Collaboration, Opposition, and Complicity: How Higher Education Shaped Apartheid in South Africa

• In Event: 2213 - Complicity and Cooptation: How Sociology has Changed Society, for Better and for Worse

Abstract

Academics have a checkered history of influencing the development of public policies and political systems. In studying how scholarship that occupies a marginal position in the academy becomes widely accepted and integrated into political programs, existing scholarship focuses on how particularly influential groups of academics gain their influence in the political sphere. We extend this productive line of scholarship to examine how the interaction between political systems and academic systems (rather than political systems and individual academics) shape academics’ capacity to influence politics and policy through an analysis of South African higher education during the apartheid era. The apartheid system was engineered in no small part by Afrikaner academics who contributed to the development, implementation, and justification of segregationist policies. Yet, the theories and assumptions used to advance apartheid were at best disputed, and ultimately discredited. We show how the continued influence of this scholarship depended on the institutional arrangements of higher education, which fostered the neutrality of the large and influential group of English-speaking academics. Building on our findings, we propose a preliminary typology of relations between the fields of politics and academics, and elaborate three theoretically important relationship types: collaboration, opposition, and complicity.

Authors

• Eric Schoon, Ohio State University

• Robert Joseph VandenBerg, Ohio State University