Fwd: The importance of research in a university
Limbani Nsapato
May be this could be inspiring to some of you in the field.
Cheers,
Limbani
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominic Tweedie <dominic...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 11:31:36 +0200
Subject: The importance of research in a university
To: sadtu-political...@googlegroups.com
Pambazuka
*
The importance of research in a university *
/Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, Executive Director, Makerere Institute of Social
Research (MISR)/
Mahmood Mamdani
*Mahmood Mamdani <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmood_Mamdani>*
*Mahmood Mamdani, Pambazuka News, Issue 526, 21 April 2011 *
My remarks will be more critical than congratulatory. I will focus more
on the challenge we face rather than the progress we have made. My focus
will also be limited, to the Humanities and the Social Sciences rather
than to the Sciences, to postgraduate education and research rather than
to underdgraduate education.
I would like to begin with a biographical comment. I did my 'O 'Levels
at Old Kampala Secondary School in 1962, the year of independence. The
US government gave an independence gift to the Uganda government. It
included 24 scholarships. I was one among those who was airlifted to the
US, getting several degrees over 10 years, BA, MA, PhD -- and returned
in 1972.
Those who came with me divided into two groups. There were those who
never returned, and then those who did, but were soon frustrated by the
fact that the conditions under which they were supposed to work were far
removed from the conditions under which they were trained. In a matter
of years, sometimes months, they looked for jobs overseas, or moved out
of academia into government or business or elsewhere.
The lesson I draw from my experience was that the old model does not
work. We have no choice but to train postgraduate students in the very
institutions in which they will have to work. We have no choice but to
train the next generation of African scholars at home. This means
tackling the question of institutional reform alongside that of
postgraduate education. Postgraduate education, research and institution
building will have to be part of a single effort.
I would like to put this in the context of the history of higher
education in Africa. I do not mean to suggest that there is a single
African history. I speak particularly of those parts of Africa colonized
after the Berlin Conference in late 19th century. There is contrast
between older colonies like South Africa or Egypt where Britain embarked
on a civilizing mission -- building schools and universities -- and
newer colonies like Uganda where they tended to regard products of
modern education as subversive of the existing order.
*HISTORY OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA*
You can write a history of higher education in Africa that begins a
millennium ago. It is now well known that there existed centers of
learning in different parts of Africa---such as Al-Azhar in Egypt,
Al-Zaytuna in Morocco, and Sankore in Mali--- prior to Western
domination of the continent. And yet, this historical fact is of
marginal significance for contemporary African higher education. This is
for one reason. The organization of knowledge production in the
contemporary African university is everywhere based on a disciplinary
mode developed in Western universities over the 19th and 20th centuries.
The first colonial universities few and far between: Makerere in East
Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa, and so on. Lord Lugard,
Britain's leading colonial administrator in Africa, used to say that
Britain must avoid the Indian disease in Africa. The Indian Disease
referred to the development of an educated middle class, a group most
likely to carry the virus of nationalism.
This is why the development of higher education in Africa between the
Sahara and the Limpopo was mainly a post-colonial development. To give
but one example, there was 1 university in Nigeria with 1,000 students
at independence. Three decades later, in 1991, there were 41
universities with 131,000 students. Nigeria not an exception.
Everywhere, the development of universities was a key nationalist
demand. At independence, every country needed to show its flag, national
anthem, national currency and national university as proof that the
country had indeed become independent.
We can identify two different post-independent visions of the role of
higher education. One was state-driven. I spent six years teaching at
the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. The downside of the Dar
experience was that governments tended to treat universities as
parastatals, undermining academic freedom. The great achievement of Dar
was the creation of a historically-informed, inter- disciplinary,
curriculum.
A later post-independence vision was market-driven. Makerere University
came to be its prime example. I spent nearly two decades at Makerere,
from 1980 to 1996. During the 1990s, Makerere combined the entry of
fee-paying students [privatization] with the introduction of a
market-driven curriculum [commercialization]. The effects were
contradictory: payment of fees showed that it was possible to broaden
the financial base of higher education; commercialization opened the
door to a galloping consultancy culture.
The two models had a common failing. Neither developed a graduate
program. Everyone assumed that post-graduate education would happen
overseas through staff development programs. I do not recall a single
discussion on post-graduate education at either Dar or Makerere.
*A PERVASIVE CONSULTANCY CULTURE*
Today, the market-driven model is dominant in African universities. The
consultancy culture it has nurtured has had negative consequences for
postgraduate education and research. Consultants presume that research
is all about finding answers to problems defined by a client. They think
of research as finding answers, not as formulating a problem. The
consultancy culture is institutionalized through short courses in
research methodology, courses that teach students a set of tools to
gather and process quantitative information, from which to cull answers.
Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones
classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have
migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances
and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of
the university. Academic papers have turned into coporate-style power
point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz
words have taken the place of lively debates.
If you sit in a research institution as I do, then the problem can be
summed up in a single phrase: the spread of a corrosive consultancy
culture. Why is the consultancy mentality such a problem? Let me give
you an example from the natural sciences.
In 2007, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation decided to make
eradicating malaria its top priority. Over the next 4 years, it spent
$150 million on this campaign. Even more important were the consequences
of its advocacy program, which was so successful that it ended up
shaping priorities of others in the field of health.
According to a recent study on the subject, WHO expenditure on
eradicating malaria sky rocketed from $ 100 million in 1998 to $2
billion in 2009.
The rush to a solution was at the expense of thinking through the
problem. From an epidemiological point of view, there are two kinds of
diseases: those you can eradicate, like sleeping sickness or smallpox,
and those you cannot -- like yellow fever -- because it lives on a host,
in this case monkeys, which means you would have to eradicate monkeys to
eradicate yellow fever. The two types of diseases call for entirely
different solutions: for a disease you cannot eradicate, you must figure
out how to live with it
Last year, a team of scientists from Gabon and France found that malaria
too has a wild host -- monkeys -- which means you cannot eradicate it.
To learn to live with it calls for an entirely different solution.
Eradication calls for a laboratory-based strategy. You look for isolated
human communities, like islands with small populations and invest all
your resources in it -- which is what the Gates Foundation and WHO did.
But living with malaria requires you to spend your monies in communities
with large, representative populations.
The Gates Foundation and WHO money was spent mostly on small islands. A
WHO expert called it 'a public health disaster'. The moral of the story
is that diagnosis is more important than prescription. Research is
diagnosis.
*CREATING AN ANTI-DOTE TO A CONSULTANCY CULTURE*
How do we counter the spread of consultancy culture? Through an
intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful
intellectual culture. To my knowledge, there is no model for this on the
African continent today. It is something we will have to create.
The old model looked for answers outside the problem. It was utopian
because it imposed externally formulated answers. A new model must look
for answers within the parameters of the problem. This is why the
starting point must go beyond an understanding of the problem, to
identifying initiatives that seek to cope with the problem. In the rest
of this talk, I will seek to give an analysis of the problem and outline
one initiative that seeks to come to grips with it. This is the
initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research.]
*THE CONSULTANCY PROBLEM*
Let me return to my own experience, this time at MISR, where I have
learnt to identify key manifestations of the consultancy culture.
I took over the directorship of MISR in June of 2010. When I got there,
MISR had 7 researchers, including myself. We began by meeting each for
an hour: what research do you do? What research have you done since you
came here? The answers were a revelation: everyone seemed to do
everything, or rather anything, at one time primary education, the next
primary health, then roads, then HIV/AIDS, whatever was on demand! This
is when I learnt to recognize the first manifestation of consultancy: A
consultant has no expertise. His or her claim is only to a way of doing
things, of gathering data and writing reports. He or she is a Jack or a
Jane of all, a master of none. This is the first manifestation.
Even though consultancy was the main work, there was also some research
at MISR. But it was all externally-driven, the result of demands of
European donor agencies that European universities doing research on
Africa must partner with African universities. The result was not
institutional partnerships but the incorporation of individual local
researchers into an externally-driven project. It resembled more an
outreach from UK or France rather than a partnership between relative
equals.
Next I suggested to my colleagues that our first priority should be to
build up the library. I noticed that the size of our library had
actually been reduced over the past 10 years. I understood the reason
for this when I looked at MISR's 10-year strategic plan. The plan called
for purchasing around 100 books for the library over 10 years. In other
words, the library was not a priority. The second manifestation of a
consultancy culture is that consultant don't read, not because they
cannot read, or are not interested in reading -- but because reading
becomes a luxury, an after-work activity. Because consultancies do not
require you to read anything more than field data and notes.
My colleagues and I discussed the problem of consultancy in meeting
after meeting, and came up with a two-fold response. Our short-term
response was to begin a program of seminars, two a month, requiring that
every person begin with a research proposal, one that surveys the
literature in their field, identifies key debates and located their
query within those debates; second, also twice a month, we agreed to
meet as a study group, prepare a list of key texts in the social
sciences and humanities over the past 40 years, and read and discuss them.
Over the long-term, we decided to create a multi-disciplinary,
coursework-based, PhD program to train a new generation of researchers.
To brain-storming the outlines of this program, we held a two-day
workshop in January with scholars from University of Western Cape in
South Africa and Addis Ababa University. I would like to share with you
some of the deliberations at that workshop.
*REFLECTIONS ON POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE SOCIAL
SCIENCES*
The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what it
means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current
historical context and, in particular, in the post-colonial African
context. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in a
location where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products not of
Africa's own experience, but of a particular Western experience? Where
dominant paradigms theorize a specific Western history and are concerned
in large part to extol the virtues of the enlightenment or to expound
critiques of that same enlightenment? As a result, when these theories
expand to other parts of the world---they do so mainly by submerging
particular origins and specific concerns through describing these in the
universal terms of scientific objectivity and neutrality? I want to make
sure I am not misunderstood: there is no problem with the reading texts
from the Enlightenment -- in fact, it is vital -- the problem is this:
if the Enlightenment is said to be an exclusively European phenomenon,
then the story of the Enlightenment is one that excludes Africa as it
does most of the world. Can it then be the foundation on which we can
build university education in Africa?
The assumption that there is a single model derived from the dominant
Western experience reduces research to no more than a demonstration that
societies around the world either conform to that model or deviate from
it. The tendency is to dehistoricize and decontextualise discordant
experiences, whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue
original research or intellectual production in Africa. The global
market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material ("data") to
outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back
to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of
data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is
reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory
and debate.
The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stress
quantification above all has led to a peculiar intellectual dispensation
in Africa today: the dominant trend is increasingly for research to be
positivist and primarily quantitative, carried out to answer questions
that have been formulated outside of the continent, not only in terms of
location but also in terms of historical perspective. This trend either
occurs directly, through the "consultancy" model, or indirectly, through
research funding and other forms of intellectual disciplining. In my
view, the proliferation of "short courses" on methodology that aim to
teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to
gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of
native informers. But the collection of data to answer pre-packaged
questions is not a substantive form of research if it displaces the
fundamental research practice of formulating the questions that are to
be addressed. If that happens, then researchers will become managers
whose real work is to supervise data collection.
But this challenge to autonomous scholarship is not
unprecedented---indeed, autonomous scholarship was also denigrated in
the early post-colonial state, when universities were conceived of as
providing the "manpower" necessary for national development, and
original knowledge production was seen as a luxury. Even when scholars
saw themselves as critical of the state, such as during the 1970s at
University of Dar es Salaam, intellectual work ended up being too wedded
to a political program, even when it was critical of the state. The
strength of Dar was that it nurtured a generation of public
intellectuals. Its weakness was that this generation failed to reproduce
itself. This is a fate that will repeat in the future if research is not
put back into teaching and PhD program in Africa are not conceived of as
training the next generation of African scholars.
Someone told me yesterday that Makerere requires every Ph D thesis to
end with a set of recommendations. If true, this indicates a problem. A
university is not a think tank. A university may house think tanks, even
several, but a university cannot itself be a think tank. Think tanks are
policy-oriented centers, centers where the point of research is to make
recommendations. In a university, there needs to be room for both
applied research, meaning policy-oriented research, and basic research.
The distinction is this: unlike applied research which is preoccupied
with making recommendations, the point of basic research is to identify
and question assumptions that drive the very process of knowledge
production.
*THE POSTGRADUATE INITIATIVE AT MISR*
I believe one of the biggest mistakes made in the establishment of MISR
as a research institute was to detach research from postgraduate
education. The formation of the new College of Humanities that has
brought the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences and MISR under a
single administrative roof gives us a historic opportunity to correct
this mistake. MISR will aim to offer a multi-disciplinary Doctoral
program in the qualitative social sciences and the Humanities.
The initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) is
driven by multiple convictions. One, key to research is the formulation
of the problem of research. Two, the definition of the research problem
should stem from a dual engagement: on the one hand, a critical
engagement with the society at large and, on the other, a critical grasp
of disciplinary literature, world-wide, so as to identify key debates
within the literature and locate specific queries within those debates.
Faced with a context where the model is the consultant and not the
independent researcher, we at MISR think the way forward is to create a
PhD program based on significant preparatory coursework, to create among
students the capacity to both re-think old questions and formulate new.
Our ambition is also to challenge the foundations of the prevailing
intellectual paradigm which has turned the dominant Western experience
into a model which conceives of research as no more than a demonstration
that societies around the world either conform or deviate from that
model. This dominant paradigm dehistoricizes and decontextualises other
experiences, whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue
original research in Africa. The global market tends to relegate Africa
to providing raw material ("data") to outside academics who process it
and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are
increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods
used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there
is a general impoverishment of theory and debate. If we are to treat
every experience with intellectual dignity, then we must treat treat it
as the basis for theorization. This means to historicize and
contextualize not only phenomena and processes that we observe but also
the intellectual apparatus used to analyze these.
Finally, MISR will seek to combine a commitment to local [indeed,
regional] knowledge production, rooted in relevant linguistic and
disciplinary terms, with a critical and disciplined reflection on the
globalization of modern forms of knowledge and modern instruments of
power. Rather than oppose the local to the global, it will seek to
understand the global from the vantage point of the local. The doctoral
program will seek to understand alternative forms of aesthetic,
intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, both contemporary and
historical, the objective being not just to learn about these forms, but
also to learn from them. Over time, we hope this project will nurture a
scholarly community that is equipped to rethink---in both intellectual
and institutional terms---the very nature of the university and of the
function it is meant to serve locally and globally.
*COURSEWORK*
Coursework during the first two years will be organized around a single
set of core courses taken by all students, supplemented by electives
grouped in four thematic clusters:
1. Genealogies of the Political, being discursive and
institutional histories of political practices;
2. Disciplinary and Popular Histories, ranging from academic
and professional modes of history writing to popular forms
of retelling the past in vernaculars;
3. Political Economy, global, regional and local; and
4. Literary and Aesthetic Studies, consisting of fiction, the
visual and performing arts and cinema studies.
Translated into a curricular perspective, the objective is for an
individual student's course of study to be driven forward by debates and
not by orthodoxy. This approach would give primacy to the importance of
reading key texts in related disciplines. In practical terms, students
would spend the first two years building a bibliography and coming to
grips with the literature that constituted it. In the third year they
would write a critical essay on the bibliography, embark on their own
research in the fourth year, and finally write it up in the fifth.
*INTER-DISCIPLINARITY*
Over the 19th century, European universities developed three different
domains of knowledge production---natural sciences, humanities, and
social sciences---based on the notion of "three cultures". Each of these
domains was then subdivided into "disciplines." Over the century from
1850 to the Second World War, this became the dominant pattern as it got
institutionalized through three different organizational forms: a)
within the universities, as chairs, departments, curricula, and academic
degrees for students; b) between and outside universities at the
national and international level, as discipline-based associations of
scholars and journals; c) in the great libraries of the world, as the
basis for classification of scholarly works.
This intellectual consensus began to break down after the 1960s, partly
because of the growing overlap between disciplines and partly because of
a shared problematique. For example, the line dividing the humanities
from the social sciences got blurred with the increasing
"historicization" and hence "contextualization" of knowledge in the
humanities and the social sciences. The development was best captured in
the report of the Gulbenkian Commission chaired by Immanuel Wallerstein.
As inter-disciplinarity began to make inroads into disciplinary
specialization, the division between the humanities and the social
sciences paled in the face of a growing division between quantitative
and qualitative perspectives in the study of social, political and
cultural life. But these intellectual developments were not matched by
comparable organizational changes, precisely because it is not easy to
move strongly entrenched organizations. Though the number of
interdisciplinary and regional institutes multiplied, collaboration
rarely cut across the humanities/social science divide.
The challenge of postgraduate studies in the African university is how
to produce a truly inter-disciplinary knowledge without giving up the
ground gained in the disciplines. The challenge of MISR is how to
reproduce a generation of researchers by joining research to
postgraduate education. Our incorporation into the new College of
Humanities and Social Sciences, and thereby an end to our standalone
status, has created this opening for us -- one we hope to seize with
both hands.
* The paper was presented as the keynote speech at Makerere
University Research and Innovations Dissemination Conference,
Hotel Africana, 11 April 2011 by Mahmood Mamdani, professor and
executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research
(MISR). Š Mahmood Mamdani
*From: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72782*
*
*
**
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Limbani Nsapato
Policy & Advocacy Manager
Africa Network Campaign on Education for All (ANCEFA)
Design House, ZANEC Offices, Cairo Street,
P.O. Box 30 744,
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Skype: limbani.nsapato
Limbani Nsapato
Your observations are correct. There needs to be a lot of debate and
awareness around the issue of knowledge translation.
Such a concept is also critical within civil society circles as people
are now promoting evidence based advocacy for better policy results.
Regards,
Limbani
On 5/14/11, Anderson Fumulani <afu...@africa-online.net> wrote:
> *** Details on how to subscribe or unsubscribe are at foot ***
>
> Hello all,
> This is one of my rare postings - being the first on this forum after a long
> time of silent participation.
>
> I take keen interest in research these days. My interest is more about the
> "concept of knowledge translation". I think "translation" can be used
> interchangeably with "transfer".
>
> I attended an AfriNead conference 2-years ago in Cape Town. AfriNead stands
> for "Africa-Network-for-Evidence-to-Action on Disability".
>
> Professors from across the globe made impressive presentations on research
> they had conducted. Yet none of these learned people made any presentation
> about "knowledge translation".
>
> "Knowledge translation" is a new concept meant to resolve an old problem of
> "translating what is known - research knowledge" into what is done. So many
> people have knowledge about issues yet they don't translate or transfer it
> to those could best apply it on the ground.
>
> Researchers tend to rely so much on research "dissemination seminars"
> unfortunately, also attended by fellow researchers -as "knowledge
> translation or transfer" which at the most will take a couple of days(at
> most one week). Yet research takes at the minimum several months to conduct.
> How can knowledge that has been acquired for several months to many years
> only take a few days to translate or transfer?
>
> It seems only the medical and disability sectors are institutions interested
> in the knowledge translation concept. Yet knowledge translation can be
> applied by all sectors if they want to push for knowledge based policy and
> action changes supported by research.
>
> In simple terms - knowledge translation is meant to address the widening gap
> about what is known against what is applied in the real world. I tend to
> believe that knowledge translation is a sibling to communication. On the
> other hand, people tend to confuse communication with dissemination. These
> two are different and the latter is very narrow (actually one way).
>
> If researchers go on piling up research knowledge without transferring it
> into application - all the knowledge investment remains with them and I'm
> afraid to say - they will die with their knowledge without transferring it
> into action or to those who can apply it.
>
> Some effort should therefore be applied to research knowledge translation if
> people want to see some meaningful change in the real world.
>
> My humble posting.
>
> Anderson J. Fumulani
> Centre for Media Advocacy & Interaction
> P O Box 1732
> Blantyre
> Tel: 265-212-954854/265-888-954854
> "research, programme evaluation, communication strategy design,
> communication for development, behaviour change communication & publishing"
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-c...@sdnp.org.mw [mailto:owner-c...@sdnp.org.mw] On
> Behalf Of Limbani Nsapato
> Sent: 13 May 2011 02:09 PM
> To: bwalo-la-aphunzitsi
> Cc: Augustine Musopole; exseminarians; civs...@sdnp.org.mw; Malawi
> Exseminarian Forum
> Subject: [civsoc-mw] Fwd: The importance of research in a university
>
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> ___________________________________________________________________
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