What Jason and the Technicoloured Dreamcoat of Academia reveal about othering

I am a graduate of Cambridge; and also a recipient of its Commonwealth and other bursaries. In that sense, I am a beneficiary, as also an advocate, of what excellence stands for. Reading about Professor Jason Arday is by turns sad, disappointing and, at a visceral level, gut-wrenching because of the fractures that appear concerning othering and inclusion.

It is the same feeling that prevails when, in recent years, some South African social movements have contributed to the othering of foreign nationals by portraying people as responsible for, or contributing to, increasing unemployment levels or crime, often in distressing ways. 

In some ways these developments arise from the imperfections of our government’s historic approach to porous borders and weak immigration controls (and by this I mean weak documentation measures rather than only weak control of access) so that the belief distorts the reality. 

Of course, measures of proper identification and access control should be in place on matters of migration; rigour and quality controls should be in place in academic contexts. We expect from both the bureaucratic, as also the education functions of the state, adequate quality controls. 

But when controls become, even in their absence, the justification for displacement, othering and judgement, we need as society to pause. Professor Jason Arday died alone. Many migrants having to return to places they had either fled, or been driven from, have felt themselves alone at the mercy of communities they had come to think of as home. It was Hannah Arendt who made the point about how fear aligns with tyranny to become a political means to foster suspicion and isolation.

A vexed and divisive issue

Professor Jason Arday was born in Britain to Ghanaian parents. Evidently this form of belonging and inclusion in a multicultural and multilingual society seems in retrospect to be weak: too weak to counter or prevent racialised othering in a society in which immigration is presently a vexed and divisive issue; opening up the wounds of a state that was shaped imperial practices concerning enslaved, indentured and migrant labour. 

Othering does not take on an altogether different shade with respect to foreign nationals in SA. To state this is to affirm how much it matters to be included, and to have the academic opportunity in a world-class institution, not without its own historic and contemporary challenges. 

In Cambridge, as in many progressive institutions in the North and South, there are many complexities to institutional development which include problematic colonial histories that contend with powerful shifts to transform and open access, and in so doing disrupt old discourses of race, class and gender entitlement. 

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) began as a place that was intended to serve an apartheid idea of race hierarchy and entitlement, and then committed itself to develop differently; rejecting and opposing those foundations, to embrace a commitment to equality and inclusion in sometimes violent opposition to the apartheid state.

As someone who has known what othering feels like (from the different perspective of being part of the LGBTIQA+ community) it is important personally and in this role of vice-chancellor to think through the experience of othering and its implications. UWC has a cherished and long relationship with the University of Ghent, led by a vice-chancellor who identifies as a trans woman. 

Significantly, both of us as leaders are aware as white (and in my case male) people of what race and gender privilege feels like, and how quickly those forms of “privileged inclusion” can morph into an othering turn when you refuse expectations shaped by heteronormative practices and perceptions. Non-conformity comes with a price of exclusion. 

The same is true for many religious communities, too. What do the ethics of inclusion ask of leadership in the othering turn in places like universities? First, is to acknowledge that the othering turn is racialised and gendered, and second, that it has an impact on universities that cannot claim to be neutral spaces, and third, is that we must lay claim to being and becoming more inclusive places.

Running against the grain

Othering runs against the grain in a university: How do we claim to be universal in knowledge without being universally representative of knowledges of the world, and as importantly, the people from around our one world, who make it? Diversity in its fulsome expression is not possible without inclusion. 

Othering to the extent that lives are crushed, runs against the grain also in a multicultural and multilingual democracy. If modern national identities are to speak honestly about the realities of forced and other diasporas, and the colonial and conflict-ridden borders we share, then the privileging of narrow identities, whether ethno-national, religious, linguistic, or otherwise, should turn our stomachs. 

What makes us allow this to be considered normal or legitimate as a response? Our seeing the situation in Palestine as normal is a catastrophic example of perception used as a ready tool to distort reality: belief in the power of difference not only motivates opinion, but justifies judgement, leading to actions that lead to guilt, and sometimes death. And in that death of the other, indifference is also a judgement.

For some years, I was also a “foreign national” – in the United Kingdom. I recall a few inventive peers from SA in those years who remade themselves, sometimes finding fictional connections to a country that they wanted to be part of; a class system to which they aspired. 

I bear no judgement of the effort, it was by turns the subject of mirth and satire, but I cannot abdicate discernment about what anxieties underpinned those desires to belong: people recreated their pasts, their colours, their sexualities – so desperate was the impulse to flee the experienced rejection of a past, to embrace the reinvention of a future. 

One sees this behaviour in many othered vulnerable groups (consider for example, in the gay man’s “choice” to remain closeted, or immigrants’ “desire” to forget a language of the home so as to embrace a “new world, new me” English). The othering that characterised the pursuit of Professor Arday runs also against the grain of community, by definition. In the glass houses of modern nation statehood, and modern institutions, there seems to be an increased fragility in the glass itself. 

Conflict is allowed to persist for years, and we allow individuals to be pursued relentlessly in the name of academic integrity: understanding and compassion give way to toxicity, and race and gender othering are entailed. In Professor Arday’s case, his death gives the debate an added sense of gravity, without suggesting a causal relationship between the scrutiny he faced and his death.

A counter-example

The other is black, woman, LGBTIQA, immigrant. August is Women’s Month in SA. It’s also the month when the bombs fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is the month that marks the death of Jason Arday: so many conflicts to end conflict; fires to end fire. As a counter-example, the Women’s March of 1956 in SA did not need violence to make an enduring and powerful point about racial othering, gender and belonging. This makes us question whether in our turns, we are returning ourselves to barbarism in which legitimising conflict seems normal.

SA has much to share with the world about the impact this trajectory has on human development: that experience is not always exemplary as the recent anti-immigration activities demonstrate. That we should be open to bringing to light the darkest thoughts about what it means to be othered, and to be in pursuit of the othering turn, helps us understand how judgement is often underpinned by fear and competition, where careful and caring discernment could have, and can still, prevail. 

If there are places in society where that privileged reflection can occur in community, it ought to be the university. Just recently, I was in conversation about philanthropies when I was made aware of a growing tide of anti-intellectualism where it was suggested to me that universities risk coming to be considered antique bastions of classism. 

While this is not true of all universities, it is a worrying perception. Beyond such institutional critique, education spaces should enable careful discernment and be protected by society, so that science comes together with a university’s commitment to shaping, challenging and changing sensibility. 

In this shaping is not an affirmation of the ivory tower elitism, but rather a commitment to knowledge that changes our world, its links to popular culture and belief, and the willingness to open up its othering turns to reflection. 

This affirms the human, in the abstraction of ideas such as academic integrity and citizen, to understand these othering turns, and to illuminate any basis in prejudice, falsehood and fear. DM