HE should produce free thinkers, not conformers, expert says

Universities should move from producing graduates who know how to work the system and, instead, embrace new forms of thinking that promote social justice, according to Shanen Ganapathee, a former member of the faculty at the African Leadership University in Kigali, Rwanda.

Ganapathee, who specialised in graduate employment, said: “Achieving a balance between learning how to operate effectively within the system and questioning the nature of the system with a view to changing it”, is what students should learn.

“However, at present, the emphasis is generally on how to succeed as a part of the system,” she said.

In the quest to promote a spirit of intellectual enquiry, Ganapathee, who is now undertaking research into the genetic basis of the evolution of the human brain at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US, advised that “universities should foster think tanks where free thinkers, including anti-government scholars, would be able to conceptualise how systemic change to promote liberation may be achieved”.

Teaching skills not academia’s job

In this context, she said that, while universities should be responsible for equipping their graduates with critical thinking skills, national government should not expect them to create “the kinds of employees required by the market”.

“The notion of the university as a place which prepares students for jobs can be at odds with the idea of education as a force for liberation and the promotion of social justice,” she said.

Describing the emphasis on producing job-ready graduates as a “short-term approach”, Ganapathee said that the responsibility for teaching workplace-specific skills rests with employers, not universities.

“After all, it is the employer who profits from exploiting skilled labour. Why should some other institution be expected to teach those who will be their employees and bear the cost of that? Why should the government subsidise the costs of higher education so that companies may profit?”

Workplace focus is limiting

In this regard, and while expressing sympathy for the rationale that drives African governments to focus on investing in science and technology “as a means of fixing the immediate practical problems faced by the continent”, she noted the limited nature of this agenda.

Indeed, she argues, the prioritisation of such studies at the expense of the humanities may hinder rather than advance the cause of national development in Africa.

“For example, an exclusive focus on producing artificial intelligence technicians may lead to only a small number of people being trained to develop the necessary ethical, policy-making and regulatory frameworks for the emerging new technology.”

More broadly, Ganapathee expounded on the “power and value in new forms of thinking as an alternative to this zero-sum-game kind of thinking which has produced our present capitalist societies – which, it has been shown, are clearly not the answer”.

She said: “The challenge for universities would be, not only to provide young people with the kind of education that allows them to advance themselves, but also to pursue a larger systemic change under which their graduates can flourish and realise the potential of the education and the opportunity for self-development that they have been given.”

New measuring instrument needed

In this respect, she acknowledges the ways in which universities are forced to become producers of job-ready graduates because of “skewed funding and investment”. She also noted the impact of international university rankings that incentivise higher education institutions to prioritise aspects of their governance and mission at the expense of others.

“If the rankings do not measure or reward, for example, support for human rights or environmental activism or investment in the humanities, then there is no incentive to invest in these aspects of a university’s role,” she said.

Accordingly, she argues for the establishment of a new set of criteria and/or new rankings to measure the performance of universities.

From the perspective of the individual student, Ganapathee argues that capitalism “places a financial value on people’s time in ways that can prevent them from becoming who they want to be”. She links this oppression to how power has been exercised, including in the education system, to privilege groups of people over others.

“Education has been described as the great equaliser,” she said, “but cycles of privilege and underprivilege persist across generations.”

Reclaiming narratives

Ganapathee argues that the histories of such discrimination must be taught, warning that education can be used not only for liberation, but also for oppression. “If an institution of learning does not want its students to learn about colonisation or their history, it is not producing education for liberation,” she said.

Arguing that the study of anthropology has historically been “steeped in racism … for example, in its portrayal of Africans as ‘savages’ ”, she said that higher education on the continent must reclaim narratives and generate “knowledge produced by Africans so that such untruths are never again promulgated”.

Ganapathee also tackled the question of power in higher education in terms of how decisions in relation to access and the development of the curriculum at universities are made and who is leading this process.

Arguing that greater attention should be paid to the issue of “redistributing power in the decision-making processes around how higher education may be reshaped”, she argues for greater bottom-up engagement.

Engagement is vital

“At present, the process seems to be one in which university administrators, researchers and senior government officials wrestle with these problems, trying to solve them on behalf of the ‘beneficiaries’,” she said. “However, another approach would be to deploy participatory decision-making.”

She advises that “instead of the ministry of education centralising the process of curriculum development so that it decides what will go into every school, local pupils could be engaged on what they think should be taught and local curricula may be designed accordingly.

“Similarly, local communities and the public may be brought together to consider this issue of access which has challenged administrators for years.”

Universities also may benefit from adopting more participatory processes in addressing the challenges they face, according to Ganapathee.

“[University] administrators and faculty staff may find that many of the problems they encounter may be resolved through a more community-based approach, under which local people are no longer engaged merely as beneficiaries of a particular programme but also as co-creators of the initiatives from which they are supposed to derive benefit,” she said.

This article is based on an interview conducted by Dr Ibrahim Oanda for The Imprint of Education project, which is being implemented by the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. This project, which includes a series of critical engagements with experienced scholars and thought leaders on their reimaginings of higher education in Africa, investigates current and future challenges facing the sector, including best practices and innovations. A full transcript of the interview can be downloaded from the HSRC’s website.