Bureaucracy – the way to strangle a nation

I interrupt the series of pieces that I have been writing on the “twelve big questions of science” in order to address something that has obtruded itself so frequently in recent weeks that I feel constrained to say something about it. I hope that the minister of education, Naledi Pandor, whom I have met, and by whose intelligence I have been impressed, will read this, and perhaps reflect on whether a school system suffused in bureaucracy is ultimately capable of providing children and young people with a truly edifying, civilising and enriching education. Personally I believe — in light of conversations I have had with several ex-teachers on the reasons why they left the teaching profession — that, the more administration teachers are expected to do, the less energy and motivation they are likely to have for inspiring, effective teaching.

In one of his songs, the inimitable Leonard Cohen sings: “They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom … for trying to change the system from within … ” I often recall these lyrics nowadays, whenever it strikes me that teachers in South Africa — at school level as well as at universities — are not merely in danger of being drowned in a sea of hyper-administration, otherwise known as bureaucracy, but of being bored out of their minds by endlessly filling in form after redundant form. Sure, in institutions such as these, administration is unavoidable, but the true vocation of schools and universities is, in the first place, to educate the young (children and mostly adolescents, respectively), and to do so on the basis of a thorough knowledge of those disciplines — biology, chemistry, English, Xhosa, Afrikaans, mathematics — that students are required to be familiar with, in order to fulfil their role as professionals and citizens of the country one day.

What makes a “good” teacher or lecturer? To my mind, this is primarily someone who is sufficiently familiar with the subject that she or he teaches, that students can sense a certain “authority” on his or her part concerning the discipline in question. Besides, such knowledge is the only ground, I believe, for accepting a person’s authority in academic matters.

Secondly, to be a good lecturer or teacher does not only require a thorough knowledge of one’s field — it also entails the ability to communicate this knowledge to students. (I recall a maths teacher from high school who was evidently very good at doing mathematics — judging by the facility with which he worked out problems on the blackboard — but could not, to save his own life, explain to us how to do it!)

Thirdly, a good teacher or lecturer usually imparts enthusiasm about and for their subject to students — students can invariably sense this enthusiasm, which is conducive to a greater enjoyment of the discipline.

At university level another requirement has to be added here — to be a “good” university lecturer, one has to teach on the basis of, and drawing from, research that one is conducting in one’s chosen field in a sustained fashion. This is especially important, given that university education represents the highest form of discipline-oriented education in the world, and even undergraduate teaching should draw from the sources of “higher learning” in every intellectual and scientific field to be worthy of the name “university education”. Needless to say, this applies more rigorously to postgraduate teaching.

These two things — research and teaching — are the mainstay of university education, together with the minimum (and, I would argue, minimal) administration that teaching a course implies, such as keeping a record of students’ marks and of one’s course outlines, student feedback, and so on. And yet, it is increasingly the case that, when it comes to inquiring or talking about the specific research that colleagues are doing, the response one gets amounts to a statement, variously accompanied by defiance, embarrassment or desperation, that they have difficulty getting to their research, given the administrative (and sometimes teaching) burden that they have to cope with.

But why all the endless expansion and reinforcement of bureaucracy? The reason is not difficult to find, if one recalls that Jacques Lacan (in his theory of the so-called four discourses — those of the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst) once intimated that bureaucracy is the best example of the discourse of the university. One might have expected that the sciences would have qualified as paradigmatic instances of the university discourse, but surprisingly, Lacan associates true science with the hysteric’s discourse, because of the hysteric’s relentless questioning. In contrast with this, the university is founded on the (misguided) belief, that systematic, comprehensive, “complete” knowledge is an achievable possibility — something that Lacan regards as being a symptom of “paranoiac” human ambitions. This is why bureaucracy, for him, exemplifies the university’s discourse — it does not allow any alternatives to what is enshrined in some or other “policy”, or set of “rules”. “Rules are rules” is a response, on the part of officials, which has therefore understandably been associated with the blind, dogmatic expectations engendered by bureaucracies. Even Shakespeare must have had some experience of this; hence his reference to the “insolence of office” and the “delays of the law” in Hamlet.

The ironic thing about bureaucracy is that people are somehow persuaded that it is more efficient than a way of doing things with the necessary, but minimal administration. Not true. I know of a university practice concerning payment of page fees to academic journals, where accounts received by contributing authors were routinely signed and sent to a colleague on the university’s publication committee, who saw to it that the accounts were paid without fail. It involved no administration worth mentioning, and was very efficient, because the person doing the payments out of the relevant university budget was a responsible human being. The system which now operates at this institution involves the filling in of forms and the scrutiny of page fee-accounts, as well as a requisitioning process to get the necessary funds out of the relevant accounts — a process which takes far longer than the simple and efficient one which was replaced by it.

I would surmise that the growth of bureaucracy is at least partly a symptom of the endemic mistrust in people’s ability to act as autonomous, responsible people — hence the insistence on a “paper trial”, which is supposed (it would seem) to replace personal responsibility! In fact, it erodes personal responsibility.

And it leads to endless frustration, if not irritation, on the part of the people who are subjected to its dogmatic injunctions. A colleague who acted as an external examiner for a postgraduate student from another university recently shared his frustration — the face of the bureaucratic burden accompanying the academic task — me by remarking that it had taken him longer to complete all the accompanying forms sent to him than to read the student’s work. I doubt whether this academic would easily agree to another external examining request on the part of the university concerned.

All one can hope is that the government departments responsible for initiating and driving the process of increasing bureaucratisation, as well as the institutions — from schools to universities — which are blindly and “obediently” participating in this process, will come to their senses. (I deliberately put “obediently” in scare quotes — obedience and fascism go hand in hand; democracy requires citizens to think for themselves and act against anything that undermines democracy, including bureaucracy.) It is not conducive to good, uplifting education or border-shifting research, because the academic staff who are expected to pull the oars of the paper-multiplying boat, won’t have any energy left for their proper task, which is mutually enriching teaching and research.