A Democratic University Without Ruins: Some Reflections on the Possibilities and Particularities of an African University

Abstract

Now that we have reflected on Teaching for Change, we want to examine how the rationale of such a form of online learning, namely to cultivate educational encounters and ubuntu justice, could assist us in thinking differently about an African university vis-a-vis the notion of a democratic imaginary. Although Bill Readings’s (1996) pessimism that the contemporary university is “in ruins” is a monumental idea that held sway for more than two decades since its publication, it might neither be plausible nor helpful to think of a university in that way. This is so because one cannot assume that global capitalism, enmeshed in a consumerist ideology, accentuates the importance of graduate throughput and success for national and international markets and, hence, undermines a university’s status as a free, open and responsible institution of higher learning. Furthermore, one would not expect a university to remain in the vanguard of national culture and therefore be perceived to be in peril if it undergoes cultural change. Such an idea of the university rests in any case on an erroneous assumption that culture and society remain the same over time. Ron Barnett’s (2016) Understanding the university announces, “the university is a task without end … [and] since the university is always on the move, always moving in its spaces – economic, social, political, cultural, institutional and so on – its possibilities will always be moving on” (Barnett 2016: 9). We concur with Barnett’s cogent analytical take on the contemporary university, and draw on his three-pronged analysis, namely that a university is an institution and an idea; it is an institution in the present with future possibilities; and it embodies a set of particulars and universals. The particulars and universals want to offer: first, a defence of a university as a democratic educational institution; and second, in line with Jacques Derrida’s (2004) novel thoughts on a contemporary university, we make a case for a university as a responsible institution-in-becoming within an African context, thereby bringing into contestation the notion that a university could ever be “in ruins”.