1. IAU Durban Conference, August 20-25, 2000
11th General Conference: Universities as Gateway to the Future
Plenary Panel II
Brenda Gourley
Vice-Chancellor, University of Natal, South Africa
Introduction
In this address, I will attempt to weave together some of what I heard in the Working Groups over the
course of the last two days and some of what I have heard in the speakers’ presentations, with my own
views on the place of “Universities and the Knowledge Society”.
Visions and Responsibilities
Our Working Group was characterised by participation from representatives of countries across the
world, countries which are experiencing varying levels of poverty and disadvantage and varying levels
of democracy. I use the term “democracy” with particular care – to reflect the fact that many of these
states, for a variety of reasons, exist within very fragile democracies.
It is unlikely that there is a single person present today who doubts the crucial role to be played by
higher education in the upliftment of society. Similarly, there can be little doubt of the importance of
access to higher education to facilitate this process. Based on the discussions I have been a part of, it
seems that regardless of the wealth of the countries concerned, the challenge of balancing equity and
access with quality is one that applies to all universities. Every university, regardless of its particular
focus, is presently contending with the challenges presented by the incursion into the higher education
market of the private sector.
This has had the effect of introducing the concept of competition into the operation and thinking of
universities. I think it is important, at this point, to draw a distinction between the pressure on
universities to become more “business-like” and the university “becoming a business”. We all aspire
to the former, if by “businesslike” we mean enhanced efficiency, competence and productivity.
However, while the latter prospect – “becoming a business” -- is not desirable, neither is it something
that universities are particularly good at – and it is debatable as to whether they in fact should be,
given the foundations upon which universities are based. Universities are sites in which disinterested,
non-partisan inquiry and research are conducted, and these are important functions of the institution.
However, it is increasingly clear that society at large is no longer readily persuaded that this function
is so important that they must pay large sums of money in order to enable universities to abandon their
pretensions to being businesses, as opposed to being business-like.
Therefore we have to ask ourselves: are universities at all central to this new knowledge economy? Or
are they part of a grand enterprise which will eventually succeed in driving the rich into an exclusive
network society that many of us have described over the last two days, while the poor will be forever
relegated and abandoned to some other kind of level? Have universities played a role in allowing this
to happen? Can we call ourselves socially responsible if we do allow that to happen?
It is clear to me that in an open and democratic society, communities need to see and to understand
and know the role that their universities fulfil. I know, for example, of one country on this particular
continent that had an excellent university. A new government came to power and cut off the funds to
that university. The university turned to the community in which it saw itself “embedded” and said:
“You must not allow this to happen to us.” To this the community leaders replied: “Who are you?
What do you do? Why should we save you?”
Threats of Demise
That experience was an important lesson and certainly one from which I learned a good deal. If
universities are too arrogant or too complacent to draw communities in and make it possible for
communities to defend their draw on the public purse, it seems to me that they have engineered their
own marginalisation in a knowledge society. If universities conduct their own affairs – and by
“affairs” I mean what it is they are, how their student and staffing bodies are comprised, what they
teach, how they govern themselves – if they pursue their own little brand of knowledge, their own
little perceptions of the world, then they are playing an active role in their own demise.

2. When I look around the room today, I observe what seems to me to be an exact replica of what I see in
universities across the world. There are hardly any women. Women make up perhaps five percent of
this audience. This ratio is often replicated in university populations. The role that diversity plays and
the emphasis and importance that diversity is given in university communities is not notably strong. If
all that is true -- and it may not be true of all individual universities, but it is seems patently true today
– then it seems to me that universities themselves have had a hand in engineering their marginalisation
in a knowledge society. It is not at all surprising then that business and, importantly, that non-
governmental organisations and the private sector have moved in to assume lost ground.
In that marginalisation of themselves, it seems to me that universities have failed in their most
pressing social responsibility: to protect, preserve and uphold the ability and the capacity to conduct
critical, disinterested and non-partisan research and to play non-market related roles. Where do we see
in universities research directed towards removing the most pressing problems in the world? Where
does poverty figure as the top item on a university’s research agenda? Where do you see HIV/Aids as
the top priority in university research? Where do you see the removal of gender discrimination as a
pressing issue? Where indeed!
You may wonder why all of this is relevant in a knowledge society. My point is that we cannot
preserve knowledge, disseminate knowledge and thereby inspire the search for further knowledge, if
we don’t ourselves retain the capacity to do so in a disinterested and non-partisan fashion. By not
ensuring we retain that capacity, we abandon our most important social responsibility.
Can we recover? This question was considered in our Working Group. Some of us believe that the
train has already left the station, but we hope and believe that collectively, as Professor Edwards said,
the IAU and the other bodies like this one, can do more as associations to press our cause. But it also
seems that, individually, we don’t always act in ways that are democratically responsible and if,
individually, we don’t pursue the kinds of knowledge that give real attention to the most pressing
human needs in the different societies in which we are embedded, we are failing dismally in our social
responsibility. The words of American educator and writer Robert Hutchins sum up this challenge
rather succinctly: “Education”, he suggests, “can offer a real hope of salvation to suffering humanity
everywhere. If it cannot, or will not, then it is irrelevant and its fate is immaterial.”