MWANGAZA, universities: Search for clarity continues!

To get to the point, today’s university ... in scholarship, research, teaching, etc. ... whether sciences, humanities, etc. ... — is rooted and anchored philosophically in Liberalist, Capitalist world-views ... Such university and its intellectual community first and foremost serve and nurture the Liberalist, capitalist state ...

MWANGAZA, universities: Search for clarity continues!
By Admin .
Journalists @New Vision
#MWANGAZA #University #Reserach #Education

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OPINION

By Kenneth David Mafabi

As we stated last week, in the ongoing Mwangaza effort, several questions have been put to us repeatedly. They have included: Why the focus on universities? Why Study Groups?

“Our answers have been very simple and straightforward. Firstly, institutions of higher learning and universities have played a central and pivotal role in the transformation of all human societies — from antiquity, to date.”

Our universities in Uganda and Africa today are enjoined by history to play an equivalent role under our specific and peculiar circumstances.

Secondly, no sustainable revolution or national transformation process has occurred without a corresponding organic “priesthood” and “discipleship”.

But first, we must report to the reader that we were very well received in Makerere University on September 16, 2022, and in Soroti University on September 19, 2022 — by the leaderships, academic and non-academic staff, students, enthusiasts from the wider community and the media.

We are particularly grateful to Prof. Eria Hisali, the principal of the College of Business and Management Sciences; Prof. Peter Baguma (psychology) and NRM chairperson, Makerere University, as well as student leaders, among others — who received and hosted us in Makerere.

We are similarly particularly grateful to Prof. Ikoja Odongo, the vice-chancellor of Soroti University; Peter Pex Paak, the resident city commissioner of Soroti city, the guild president of Soroti University, among others — who received and hosted us, in Soroti University.

The discussions around ideological clarity and the formation of Mwangaza African Revolutionary Study Groups of the process of the fundamental unity and socio-economic transformation of Uganda and Mother Afrika (like elsewhere we have been) were exhilarating! It was gratifying again, as we now prepare to visit the Islamic University in Uganda (Mbale, Main Campus) and Busitema University — to receive a telephone call from the Teso Media Association to the effect that they have resolved to form a Mwangaza Study Group, and that they need guidance on how to proceed!

Now, back to the critical historical place and role of universities in the qualitative transformation of societies. Last week, we traced out the broad historical path of the emergence of higher institutions of learning — from ancient Egyptian and other civilisations, through classical antiquity, to the modern university in the 11th century. Significantly, the modern university appears together with the emergence of urbanisation and guilds of craftsmen and traders — on the historical eve of: the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; the mutation of mercantilist capital to industrial capitalism; the Industrial Revolution.

The modern university, therefore, appears initially in the form of guilds or specialised associations — of students and teachers with collective legal rights guaranteed by charters.

These entities were self-regulating and determined the qualifications of their members.

The periodisation above is being very deliberately outlined and emphasised: the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; Capitalism; the Industrial Revolution.

To recapitulate on what we all know, the Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, and covering the 15th and 16th centuries.

It was characterised by efforts to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It was associated with great social change.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, was an intellectual and philosophical movement that shook Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and with world-wide impact.

It included ideas built around the value of human happiness, the knowledge obtained by reasoning and given to us by our senses. It also brought to the fore the ideals of liberty, progress, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state.

In history, the Enlightenment was preceded by the Scientific Revolution — which was characterised by revolutionary developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, among others. Rene Descartes’ 1637 Discourse on the Method with his now famous dictum, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), is widely cited as one of the critical nodal points in the unfolding of the Scientific Revolution.

Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) is generally viewed as a high point of the Scientific Revolution and the start of the Enlightenment. To get to the point, the ideals and thought of the Enlightenment directly undermined the old feudal order and paved the way for the liberalist, bourgeois democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe and America. As we have written elsewhere, “European feudalism had proved to be more fertile for generating capitalism than the great hydraulic civilisations of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indies and the Ganges, the Yellow River and Mekong, or the water tank systems of Peru and Sri-Lanka.

A new class of industrial capitalists had emerged to challenge the old merchant capitalists for supremacy even in Britain, the first capitalist nation.

Britain, then, was an industrialising, capitalist nation, and a dominant and leading power. General political thought, then, reflected the essence of booming capitalist enterprise.”

To get to the point, today’s university ... in scholarship, research, teaching, etc. ... whether sciences, humanities, etc. ... — is rooted and anchored philosophically in Liberalist, Capitalist world-views ... Such university and its intellectual community first and foremost serve and nurture the Liberalist, capitalist state ...

The socialist states of yesteryear built higher education institutions, universities and intellectual communities — nay, entire education systems — that first and foremost served and nurtured their states.

Who and what, precisely, do the universities amongst the world’s emergent peoples serve? What socio-economic interests do they serve — in the name of scholarship and academic freedom?

Last week, we stated and re-affirm today, “All civilisations in history have found higher education necessary — to train their elites: politicians, priests, bureaucrats, the military, etc.”

In the specific circumstances of what Mao Zedong characterised as “New Democratic Revolutions” in the world’s former colonies — that is, neither capitalist nor socialist — what constitutes, or should constitute, the philosophical anchor of higher education?

To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, our universities have an objective historical mission and duty... They either fulfil ... or betray it. Next week, we look briefly at: “Why Study Groups”?

The writer is a Senior Presidential Advisor/Political Affairs (Special Duties) State House kdavidmafabi1@gmail.com