HIGHER EDUCATION

May 02, 2011 Editorial

There has been much debate on the nature of a university for a country such as ours. Some have suggested that we move towards a more market-driven institution. Recently, Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, Director of Makerere Institute of Social Reaserch, in critiquing the latter, suggested a way forward. We can simply substitute the word “Guyana for “Africa”.
“The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what it means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current historical context and, in particular, in the post-colonial African context. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in a location where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products not of Africa’s own experience, but of a particular Western experience? Where dominant paradigms theorize a specific Western history and are concerned in large part to extol the virtues of the enlightenment or to expound critiques of that same enlightenment?
As a result, when these theories expand to other parts of the world—they do so mainly by submerging particular origins and specific concerns through describing these in the universal terms of scientific objectivity and neutrality? I want to make sure I am not misunderstood: there is no problem with the reading texts from the Enlightenment – in fact, it is vital – the problem is this: if the Enlightenment is said to be an exclusively European phenomenon, then the story of the Enlightenment is one that excludes Africa as it does most of the world. Can it then be the foundation on which we can build university education in Africa?
The assumption that there is a single model derived from the dominant Western experience reduces research to no more than a demonstration that societies around the world either conform to that model or deviate from it. The tendency is to dehistoricize and decontextualise discordant experiences, whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa. The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.
The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stress quantification above all has led to a peculiar intellectual dispensation in Africa today: the dominant trend is increasingly for research to be positivist and primarily quantitative, carried out to answer questions that have been formulated outside of the continent, not only in terms of location but also in terms of historical perspective. This trend either occurs directly, through the “consultancy” model, or indirectly, through research funding and other forms of intellectual disciplining.
The proliferation of “short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers. But the collection of data to answer pre-packaged questions is not a substantive form of research if it displaces the fundamental research practice of formulating the questions that are to be addressed. If that happens, then researchers will become managers whose real work is to supervise data collection.
But this challenge to autonomous scholarship is not unprecedented—indeed, autonomous scholarship was also denigrated in the early post-colonial state, when universities were conceived of as providing the “manpower” necessary for national development, and original knowledge production was seen as a luxury. Even when scholars saw themselves as critical of the state… intellectual work ended up being too wedded to a political program, even when it was critical of the state.”
Professor Mamdani concluded: “In a university, there needs to be room for both applied research, meaning policy-oriented research, and basic research. The distinction is this: unlike applied research which is preoccupied with making recommendations, the point of basic research is to identify and question assumptions that drive the very process of knowledge production.”

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