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'Cancellation culture’ at UCT is a risk to academic liberty and freedom of speech

Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass
By Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass
16 Oct 2024
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The recent ‘cancellation’ of an eminent legal academic at the University of Cape Town suggests that academic freedoms might be a casualty of censorious and uncompromising politics.

The “Fallist” protests of 2015/16 intensified the intrusion of an American hyperbolic style to debate in South African universities. It fuelled a cruelly Manichean politics. Dissenters were denounced (most often as “racist”) and subject to social cancellation.

Even erstwhile allies risked attack if deemed insufficiently conformist, with Fallists accusing one professor of being a “house negro” (or worse, using a vocabulary imported from the US). 

The most tragic consequence of this toxicity was the suicide in 2018 of the dean of health sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Bongani Mayosi, in the face of pressure from uncompromising students and lecturers.

Racialised toxicity was institutionalised at UCT under an especially divisive vice-chancellor between 2018 and 2022. The panel that investigated the leadership crisis (chaired by retired judge Lex Mpati) condemned the vice-chancellor’s “authoritarian” leadership, the abusive racialisation of university life, the resulting polarisation and the erosion of collegiality.

The Mpati Panel concluded that “a new culture is needed of respectful dialogue, empathy, fairness and equity”. The vice-chancellor took early retirement, with an interim vice-chancellor stepping in until a new appointment could be made.

UCT has now appointed – to general acclamation – a new vice-chancellor, Professor Mosa Moshabela. At UCT, the vice-chancellor chairs the university’s Senate, which is responsible for academic matters.

At his very first Senate meeting, the Senate was asked to consider the elevation to “emeritus” status of recently retired Professor of Law Anton Fagan. “Emeritus” status confers a number of rights, privileges and responsibilities on eminent retired scholars. It also recognises the continued value to both the university and the individual scholar of their ongoing, post-retirement relationship.

When, after a truncated discussion, the Senate was asked to vote, slightly more members voted against the conferment of emeritus status than supported it (although there were many abstentions and neither the “yes” nor “no” votes achieved an overall majority).

UCT’s procedures on emeritus candidacies clearly require reconsideration in this era of politicised censoriousness.

This appears to have been the first time – that is, in more than a century – that UCT’s Senate has voted to deny emeritus status to a retired professor.

Why was this a case of cancellation? As the dean of law informed the Senate, Fagan had satisfied the requirements of emeritus status. He is an eminent scholar with a strong record as teacher and researcher, including through his engagement with public issues.

He has also achieved some notoriety on account of his outspoken opposition to calls that the university imposes some kind of academic boycott of Israeli institutions in protest against the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza.

While Fagan’s argument was that it was unclear whether the Israeli government was abiding by the laws of war, he seems to have come to be seen (wrongly) as the embodiment of the defence of the Israeli government’s actions against its critics.

The criticism of (or more accurately attacks on) Fagan in the Senate involved leading critics of the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza and of Fagan’s position on this.

Earlier complaints against Fagan over the wording of an exam paper – which he rebutted, but which nevertheless precipitated his early retirement – had involved students (and perhaps academics) associated with the UCT4Palestine group. This small group of students had complained, in hyperbolic style, of being “traumatised” and “triggered” by the question.

The attack on Fagan in the Senate involved similarly wild claims about his “traumatising” of students.

UCT’s Senate has spent hours debating motions condemning the Israeli invasion of Gaza and calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. In November 2023, after much debate, the Senate passed a motion, with overwhelming support, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas.

Consensus and respect for different opinions appeared to have prevailed, but the following year activists further disrupted university business, demanding an academic boycott of Israel.

Over the course of five sessions over five months between November 2023 and April 2024, the Senate spent at least eight hours discussing how the university should respond to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This is about the same time it usually spends over the course of a year considering more conventionally academic matters.

The debates took a long time (despite being curtailed repeatedly) and were frequently rancorous because the motions were controversial (on procedural as well as substantive grounds) and deeply divisive.

A motion in support of a more targeted boycott (of academics with links to the Israel Defence Forces) was eventually passed and adopted by the Council – though this is now subject to legal challenge. The controversy rekindled the toxicity and Manichean politics of previous years.

The cancellation of Fagan was the latest casualty of this politics.

Just 11 days after the Senate denied Fagan emeritus status, Judge Dire Tladi delivered UCT’s prestigious TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture. Tladi critiqued the way that simplistic hegemonic “narratives” demonised opponents and undermined academic freedom. Asked by a member of the audience what academics should do about this, he recommended that we learn to “withstand” criticism and not fear being unpopular.

Punitive cancellation goes far beyond the kinds of criticism that Fagan or anyone else should be asked to withstand.

UCT’s procedures on emeritus candidacies clearly require reconsideration in this era of politicised censoriousness. The vote over Fagan’s candidacy was shrouded in confusion: was the Senate being asked to reject his candidacy or to put it on hold pending further information on the allegations against him? Was there a formal (and seconded) objection?

It is a principle of academic life that academics are scrutinised and judged by their peers. If the Senate cannot heed the Mpati Panel’s call for “respectful dialogue, empathy, fairness and equity” and Tladi’s warnings about the “tyranny” of hegemonic narratives, candidates for emeritus status should probably rather be considered through the same procedure as candidates for ad hominem promotion to professorships. 

In his welcoming remarks at the TB Davie lecture, vice-chancellor Moshabela observed that it came at a “critical point” for UCT, noting how debates over Gaza highlighted issues of social justice and academic freedom. Yet it was the vice-chancellor himself who unwittingly presided over the cancellation of Fagan and a fundamental challenge to academic freedom at UCT.

When debate becomes so sharply polarised and uncompromising, many people – including people in senior executive positions – choose to keep their heads below the parapet rather than risk becoming targets themselves.
Dissenters from the line pushed by the commissars of one or other cause should not be surprised when they, like Fagan, are punished through the denial of emeritus status or other privileges.

Academic life rests on ensuring that scholars and students can question conventional wisdoms and articulate unpopular positions. Freedom of speech and academic freedom require not that we defend the rights of people we agree with, but that we defend the rights of people to articulate positions with which we disagree, including especially positions that we find distasteful or repugnant.

There are clearly members of the Senate who disagree emphatically with some of Fagan’s views, just as he appears to disagree with theirs.

But it is precisely because there are these disagreements that the university should defend the rights of all scholars (and students) to articulate their positions (as long as they do not circumscribe the rights of others and, perhaps, avoid clear hate speech).

We should defend Fagan’s rights, even when we disagree with him, just as we should defend the rights of his critics or opponents when we disagree with them.

Ironically, Fagan himself was one of the few scholars in the late 2010s who defended publicly the right of Fallist students to voice their opinions, despite – or, more accurately, because – he himself disagreed with their position.

Sadly, however, tolerance of dissent has been swept away with the resurfacing of a Manichean, self-righteous, censorious and adversarial culture at the university.

Dissenters from the line pushed by the commissars of one or other cause should not be surprised when they, like Fagan, are punished through the denial of emeritus status or other privileges.

Many of us should worry about the consequences of expressing dissent on controversial topics. If we dissent from a dominant position or narrative, will we later be denied emeritus status?

If the toxicity is legitimated in the Senate will it trickle down into ad hominem promotion committees? Will dissidents early in their careers be refused promotion? Will they be excluded from opportunities for research or blocked from teaching? Will known dissenters be appointed to positions in the first place?

The denial of emeritus status to Fagan is likely to have a chilling effect not only on speech but also on teaching and research.

Fagan was the immediate target, but the message was clear to all academics: dissent from dominant political positions and you may be punished. DM

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