Academic Colour Bar

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 10

Academic Colour Bar

ABLE messages in the newsC papers have drawn attention to a new and _ disturbing aspect of apartheid in South Africa. The Government announced some time ago that it intended to take power by legislation to prohibit the entry of non-white students to the "open" universities. These are the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand -( Johannesburg). They are called "open" because they admit students of all races; their aim in academic matters is to provide full equality without segregation. According to the terms of the Separate University Education Bill, announced tfecently, there will be no interference with present arrangements until colleges have been established for Africans, Indians and "Coloureds." After that, however, ‘open universities will disappear. When the Government’s plans became known, the Councils of the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand organised a conference of senior members of their academic staffs. The conference met in January, and afterwards an editorial committee prepared a small book* in which the ideas put forward and discussed were drawn into a reasoned statement. Its first task is to describe the present system in South Africa. In addition to the two open universi- ties, the University of Natal admits non-white students, but except for post-graduate work they are obliged to attend separate classes. Nearly 400 non-whites also attend the University College of Fort Hare, founded primarily for the higher education of Africans, and now virtually closed to white students. Four Afrikaans-medium universities are "closed": no nonwhites are admitted. Of 22,000 students in the universities of South Africa, only about 1300 are non-white, and nearly 500 of these are at Cape Town and the Witwatersrand. The open universities may therefore seem to be speaking for a small minority. But they are also upholding the principle of academic freedom, and their leaders understand that in doing this they are trying to protect the | interests of the majority.

The open universities "believe that the policy of academic nonsegregation provides the conditions under which the pursuit of truth may best be furthered." Any sort of restriction on the spirit of free inquiry is an attack upon the ideal of Socrates-‘"to follow the argument where it leads"; and a racial dogma, insisting that the welfare of a State requires the separation of people according to the colour of their skins, ties scholarship to a myth, The practical results. will be harmful. Men and women fitted for research and higher training are not unlimited in number, and if some of them are excluded for non-academic reasons the work of a university is weakened. It is no answer to say that they can be given their opportunities in separate colleges. The opportunities become quite different if the values of diversity are lost; and the loss is shared by the colleges from which non-whites are excluded. "A closed university in South Africa throws away, in the field of social and _ linguistic Studies, the very advantage which is afforded by its position in a continent of diverse cultures and languages." No university can turn away from toleration, or pretend that toleration can be segregated, without loss of spiritual authority. It has been said of the open universities that they will become "black" if their present policy is continued. The answer is partly a declaration of faith in the capacity of white people "to maintain their place in the intellectual life of the country." But the spokesmen go further than that. "When in time to come our Western civilisation has spread through the majority of South Africa’s multiracial population, it will still be the proud duty of the open universities to train the leaders of the people whatever the colour of their skins. What concerns us as universities is not the colour of a man who is the bearer of civilisation, but the quality of the civilisation which he represents." Academic freedom may suffer in South Africa; but while there are men in the universities who can speak for it in those words, we may still hope that ultimately the policy of fear will be

defeated.

M.H.

H.

*THE OPEN UNIVERSITIES IN ‘SOUTH AFRICA, published in Johannesburg by the Witwatersrand University Press, South African price 5/-,