Rethinking African Universities: Gender and Transformation
This article contains text from the lecture,
"Gender and African Universities," delivered on April 22, 2008 at
Barnard College.
Introduction and Background
African universities are key sites for examining questions of
citizenship, democratization, and social justice. There are over 5
million young Africans enrolled in the continent's universities, making
them a major training ground for the next generation of politicians,
policymakers, public officials, and corporate and civil society leaders.
From a feminist perspective, the gender relations prevailing in the
intellectual and institutional cultures of universities are important
because of their implications for national and regional development. The
central gender question can be summarized thus: Do African universities
sustain or transform the region's conservative legacies of colonial and
nationalist patriarchal cultures? Many African nations have made
enormous progress with regard to inscribing commitments to gender
equality in the constitutions, laws, and policies since independence.
Universities might reasonably be expected to be at the vanguard of
pursuing gender equality as an integral aspect of the development and
democratization. But do they actually practice and promote the advance
of gender equality, or do they tacitly or actively operate in ways that
perpetuate the unequal status quo that characterizes the societies in
which they are located?
This key strategic question can only be addressed by carrying out
gender research in the higher education sector. To date, the empirical
profile, though incomplete, suggests strongly that universities—not just
in Africa but around the world—remain deeply imbued with inequitable
gender dynamics that are reflected in the profiles of achievement,
output, and the administration, and in the institutional cultures that
continue to privilege masculine norms of behaviour, academic prowess,
and status. While these features may be common all over the world, there
are grounds for taking this especially seriously in societies that
regard universities as socially-responsible public institutions with a
key role to play in social and political development. In the African
region, there can be little doubt that universities have been expected
to uphold identifiable social and political agendas, even though these
have changed over time. Although the initial colonial colleges were set
up to advance imperial interests and groom a subservient class of public
servants, the majority of Africa's universities were actually set up
after independence and tasked with decolonisation and intellectual
development of the emergent nations. The fact that this agenda is
shifting, having become increasingly contested with the displacement of
national development agendas by crisis and economic liberalization, does
not mean that the questions of social responsibility have ceased to
exist. On the contrary, the university's role in national regional
development may need to be re-articulated and defended in the context of
globalization and higher education reform processes.
There are several areas that need to be assessed to answer the
question of whether universities play a conservative or transformative
role with regard to gender equality. The first and most obvious is that
of the employment and student profiles which, as I explain below, remain
broadly unequal, albeit with some variability across locations and
academic fields. Secondly, there is the matter of the institutional
procedures and practices, most of which are assumed to be gender
neutral; close analysis, however, points to various ways in which
apparently neutral policies actually work to sustain inequalities, and
this is the subject of a growing pool of research on institutional
cultures and practices. Finally, there is the question of the
curriculum, both formal academic and the so-called hidden curriculum,
through which gender-biased knowledge, values, and assumptions can be
transmitted or challenged. It is here that gender and women's studies
advocates have sought to intervene, both by developing specialized
courses and by integrating gender analysis into existing disciplines and
fields of study.
The Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (GICAU)
project that forms the basis of this brief presentation was designed and
carried out by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape
Town, with the support of the African Association of Universities
between 2004 and 2006. I designed and directed the project on behalf of
the African Gender Institute, working closely with Dr. Theresa Barnes
(from the University of the Western Cape) and a small team of
researchers located within the institutions participating in the
study.[1]
In designing a project constrained by limited resources but intended to
open up the field for further work and gender advocacy, we opted to
conduct case studies on five selected national public universities, thus
excluding private and other higher education and research institutions
from consideration. This was appropriate given our focus on the public
responsibility of universities with regard to gender equality.
The GICAU project therefore carried out in-depth studies of
University of Chiekh Anta Diop in Senegal, University of Ghana,
University of Ibadan Nigeria, University of Zimbabwe, and University of
Addis Ababa, with the full co-operation of the university administration
in each instance. Each project was led by a local researcher who
recruited assistants and participants from within the institution to
address the overall profile and key manifestations of gender in the
particular institutional contexts.
The study used qualitative methods—various modes of interviewing and
participant observation—to document and analyze the operation of gender
dynamics inside the target institutions. In this way, we set out to
gather the information to support analysis of the dynamics sustaining
the observed numerical gender discrepancies. We hoped that qualitative
documentation and analysis of gender in the everyday work, social
interactions, and the institutional practices, habits, and assumptions
(in short, the daily life) of those working and studying in
universities, would help to explain why gender inequalities were
persisting, even though African post-independence universities have
never formally excluded women. Finally, we hoped that in documenting and
conceptualizing the workings of gender dynamics within institutions, we
would be able to lay to rest the oft-repeated assertions of university
administrators and researchers that the sources of gender inequality in
higher education are not their responsibility because they are generated
outside the institutions themselves—in the schools, homes, and
indigenous cultures of African nations. We took the view that even
though gender inequalities do exist outside in the wider society, the
universities, as premier educational institutions, have an opportunity
to effect change, and more than this, a responsibility to do so as a
matter of public interest, in keeping with national and international
legal and policy commitments.
In other words, we started out problematizing the assumption that
universities are liberal, gender-neutral spaces. We also questioned the
notion that the numerical inequalities are caused by women "dropping
out" to marry and have babies, and to investigate the possibility that
women might actually be pushed out by the less-than-supportive gender
cultures of African universities. If this were indeed the case, then the
policy implications could be addressed—there would be identifiable
strategies that could encourage more women to remain in universities to
pursue graduate studies, research, and academic careers.
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