Invitation To Inaugural Lecture By Prof. Helen Lauer

Date: 
Thursday, June 26, 2014 - 17:00
Venue: 
Great Hall
INVITATION TO INAUGURAL LECTURE BY PROFESSOR HELEN LAUER
 
Professor Helen Lauer of the Department of Philosophy and Classics, Faculty of Arts, will deliver an Inaugural Lecture on the topic:
“UG’s Epistemic competitive advantage: The role of the Humanities in a World Class African University”.
The Lecture is scheduled to take place as follows:
 
Date:      Thursday, June 26, 2014
Time:      5:00 p.m.
Venue:   Great Hall
 
Chairman:  Professor Ernest Aryeetey, Vice-Chancellor
 
Exhibition of Prof Lauer’s academic publications: June 23-27, 2014 at the Periodicals Hall, Balme Library
 
The University community and the general public are cordially invited.
 
 
Abstract
Nowadays it is a platitude to observe that institutions of higher education are obligated to ensure their own financial stability while serving the best interests of their enrolees.  One familiar way to address this tension has been to create two separate but equally important agendas: on the one hand, strive to maintain high standards of scholarly rigour and research excellence. On the other hand, strive to overcome social injustices and historical obstacles to higher learning through inclusive admissions policies and outreach programmes. 
 
 
I will argue that keeping these two aims as separate but equal university missions is self-defeating.  Extrapolating from recent results in social epistemology, I will show why equity and diversity are regarded nowadays as essential not just in the domestic fight to promote social justice and to reinforce cultural identity, but also to create the highest quality knowledge products possible, in order to address this century’s dual crises of profit-driven scientific triumphalism.  At the risk of oversimplification, I characterise two current global threats, both arising from the domination of profit-driven science and development agendas in the last fifty years: these are the tragedy of the global commons, and the derailment of confidence in procedures of global justice. A key criterion for objectively valuing the quality of a knowledge product is its capacity to help address either of these crises. An African university meeting standards of global excellence should encourage its faculties and students to engage in hermeneutic analyses and assessment within all fields and across all disciplines: this means encouraging scholars and researchers to ask awkward questions about how expertise is determined and what justifies authority in a given domain. 
 
 
The good news is that members of post colonial academic communities in the global South are at a competitive advantage to lead the world in creating and applying measures of quality assurance gauged to address these dual crises: the tragedy of the global commons, and the derailment of confidence in procedures of global justice.
 
 
The bad news is that the wealthiest bidders in the global knowledge market—who currently control the agenda and the resources, and who decide the most lucrative applications, of research cartels—have the greatest investment in sustaining the status quo and, as an elite, have the greatest aversion to substantive transformation of the current global economic order.  In their obligation to secure a financial footing in the current global division of epistemic labour, African universities run the risk of contributing to a general surrender not only of control over the management and use of knowledge products, but also to the crises of profit-driven science outlined in this paper.
 
 
Some would argue that the hard-nosed world of the modern knowledge market is a tough competitive terrain and has no place for the soft study of African humanities. I will argue that this bifurcation of an African university’s remit persists as a function of popular mythologies about the corporate nature of knowledge production, myths arising from post-modernist translation of (i) knowledge as power, (ii) as a social construction, and (iii) as a marketable exchange commodity. I will show that each of these three ways of deconstructing knowledge is either self-refuting or simply false. 
 
 
To abnegate responsibility for questioning the applications of research, for inspecting the process of knowledge production and its modes of global distribution, is not only to risk exacerbating the leach of African intellectual property, talent and resources following familiar historic patterns of foreign economic extraction and domination. It is to fail more broadly to lead the human family in meeting its greatest challenges of the twenty first century.