Extremely thoughtful and fresh piece from Mahmoud Mamdani, Director of the Institute for Development Studies at Makerere University courtesy of Prof. Shahrzad Mobjab of University of Toronto.

The importance of research in a university

Mahmood Mamdani, Makerere Institute of Social Research, 2011-04-21, Issue 526

My remarks will be more critical than congratulatory. I will focus more onthe challenge we face rather than the progress we have made. My focus willalso be limited, to the Humanities and the Social Sciences rather than tothe Sciences, to postgraduate education and research rather than tounderdgraduate education.

I would like to begin with a biographical comment. I did my 'O 'Levels atOld Kampala Secondary School in 1962, the year of independence. The USgovernment gave an independence gift to the Uganda government. It included24 scholarships. I was one among those who was airlifted to the US, gettingseveral degrees over 10 years, BA, MA, PhD - and returned in 1972.

Those who came with me divided into two groups. There were those who neverreturned, and then those who did, but were soon frustrated by the fact thatthe conditions under which they were supposed to work were far removed fromthe conditions under which they were trained. In a matter of years,sometimes months, they looked for jobs overseas, or moved out of academiainto government or business or elsewhere.

The lesson I draw from my experience was that the old model does not work.We have no choice but to train postgraduate students in the veryinstitutions in which they will have to work. We have no choice but to trainthe next generation of African scholars at home. This means tackling thequestion of institutional reform alongside that of postgraduate education.Postgraduate education, research and institution building will have to bepart of a single effort.

I would like to put this in the context of the history of higher educationin Africa. I do not mean to suggest that there is a single African history.I speak particularly of those parts of Africa colonized after the BerlinConference in late 19th century. There is contrast between older colonieslike South Africa or Egypt where Britain embarked on a civilizing mission -building schools and universities - and newer colonies like Uganda wherethey tended to regard products of modern education as subversive of theexisting order.

HISTORY OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA

You can write a history of higher education in Africa that begins amillennium ago. It is now well known that there existed centers of learningin different parts of Africa-such as Al-Azhar in Egypt, Al-Zaytuna inMorocco, and Sankore in Mali- prior to Western domination of the continent.And yet, this historical fact is of marginal significance for contemporaryAfrican higher education. This is for one reason. The organization ofknowledge production in the contemporary African university is everywherebased on a disciplinary mode developed in Western universities over the 19thand 20th centuries.

The first colonial universities few and far between: Makerere in EastAfrica, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa, and so on. Lord Lugard, Britain'sleading colonial administrator in Africa, used to say that Britain mustavoid the Indian disease in Africa. The Indian Disease referred to thedevelopment of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry thevirus of nationalism.

This is why the development of higher education in Africa between the Saharaand the Limpopo was mainly a post-colonial development. To give but oneexample, there was 1 university in Nigeria with 1,000 students atindependence. Three decades later, in 1991, there were 41 universities with131,000 students. Nigeria not an exception.

Everywhere, the development of universities was a key nationalist demand. Atindependence, every country needed to show its flag, national anthem,national currency and national university as proof that the country hadindeed become independent.

We can identify two different post-independent visions of the role of highereducation. One was state-driven. I spent six years teaching at theUniversity of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. The downside of the Dar experiencewas that governments tended to treat universities as parastatals,undermining academic freedom. The great achievement of Dar was the creationof a historically-informed, inter- disciplinary, curriculum.

A later post-independence vision was market-driven. Makerere University cameto be its prime example. I spent nearly two decades at Makerere, from 1980to 1996. During the 1990s, Makerere combined the entry of fee-payingstudents [privatization] with the introduction of a market-driven curriculum[commercialization]. The effects were contradictory: payment of fees showedthat it was possible to broaden the financial base of higher education;commercialization opened the door to a galloping consultancy culture.

The two models had a common failing. Neither developed a graduate program.Everyone assumed that post-graduate education would happen overseas throughstaff development programs. I do not recall a single discussion onpost-graduate education at either Dar or Makerere.

A PERVASIVE CONSULTANCY CULTURE

Today, the market-driven model is dominant in African universities. Theconsultancy culture it has nurtured has had negative consequences forpostgraduate education and research. Consultants presume that research isall about finding answers to problems defined by a client. They think ofresearch as finding answers, not as formulating a problem. The consultancyculture is institutionalized through short courses in research methodology,courses that teach students a set of tools to gather and processquantitative information, from which to cull answers.

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bonesclassroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated tohotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. Allthis is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university.Academic papers have turned into coporate-style power point presentations.Academics read less and less. A chorus of bu

 words have taken the place oflively debates.

If you sit in a research institution as I do, then the problem can be summedup in a single phrase: the spread of a corrosive consultancy culture. Why isthe consultancy mentality such a problem? Let me give you an example fromthe natural sciences.

In 2007, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation decided to make eradicatingmalaria its top priority. Over the next 4 years, it spent $150 million onthis campaign. Even more important were the consequences of its advocacyprogram, which was so successful that it ended up shaping priorities ofothers in the field of health.

According to a recent study on the subject, WHO expenditure on eradicatingmalaria sky rocketed from $ 100 million in 1998 to $2 billion in 2009.

The rush to a solution was at the expense of thinking through the problem.From an epidemiological point of view, there are two kinds of diseases:those you can eradicate, like sleeping sickness or smallpox, and those youcannot - like yellow fever - because it lives on a host, in this casemonkeys, which means you would have to eradicate monkeys to eradicate yellowfever. The two types of diseases call for entirely different solutions: fora disease you cannot eradicate, you must figure out how to live with it

Last year, a team of scientists from Gabon and France found that malaria toohas a wild host - monkeys - which means you cannot eradicate it. To learn tolive with it calls for an entirely different solution. Eradication calls fora laboratory-based strategy. You look for isolated human communities, likeislands with small populations and invest all your resources in it - whichis what the Gates Foundation and WHO did. But living with malaria requiresyou to spend your monies in communities with large, representativepopulations.

The Gates Foundation and WHO money was spent mostly on small islands. A WHOexpert called it 'a public health disaster'. The moral of the story is thatdiagnosis is more important than prescription. Research is diagnosis.

CREATING AN ANTI-DOTE TO A CONSULTANCY CULTURE

How do we counter the spread of consultancy culture? Through an intellectualenvironment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture. Tomy knowledge, there is no model for this on the African continent today. Itis something we will have to create.

The old model looked for answers outside the problem. It was utopian becauseit imposed externally formulated answers. A new model must look for answerswithin the parameters of the problem. This is why the starting point must gobeyond an understanding of the problem, to identifying initiatives that seekto cope with the problem. In the rest of this talk, I will seek to give ananalysis of the problem and outline one initiative that seeks to come togrips with it. This is the initiative at the Makerere Institute of SocialResearch.]

THE CONSULTANCY PROBLEM

Let me return to my own experience, this time at MISR, where I have learntto identify key manifestations of the consultancy culture.

I took over the directorship of MISR in June of 2010. When I got there, MISRhad 7 researchers, including myself. We began by meeting each for an hour:what research do you do? What research have you done since you came here?The answers were a revelation: everyone seemed to do everything, or ratheranything, at one time primary education, the next primary health, thenroads, then HIV/AIDS, whatever was on demand! This is when I learnt torecognize the first manifestation of consultancy: A consultant has noexpertise. His or her claim is only to a way of doing things, of gatheringdata and writing reports. He or she is a Jack or a Jane of all, a master ofnone. This is the first manifestation.

Even though consultancy was the main work, there was also some research atMISR. But it was all externally-driven, the result of demands of Europeandonor agencies that European universities doing research on Africa mustpartner with African universities. The result was not institutionalpartnerships but the incorporation of individual local researchers into anexternally-driven project. It resembled more an outreach from UK or Francerather than a partnership between relative equals.

Next I suggested to my colleagues that our first priority should be to buildup the library. I noticed that the size of our library had actually beenreduced over the past 10 years. I understood the reason for this when Ilooked at MISR's 10-year strategic plan. The plan called for purchasingaround 100 books for the library over 10 years. In other words, the librarywas not a priority. The second manifestation of a consultancy culture isthat consultant don't read, not because they cannot read, or are notinterested in reading - but because reading becomes a luxury, an after-workactivity. Because consultancies do not require you to read anything morethan field data and notes.

My colleagues and I discussed the problem of consultancy in meeting aftermeeting, and came up with a two-fold response. Our short-term response wasto begin a program of seminars, two a month, requiring that every personbegin with a research proposal, one that surveys the literature in theirfield, identifies key debates and located their query within those debates;second, also twice a month, we agreed to meet as a study group, prepare alist of key texts in the social sciences and humanities over the past 40years, and read and discuss them.

Over the long-term, we decided to create a multi-disciplinary,coursework-based, PhD program to train a new generation of researchers. Tobrain-storming the outlines of this program, we held a two-day workshop inJanuary with scholars from University of Western Cape in South Africa andAddis Ababa University. I would like to share with you some of thedeliberations at that workshop.

REFLECTIONS ON POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE SOCIALSCIENCES

The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what itmeans to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current historicalcontext and, in particular, in the post-colonial African context. What doesit mean to teach humanities and social sciences in a location where thedominant intellectual paradigms are products not of Africa's own experience,but of a particular Western experience? Where dominant paradigms theorize aspecific Western history and are concerned in large part to extol thevirtues of the enlightenment or to expound critiques of that sameenlightenment? As a result, when these theories expand to other parts of theworld-they do so mainly by submerging particular origins and specificconcerns through describing these in the universal terms of scientificobjectivity and neutrality? I want to make sure I am not misunderstood:there is no problem with the reading texts from the Enlightenment - in fact,it is vital - the problem is this: if the Enlightenment is said to be anexclusively European phenomenon, then the story of the Enlightenment is onethat excludes Africa as it does most of the world. Can it then be thefoundation on which we can build university education in Africa?The assumption that there is a single model derived from the dominantWestern experience reduces research to no more than a demonstration thatsocieties around the world either conform to that model or deviate from it.The tendency is to dehistoricize and decontextualise discordant experiences,whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue original researchor intellectual production in Africa. The global market tends to relegateAfrica to providing raw material ("data") to outside academics who processit and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals areincreasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used tocollate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a generalimpoverishment of theory and debate.

The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stressquantification above all has led to a peculiar intellectual dispensation inAfrica today: the dominant trend is increasingly for research to bepositivist and primarily quantitative, carried out to answer questions thathave been formulated outside of the continent, not only in terms of locationbut also in terms of historical perspective. This trend either occursdirectly, through the "consultancy" model, or indirectly, through researchfunding and other forms of intellectual disciplining. In my view, theproliferation of "short courses" on methodology that aim to teach studentsand academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering andprocessing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers.But the collection of data to answer pre-packaged questions is not asubstantive form of research if it displaces the fundamental researchpractice of formulating the questions that are to be addressed. If thathappens, then researchers will become managers whose real work is tosupervise data collection.

But this challenge to autonomous scholarship is not unprecedented-indeed,autonomous scholarship was also denigrated in the early post-colonial state,when universities were conceived of as providing the "manpower" necessaryfor national development, and original knowledge production was seen as aluxury. Even when scholars saw themselves as critical of the state, such asduring the 1970s at University of Dar es Salaam, intellectual work ended upbeing too wedded to a political program, even when it was critical of thestate. The strength of Dar was that it nurtured a generation of publicintellectuals. Its weakness was that this generation failed to reproduceitself. This is a fate that will repeat in the future if research is not putback into teaching and PhD program in Africa are not conceived of astraining the next generation of African scholars.

Someone told me yesterday that Makerere requires every Ph D thesis to endwith a set of recommendations. If true, this indicates a problem. Auniversity is not a think tank. A university may house think tanks, evenseveral, but a university cannot itself be a think tank. Think tanks arepolicy-oriented centers, centers where the point of research is to makerecommendations. In a university, there needs to be room for both appliedresearch, meaning policy-oriented research, and basic research. Thedistinction is this: unlike applied research which is preoccupied withmaking recommendations, the point of basic research is to identify andquestion assumptions that drive the very process of knowledge production.

THE POSTGRADUATE INITIATIVE AT MISR

I believe one of the biggest mistakes made in the establishment of MISR as aresearch institute was to detach research from postgraduate education. Theformation of the new College of Humanities that has brought the Faculties ofArts and Social Sciences and MISR under a single administrative roof givesus a historic opportunity to correct this mistake. MISR will aim to offer amulti-disciplinary Doctoral program in the qualitative social sciences andthe Humanities.The initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) is drivenby multiple convictions. One, key to research is the formulation of theproblem of research. Two, the definition of the research problem should stemfrom a dual engagement: on the one hand, a critical engagement with thesociety at large and, on the other, a critical grasp of disciplinaryliterature, world-wide, so as to identify key debates within the literatureand locate specific queries within those debates.

Faced with a context where the model is the consultant and not theindependent researcher, we at MISR think the way forward is to create a PhDprogram based on significant preparatory coursework, to create amongstudents the capacity to both re-think old questions and formulate new.

Our ambition is also to challenge the foundations of the prevailingintellectual paradigm which has turned the dominant Western experience intoa model which conceives of research as no more than a demonstration thatsocieties around the world either conform or deviate from that model. Thisdominant paradigm dehistoricizes and decontextualises other experiences,whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue original researchin Africa. The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing rawmaterial ("data") to outside academics who process it and then re-exporttheir theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasinglydescriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collatedata, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a generalimpoverishment of theory and debate. If we are to treat every experiencewith intellectual dignity, then we must treat treat it as the basis fortheorization. This means to historicize and contextualize not only phenomenaand processes that we observe but also the intellectual apparatus used toanalyze these.

Finally, MISR will seek to combine a commitment to local [indeed, regional]knowledge production, rooted in relevant linguistic and disciplinary terms,with a critical and disciplined reflection on the globalization of modernforms of knowledge and modern instruments of power. Rather than oppose thelocal to the global, it will seek to understand the global from the vantagepoint of the local. The doctoral program will seek to understand alternativeforms of aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, bothcontemporary and historical, the objective being not just to learn aboutthese forms, but also to learn from them. Over time, we hope this projectwill nurture a scholarly community that is equipped to rethink-in bothintellectual and institutional terms-the very nature of the university andof the function it is meant to serve locally and globally.

COURSEWORK

Coursework during the first two years will be organized around a single setof core courses taken by all students, supplemented by electives grouped infour thematic clusters:

1. Genealogies of the Political, being discursive and institutionalhistories of political practices;2. Disciplinary and Popular Histories, ranging from academic andprofessional modes of history writing to popular forms of retelling the pastin vernaculars;3. Political Economy, global, regional and local; and4. Literary and Aesthetic Studies, consisting of fiction, the visual andperforming arts and cinema studies.

Translated into a curricular perspective, the objective is for an individualstudent's course of study to be driven forward by debates and not byorthodoxy. This approach would give primacy to the importance of reading keytexts in related disciplines. In practical terms, students would spend thefirst two years building a bibliography and coming to grips with theliterature that constituted it. In the third year they would write acritical essay on the bibliography, embark on their own research in thefourth year, and finally write it up in the fifth.

INTER-DISCIPLINARITY

Over the 19th century, European universities developed three differentdomains of knowledge production-natural sciences, humanities, and socialsciences-based on the notion of "three cultures". Each of these domains wasthen subdivided into "disciplines." Over the century from 1850 to the SecondWorld War, this became the dominant pattern as it got institutionalizedthrough three different organizational forms: a) within the universities, aschairs, departments, curricula, and academic degrees for students; b)between and outside universities at the national and international level, asdiscipline-based associations of scholars and journals; c) in the greatlibraries of the world, as the basis for classification of scholarly works.

This intellectual consensus began to break down after the 1960s, partlybecause of the growing overlap between disciplines and partly because of ashared problematique. For example, the line dividing the humanities from thesocial sciences got blurred with the increasing "historicization" and hence"contextualization" of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences.The development was best captured in the report of the Gulbenkian Commissionchaired by Immanuel Wallerstein. As inter-disciplinarity began to makeinroads into disciplinary specialization, the division between thehumanities and the social sciences paled in the face of a growing divisionbetween quantitative and qualitative perspectives in the study of social,political and cultural life. But these intellectual developments were notmatched by comparable organizational changes, precisely because it is noteasy to move strongly entrenched organizations. Though the number ofinterdisciplinary and regional institutes multiplied, collaboration rarelycut across the humanities/social science divide.

The challenge of postgraduate studies in the African university is how toproduce a truly inter-disciplinary knowledge without giving up the groundgained in the disciplines. The challenge of MISR is how to reproduce ageneration of researchers by joining research to postgraduate education. Ourincorporation into the new College of Humanities and Social Sciences, andthereby an end to our standalone status, has created this opening for us -one we hope to seize with both hands.

Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani is professor and executive director of Makerere Instituteof Social Research (MISR). The paper was presented as the keynote speech at Makerere University, Research and Innovations Dissemination Conference, Hotel Africana, 11 April 2011.