheavals of recent times.

But we also have the solemn responsibility to teach them. To model through our leadership what a university is really about. We should insist on public argument and reasoned debate. We should direct students to readings that enable them to craft powerful arguments from the literature of post-colonialism to the debates on critical race theory, to use singular examples.

What is at stake is the future of our country; the students are, after all, the replacement leadership in which we place our hope.

This article first appeared in The Times