Academic xenophobia and internationalisation cannot coexist

We now know that the attacks on foreigners are not confined to the streets of Diepkloof, a township near Johannesburg, or the vineyards of De Doorns in the Western Cape, but to the corridors of academia as well.

In a recent book, we call this phenomenon academic xenophobia and detail how this is experienced in the everyday lives of university staff from elsewhere.

For the first time in our democracy, that xenophobic push against universities is coming from administrative and political offices of government such as (South Africa’s Department of) Home Affairs and a particularly thuggish group called the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Higher Education (an oversight body consisting of representatives from political parties). We are up against it.

This phenomenon has direct implications for those campus units typically referred to as ‘the international office’.

Seven theses

My first thesis is quite simple: xenophobia and internationalisation are incompatible, period. They cannot and should not co-exist. It is a contradiction in terms. You shut down and exclude or you reach out and include. You cannot do both.

My second thesis is that tactical or strategic arguments about how internationalisation departments should respond to xenophobia are misplaced for a simple reason: xenophobia is completely at odds with the constitutive nature of what we call ‘the university’. Of course, I would like to make tactical and strategic arguments as well, such as the following:

• That the withdrawal of foreign nationals would collapse the pipeline of South African graduates coming through the system to doctoral and postdoctoral studies;

• That the withdrawal of foreign nationals from rural, black universities would completely collapse the academic project in those institutions; and

• That the prestige of South African universities in the international knowledge system would fall precipitously if 20 to 30 of our top scholars and scientists from other African countries decided to leave under pressure (Kelly Chibale at the University of Cape Town, Achille Mbembe at the University of the Witwatersrand, Tebello Nyokong at Rhodes University etcetera).

In a land where most people go to church, or mosque or synagogue, I would also like to make spiritual arguments:

• That every major faith has within its sacred texts something about welcoming the stranger.

What a university is and is not

But these tactical and strategic arguments are secondary to the question of what a university is and is not.

Let me be clear about the constitutive values of a university: a South African university is not a department of state. It is not a political party. It is not a religious organisation. The argument made here is, therefore, based on a principled position: you cannot ask universities to do something that goes against the grain of what they are and why they exist in the first place.

For all their faults, universities in this country fought hard to retain the right to appoint academics or enrol students or prescribe curricula without state interference.

Sometimes they bowed to authority on these matters of principle and, to this day, UCT, for example, carries the shame of, not once, but twice denying an academic position to the anthropologist Archie Mafeje because of government pressure. But others resisted then, though less now.

My third thesis is that the logic that drives xenophobia is exactly the same logic that drives all other kinds of exclusions in universities and society as a whole.

Exclusion by race or gender or ethnicity or (dis)ability. Its foundational logic has roots in colonialism and apartheid and what contemporary migration does is to dig up old hatreds and divisions so that opportunists can ride the wave of public discontent.

Read recent articles on this by Adriaan Basson in News24 and Imraan Buccus in TimesLIVE.

My fourth thesis is that, for academic xenophobia (or any xenophobia) to flourish, you need university leaders to be complicit in its execution. They fan the flames. They develop discriminatory policies. They pressurise downwards. And sometimes they give expression to their own bigotry.

My fifth thesis is that you cannot advance decolonisation as an intellectual and political project and at the same time recognise colonial borders. So many papers being published today insert the word decolonisation, not because people know what it means but because, like AIDS in a previous time, the reference is supposed to have magical properties.

Decolonisation is a radical project that, at the very least, challenges anti-colonial constructs around who is in or outside borders. In the memorable words of Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’.

My sixth thesis is that, without a coordinated resistance to academic xenophobia (and, of course, other kinds) the pre-emptive obedience of university managers is going to get worse for a simple reason: as the state fails to deliver on its development mandate (poverty, hunger, unemployment) the pressure from above and below to find scapegoats for our misery is going to get much worse with universities caught in the middle of this pincer grip.

My seventh thesis is that internationalisation offices on our campuses should either defend vigorously the values of a university or shut down their offices.

You cannot clamour for international recognition in the West but deny access to academics and students on your SADC doorstep. You cannot desire the income white Euro-American students bring when they come to our universities for their ‘international experience’, but hold at a distance black African students or staff from the region unless they possess a ‘scarce skill’. You are walking contradictions and you have to choose one or the other path, closing down or opening up.

Three things IEASA could do

What is at stake is nothing less than the foundational idea of a university. What could IEASA (the International Education Association of South Africa) do? Three things:

• You could start by changing the last part of your name to Southern Africa;

• You could put out regular evidence-based arguments in the form of position papers against academic xenophobia; and

• You could establish a policy desk that regularly challenges xenophobic statements and positions when they arise within your universities and from government itself (on your own, you are sitting ducks for institutional retaliation given the marginal status of international units or departments on campuses).

Professor Jonathan Jansen is a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.

The IEASA conference took place from 25-28 August in KuGompo City (formerly East London) in South Africa.