Neoconservatism in Higher Education: The Academic Turn

ABSTRACT This paper explores South African academics’ responses to the call for decolonisation of education through a qualitative case study using social constructivism and narrative inquiry. Stuck within coloniality (colonial structures) entrapped in colonial history (ways of doing things) and caught within the tectonic plates of globalisation and social media, South African academics are expected to make the shift towards decolonisation of education. After 350 years of colonialism and apartheid, how do South African academics make the turn towards decolonisation of education? The call for decolonisation and structural change at South African universities was sparked by the #FeesMustFall protest actions in South Africa. This student-led protest began in mid-October 2015 and the goals of the movement were to stop increases in student fees and increase government funding of universities. In the wake of these protests, South African universities responded to this call with a sense of urgency and immediacy. Stakeholders held numerous discourses and implemented processes and practices to abate the impending threat with a renewed focus and urgent attention given to re-curriculating activities. Academics were instructed to re-visit, re-look at, and revise their study guides and course materials and to indicate their attempts at decolonising the curriculum. However, in the midst of this urgency, the key agent of curriculum delivery, namely the academic, was overlooked. It is now the academic’s turn. The academic needs to make the turn towards decolonising education. In South Africa, educational advocacy and scholarship easily adopted the decolonising discourse as evidenced by the increasing number of calls to decolonize our universities, decolonize methods, and decolonize student thinking, an approach that Tuck and Yang (2021) argue turns decolonisation into a metaphor. Decolonisation of the curriculum requires much more than just changing the curriculum or the choice of materials used (Wa Thiong’o, 1998). It requires a change in academics’ attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs. The attitude and disposition of academics to materials used in the curriculum is critical. Western knowledge systems still seem to “constitute the only basis for higher forms of thinking” (Department of Education [DoE], 2008) and are passed on to African students “as unquestionable truth and of inscrutable value” (Jansen, 1998, p. 109). Coloniality and Western knowledge systems were exported to the colonies “as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races” (Grosfuguel, 2007, pp. 217–218). Eurocentric worldviews were promoted and imposed and required “a whole new way of thinking, a discourse in which everything that is advanced, good and civilized is defined and measured in European terms” (Kelley, 2000, p. 18), rendering Black bodies as inhuman, disposable, and inherently problematic (C. A. Warren & Coles, 2020). Black bodies were “(mis)read under the white/Western gaze as the fetishized, the marginalized or the other than human” (Lyiscott et al., 2021, p. 1). In so doing, Indigenous memories, knowledges, and worldviews are not only subjugated but erased. It is time for counter narratives. The pertinent question is whether academics, after more than two decades of democracy in South Africa, are ready to “decolonise their minds” (Wa Thiong’o, 1998) and their ingrained belief and value systems. Accordingly, this study asks, how do academics respond to the call for decolonisation of education at South African universities? What are academics’ understanding of the term “decolonisation of education”? What beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes do academics hold about decolonisation of education? How do academics understand and implement decolonisation of education in the delivery of the curriculum? How do academics disrupt received knowledge, create pedagogic dissonance, and give hope to students? The data included a mix of qualitative survey responses and semi-structured interviews, analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Findings were threefold; first, academics should “turn away” from the “lip service model” of decolonisation of education and “turn towards” deep and lasting change. Second, academics should “turn away” from challenges and “turn towards” opportunities offered by decolonisation of education. Third, academics should “turn towards” becoming transformative intellectuals and agents of change if they want to “turn the tide.” Knowledge in the blood may not be “easily changed,” but the disruption of the authority of received knowledge is possible through the transfusion of new knowledge. The findings suggest that universities should develop professional development courses that are focussed on how to effectively decolonise education. (725)