Affirmative Action at UCT
Prof. Benatar at UCT's Philosophy Department has certainly sparked off intense debate with his inaugural lecture on Affirmative Action. The lecture and the discussion that came in its wake has produced a lot of heat, if not always light. But it has opened up a number of issues for a University in South Africa.
In his argument against Prof. Benatar's criticism against UCT policy, vice-chancellor Martin Hall argued that the policy promotes diversity at the University. Whilst not clear, this remark is self-evident to South Africans who see the country as diverse, multicultural and rainbow. And yet, this rainbowness has hardly been seriously tested beyond its effect in cultural celebration. What does it mean to have a diverse set of epistemologies? How do cultures produce a different ethos of inquiry at a University? Does this mean that there are multiple truths pursued at the University? Is this true of the soft sciences and possibly not the natural sciences?
Perhaps I am stretching the implication of Prof. Hall's remark, but is this an opportunity to taking up that challenge in a serious way? Whichever position one supports in the AA debate, this particular debate of multiculturalism has its own merit. I hope that students and staff might be interested in taking up this issue as well.
Presently, as many of you know, the question is intensely debated in Europe and the Americas. There, the questions has reopened questions of culture, modernity, religion, and values! The European debate, however, is taking place in the context of a war against terror, aka radical islam, aka islam. There are some who think that this latter issue is ignored by South Africans at their own peril. But for the moment, we might use the opportunity to add our voice to this debate from a different experience. And in the process, begin to look at the tremendous challenges and opportunities we face here.
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Re: Affirmative Action at UCT
Cow | 10/09/2007, 19:44
Islam is a threat in places like North America and Europe because it posits some ideal for which people are still prepared to die - as the 11 September incident and the suicide bombings have demonstrated. How many rank and file Americans, French, or Germans are prepared to die for their language, their culture, their religion or whatever aspect of their identity they use as definition? Alienation, cynicism and excessive consumption characterise many of the "youth cultures" and the orientations even of parents. To be confronted with fervent belief, such as that demonstrated by being willing to strap explosives around yourself and explode a bus full of communters, can be daunting - especially when that believe is directed away from one's own identity, and is set up against the states embodying that identity, and is thus projected to be threatening the values to which one subscribes.
Naively, I think things are different here. Islam, for example, has as long a history in this country (and particularly the Western Cape) as Christianity; and has been as instrumental in shaping language, culture and national identity.
More problematic locally, IMO, is the interface between the "settler" identity and the "indigenous" identity - the latter having been systematically and sustainedly devalued and eroded over the centuries, supported by the structural exclusion of "indigenous people" from claims to citizenship on a material and symbolic level.
But to pretend that our different context and different history renders us immune to the debates and trends of elsewhere would be ignorant, and if those debates are not surfaced openly they run the risk of exploding in other ways.