I am not going to weigh in on the case of Nicoli Nattrass and the question of the appropriateness of her recent research other than to say I once became entangled with her during a lecture I was giving on Thabo Mbeki and the HIV/AIDs crisis at the University of Cape Town, and found her a formidable combatant.
I was pursuing the question everyone was asking at that time: What made Mbeki take this horrendous position about the rollout of anti-retroviral drugs, a position which a Harvard School of Public Health report later argued led to the deaths of some three hundred and twenty thousand people. That Mbeki's grotesque intransigence should have led to a second Truth Commission, one this time addressing crimes against humanity in the domain of public health, is now obvious. My question was: What makes Mbeki tick?
She responded. This does not matter, it is a side issue. The only thing that matters is that anti-retrovirals work and we ought to be on the streets fighting for their use. Perhaps she was right. What is true is that our conversation represented fault lines across the university which themselves are more essential to the nature of knowledge, and the task of a university, than anything either of us said.
We were I think both half right, meaning both sides of the equation demanded respect, those who believe public understanding of frankly bizarre figures like Mbeki are required for civil society and its conversation of democracy, and those who believe it's the trenches that matter, the fight based on science.
In short it is the duty of a university both to safeguard an intellectual class and to generate science-based truth and policy, a fact which everyone knows but which universities in South Africa seem to have forgotten, a fact so important to the quality and character and social roles of universities that South Africa's seem to be degenerating into mere adjuncts of sectarian politics played out elsewhere.
This is I think the real moral behind the Nattrass case. When a top international scholar is not given the space within a university community to debate across disciplinary lines the question of how her achievement of fact relates to history, emancipation, the subtle politics of institutional racism, and the question of how to go about knowing things, whether philosophical and intellectual as in my own case, or data-driven as in hers, then the very project of knowledge which sustains a university and quite frankly justifies it is placed under threat.
I am not, I said, going to weigh in on whether her work is in this instance worthy of critique on racial or other grounds. Because my point is that this is what UCT should have convened immediately. That they didn't is a profound flaw in the very fabric of their university.
When an administration publicly disavows a piece of research generated by one of its own top scholars, and does so without convening its resources, that is, its faculty (which are its resources), to seriously debate, it has failed in the very mission of understanding what a university is. This is a failure to acknowledge what knowledge is.
Namely worthy of serious contestation always, not sometimes. Is her work racist? Well one cannot begin to answer that without asking: What is the role of data, that is, of the social sciences, vis a vis such other projects like ideology-critique, historical analysis. Knowledge is a matter of ubuntu. It takes an entire university to work through the implications of any given knowledge claim.
A university constitutionally unable to mount this kind of conversation is one which is either reduced to dollars and cents (how to make money in the production line of education), or to political factions, each of which arrogates to itself the authority to oversee the morals and politics of knowledge production.
Knowledge is inevitably contested, its perspectives and capacities shift dramatically across disciplines. What is the real meaning of data, when approaching questions of race and so forth? This is what the UCT administration should be focused upon. That this conversation has had to be outsourced to PoliticsWeb is appalling.
The real question is: How and why have universities failed? And this implications of this failure must not be minimized. It is a failure of democracy, since universities are public fora in which the free play of ideas should flourish with the same seriousness and edginess as they ought in the political sphere of state policy. Ironically this did take place during the Mbeki regime when Nattrass and I locked horns. Long may it continue if UCT is to remain a university worthy of the name.
Daniel Herwitz
University of Michigan
Formerly Research Associate, University of Cape Town
