Mangcu,+the+real+issue,+Southall,+Mail+and+Guardian




 * Mail and Guardian Online, January 06 13**

=**Mangcu: the real issue**=

Xolela Mangcu’s resignation from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has been presented in the Mail & Guardian as an assault on academic freedom (December 15). But the issue is not quite so easy. There is a much weightier question of the status of South Africa’s research councils. If Xolela’s resignation opens a debate about that, he will have rendered us a genuine service.

Former CEO Mark Orkin turned the HSRC round, leaving it much better regarded, domestically and internationally. But transformation has come at a cost, including increasing corporatisation, grafted on to an authoritarian public service culture.

Executive directors who lead research programmes were granted extensive authority over staff and heavy responsibility to raise research funds to meet stiff financial targets. Research staff were set financial targets and required to cut corners if necessary to deliver to budget and on time. Those who didn’t were increasingly squeezed out or subjected to disciplinary proceedings.

Research programmes tended to be silos, fundamentally, in financial competition and staff had to do the research they were told to do. The benefits to researchers were there if they secured interesting and well-funded research projects.

Of all the research councils, the HSRC is the most successful and has gone the furthest towards corporatisation. Yet it is definitely not a university. Researchers lose much autonomy, notably to do research for which there is no direct funding.

Most research is policy-driven, and researchers are as accountable to clients as to the broader research community. This also means research agendas are determined by available money, so that what govern-ment or donors want tends to dictate what researchers do.

This is not wholly wrong: the councils are there to serve the public more directly than university researchers. But it can seem to restrict academic freedom.

The HSRC’s controversial media policy is a product of corporatisation, designed “to regulate the interaction between the HSRC and the media to protect our image and reputation and to minimise the potential for friction with its stakeholders”.

Its formal provisions are relatively inoffensive — it is the implementation and motivation that seem to be causing all the trouble. There is resentment that they were handed down by management as a pronunciamento, without wider consultation. The media policy is no great infringement of intellectual freedom, just corporate nonsense that is probably best ignored. It has done unnecessary damage to the HSRC’s reputation and, if not abolished, should be re-examined by researchers as a whole, not just by management and council.

If, as Mangcu says, the media policy is a direct outcome of heavy political breathing, the politicians should be told to back off. CEO Olive Shisana equally strongly denies that the policy has anything to do with orders from on high.

But if we allow the debate to degenerate into whether Mangcu or Shisana is right, we miss the opportunity to ask more fundamental questions about the role, status and function of research councils relative to universities; their responsibilities and accountability to government, parliament and the public; the extent of their independence from government; the burying of uncomfortable research findings by govern-ment departments; the corrosive effect of corporatisation on scientific research in research councils and the universities; and the dangers and opportunities of donor-funded research.

— Roger Southall, HSRC. (He doubts whether this is the HSRC’s official opinion.)

From: http://www.mg.co.za/articleflat.aspx?area=mg_flat&ArticleId=10182