Red Alert: Universities, knowledge production and people-centred development: Reflections from Cuba

Last week I attended an international higher education conference in Havana, Cuba, Universidad 2012, held under the theme: 'Universities and Sustainable Development'. The Conference was attended by a total of about 3000 delegates, with 2000 delegates drawn mainly from Latin America and the rest of the developing countries, with a few from Europe and the United States. The other 1000 were draw from all the 68 Cuban universities. It was a high level conference attended by a combination of ministers of higher education, directors-general and vice chancellors and deans of universities.

In exploring and debating the role of universities in sustainable development, one was particularly struck and pleased by the overwhelming dominance of left-wing ideas in approaching the issues of the role of universities. This is largely a reflection of the extent to which, over the last decade, Latin America has become the hotbed of progressive left-wing ideas, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world today.

This is indeed something that is to be welcomed and a reflection of the broader political shifts taking place in that region, a shift away from neo-liberalism into intellectual and political discourses that seek to place the people at the centre of development and knowledge production. This is a debate that our own country and universities need to engage with, as we seek to strengthen political and academic relations with Latin America. It is a debate that the SACP also has to engage with in earnest.

Indeed such debates on the role of the university in people's struggles for people-centred development are not something that is completely foreign to our own history in South Africa. These were debates that dominated in the struggles of the National Education Co-ordinating Committee (NECC) and the rest of the mass movement in the 1980s into the early 1990s, under the rubric of our call for people's education for people's power. As we seek to take forward the transformation of university and post-school education in our country, it is imperative that we resuscitate these debates.

The drift of the debate at Universidad 2012 was captured succinctly by one of the left wing Brazilian Roman Catholic bishops at the conference, that universities must get closer to the people, seek to express their aspirations for people-centred and people-driven development, as the principal foundation for knowledge production. The debates were about how this is to be achieved, through a sustained critique of the dominant neo-liberal perspectives in higher education today.

It is very important that we (re) open such debates in our own country, as we seek to forge a new growth path in the struggle to build a developmental state that should prioritise the needs of the majority of the people of our country, especially the workers and the poor. Re-opening these debates and elevating them to societal concerns, does not mean a mechanical return to the 1980s debates. But it should be a debate grounded on the role of universities in South Africa post-1994 and in the new century. The SACP is uniquely placed to play an important role in resuscitating such debates.

In engaging in such discourses, it is going to be important to problematize a number of notions that have become dominant in discussions about higher education and knowledge production globally and in our country as well.

The first concept that needs to be problematized is that of 'knowledge economy'. This is an idea that economies today are based on knowledge, often capturing the shifts in the North away from manufacturing into services, especially financial services and information technology. Indeed there is no doubt that knowledge is important, and has increasingly become so. But the question is whose knowledge and in the service of which classes?

A close interrogation of the meanings embedded in the concept of a 'knowledge economy' today it is that knowledge is a commodity, to be bought and sold, rather than as something that should be in the service of the people. As I sat and reflected on the debates at the conference in Cuba, I was wondering whether we should be talking about a 'knowledge economy' or about harnessing and developing knowledge in the struggle for a just and equitable world, free from poverty and ignorance. These are debates we urgently need in our country.

Another phenomenon we need to be critically interrogating is that of the 'internationalization of higher education'. This concept is also overladen by the neo-liberal conceptions embedded in conceptions of 'knowledge economy'; where higher education institutions, especially in the North, are being driven towards becoming 'knowledge factories' - producing education to be sold in the global market-place rest of the world. This practice has been reinforced by two developments. The first is that universities in the North, and indeed in many other parts of the world, are experiencing severe financial cutbacks, thus being forced to operate as commercial entities.

The second major contributory factor to the commodification of education has been the shrinking state resources to support public university education in many countries in the South. In Africa in particular, the policies imposed by structural adjustment policies and the World Bank in the 1980s, forced African countries to shift their focus away from higher education to primary education.

This reversed the significant advances made in expanding higher education after independence, leading to a shrinking higher education sector, thus opening our continent to all manner of private higher education institutions. Not only has education been sold to developing countries, but has also been a major vehicle for neo-liberal ideas and the intellectual (re) colonization of the African continent and the South.

The third issue that requires close scrutiny is that of the implications of the current global capitalist crisis for knowledge production and university education. The current global capitalist crisis is not only a crisis of the capitalist system, but is a crisis of an IDEA - the idea that the market is the only rational force for development in the world today.

It is the crisis of an ideology that has subjected the world to financial speculation, greed and super-exploitation for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the poor. The crisis of the neo-liberal idea practically marks the end of the triumphalism of the 'end of history' thesis of the early 1990s.

In the context of the developments outlined above, the world is crying out for alternatives that will place people-centred development at the centre of a global agenda. In essence the relevance of the massive scholarship generated by neo-liberalism in many of the world's university is under serious question. The market is being proven, through the current global realities, as not such a panacea for the problems facing humanity after all. These realities have to be surfaced much more forcefully in the current period.

In our own country there is also an absolute necessity to critique the resurgent liberal notions that are 'anti-state'(and against the majoritarian character of our democracy); notions that all that is about 'state and government' is bad, and all that is about (and in) 'civil society' is good. The notion of 'civil society' itself needs to be subjected to renewed interrogation, including its problematic notion that democratic struggles are only best waged outside (and often in opposition to) the state. This has the effect of leaving the struggles for the democratization of the state to the very same neo-liberal forces that are against the building of a developmental state.

Engaging in these debates also means undertaking a sustained critique of the permanent (and almost now professionalized) cynicism of liberals about state-led transformation initiatives, whether it is about the sustainability or desirability of building two new universities in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape, or about affirmative action measures to ensure that students from poor backgrounds access higher education, especially in areas of scarce skills.

This liberal cynicism has in fact become a useful tool in the hands of neo-liberalism and all those opposed to thoroughgoing transformation in our country. It reinforces the attack of neo-liberalism on the role of the state in development, thus subjecting the fate of black and poor students to the market - which is the essence of the Democratic Alliance's notion of an 'open opportunity society'.

As highlighted in earlier editions of Umsebenzi Online this year, what often parades as 'civil society' is actually donor-driven initiatives, unaccountable to anyone other than their own self-appointed boards, and also operating in secrecy about their funders and decision-making processes. These are then elevated, as better expressions of the democratic will of the people than popularly elected governments! Universities are also important sites for debating these matters, as part of debates about the direction of our own democracy.

The SACP, as part of preparations for our 13th Congress in July and beyond, is establishing a Central Committee sub-committee on Media and the Battle of Ideas. This is indeed a timely development. It is going to be important that this subcommittee takes up all of the above issues in earnest, not as internal SACP matters, but as part of engagement in broader societal debates. It is also important for the Communist University to take up these matters, including matters relating to the role of South African universities in knowledge production for development.

Asikhulume!!

This article by SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande first appeared in Umsebenzi Online the Party's weekly online newsletter.

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