Public Engagement in South Africa
The University of Minnesota celebrated Public Engagement Day today with an all-day series of lectures, workshops, and exhibits. Our leadoff speaker was Dr. Xolela Mangcu, from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mangcu's talk, "Public Engagement: On Whose Terms?", put university public engagement efforts into an important context. South African universities, like ours, have had public engagement activities (that is, academic activities expressly intended to affect society) since the mid 1800s. Also like ours (though we tend not to recognize or admit it), those public engagement activities were on terms that justified the existing power structure. In particular, they provided an academic justification for white supremacy and apartheid, in terms of eugenics and other scientific fads of the time.
When the first black African scholars obtained university posts, they tended to be patrician and conservative, counseling a go-slow attitude toward societal change. They were eventually challenged by Steve Biko and his followers, urging a transition from a conservative to a radical conception of public engagement.
Mangcu draws from this the lesson that universities will inevitably be used for leverage to effect societal change, whether patient or radical. Universities must both stand apart from and contend within society; they are places of both reflection and action.
We see these themes playing out in today's universities, even if not usually for such dramatically high personal stakes as in South Africa.