Reciprocity and Responsibility for the Public Good

This is a discussion about partnerships between universities, and so I want to frame the questions of reciprocity and responsibility within the concept of the university as a public institution – a place for research, critical inquiry and public intellectual life and teaching. It is always interesting to ask such questions in the context of South African higher education, because South Africa is in so many ways the limit case of extremes- the ideal of liberation and the curse of AIDS; the beauty of the land and the ugliness of poverty; growing inequality that gives this country the distinction of being the most unequal in the world in terms of household incomes. At the same time little about South Africa is an exception, and the extremes of the South African case point to potential futures inherent in the present elsewhere in the world. To drive from Cape Town International Airport to the campus of the University of Cape Town is to bring the drab statistics of development economics to life – from shack to mansion; a fifty-fold increase in household incomes in twenty minutes; from 50% unemployment to a critical skills shortage, from treating extensive burns from paraffin stoves to cardiac surgery. But these dichotomies are also everywhere, if less extreme, and more hidden away: in the drive from the suburbs of Washington to the inner city; in the ethnic ghettos visible from the Eiffel Tower; in the drive south on the 101 from San Francisco. This points to the role of partnerships. If partnerships are to be more than amicable and nominal exchanges between Vice Chancellors and Presidents, they will build on the ways in which we can see our possible and potential futures in each other’s present circumstances, and build interventions with defined objectives.