Genuine Intellectuals. Academic and Social Responsibilities of Universities in Africa: Academic and Social Responsibilities of Universities in Africa

Prolegomena

Genuine Intellectuals: Academic and Social Responsibilities of Universities in Africa xi Prolegomena T his book, slim as it looks, took me the best part of five laborious years to write 1965-9 inclusive. I was penning away as students in France were up in arms against the academic Establishment, and their fury almost toppled a powerful, prestigious, political giant like General de Gaulle (1890-1970). In America students, arms in hand, besieged and stormed the buildings of the University Administration, others blew up lecture halls in Canada - the student revolt, a very saeva indignatio, was in paroxysm. But in England (save in the London School of Economics where students rioted for the lame reason that the College gate looked like that of a jail-house) all was calm. In France and America the students had good reason for the rising: the absence of Dialogue between student and Faculty, caused in France by the predominance of the Professorial System, caused in America by the involvement of the Faculty in Big Business research and the consequent neglect of the students. But old England thanks to a blending of the Professorial and the Tutorial systems, thanks to the wedlock of College and Faculty, thanks to the permanent dialogue that this blending maintained between the students and the University hierarchy, thanks to the share that students had in University government, thanks to this that even the newest freshman had the privilege of a hearing, thanks also to this that the University, by Charter, is independent of Westminster, England remained unruffled by the student insurgence. Throughout that period, I was an academic on secondment to government and held successively the Cameroon Deputy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Transport, Post and Telecommunications, and that of Public Health and Social Welfare – a humanist among technologists. And, in the running of these Ministries, I endeavoured to prove that even Politics and Government can be scientific and philosophical, that administration is Bernard Nsokika Fonlon xii best when it is subject to reason and principle and not when it is based on scheming and expediency. The deference with which I was treated by the highest specialists and the deep and lasting friendship I won from the best among them, proves, that I was right, by and large. The question that readers of this book would ask, is whether the ideas I propounded ten years ago, on University Studies, on the organization of the Univer-sity, on the characteristics of the sterling intellectual, the genuine University man, have remained firm and unchanged, in my mind. I make simple answer: From an analysis of the causes of the global student insurrection of the second half of the nineteen sixties, from my experiment with intellectual Government, from my experiences since I returned to the seemingly pleasing groves of academe - I am becoming daily more entrenched in my position, namely, in my views on the Nature of University Studies (Chapter Three), in the overwhelming importance of what Newman called ‘influence and organization’ in the establishment and running of the University (Chapter One), in my conviction about the genuine intellectual (Chapter Seven), in the need to remove all non-academic interference in University Affairs, in the need for enlarging scientific dimensions into philosophic horizons in University Studies (Chapters Four to Six), in this that if the University does not teach a student to think, it has taught him nothing of genuine worth, has failed wide of its mark, and lastly, in this, which I know will be hotly contested by many, namely, that the University is not for a mindless mob but for the Talented Tenth. Such is my idea of what the University should be. And for it to attain these ends, for it to impart this manifold wisdom to the rising youth, for it to avoid prostituting itself, certain conditions are categorically imperative with regard to the choice .of teachers, with regard to the quality of students, with regard to University organization. This is fully discussed in Chapter Two. Bernard Nsokika Fonlon xiv Furthermore, any student seriously committed to intellectual enterprise must begin, even in his under-graduate days, to create the embryo of a library of his own, for he needs not only standard text books but also books of extended reading; and what better guide can he have for this than his chosen field and allied disciplines and others farther afield in which he develops an interest...