Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape Prof Robert Balfour. Image: Institutional Advancement

Philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that the rights of (people) and of the citizen are the rights of those who make them a reality. They were won through democratic action and are only ever guaranteed through such action.

In making this claim, he suggests that justice, as also the rights upon which justice is based, depends on the actions of people to make them real: that the process of enactment, the activism of bringing to the body an idea and action, alters a reality in which these did not, not could not, have existed previously. So, too, is it with inclusion.

When a president of a democracy disappears, through an executive order, a possibility for the existence of an identity (as United States President Donald Trump has done when categorically denying that transgender people could have an identity admissible in terms of participation in the state), the action eradicates administratively a claim to that right to be human – let alone transgender. You cannot have the latter without recognising the former.

The executive order has implications for the many non-binary gender forms that have been the focus of modern scholarship since the Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality respectively, and the subject of literature and the arts long before scientific method had been applied to the question of gender. The words about disappearance have consequences. In South Africa, on 15 February, Muhsin Hendricks, an open member of the LGBTIQ+ community and an inclusive Muslim cleric was assassinated: what intolerance begins with a word, lands up in a bullet.

Inclusion is about receiving the whole person

There are many aspects to inclusion – some biological (as sex is), some physical and psychological (as disabilities are), some social (as race, The meaning of inclusion and freedom in universities gender and class are), and some philosophical (as fascism and democracy are).

I am not a philosopher, but clearly what ‘is’, even when it is only physical and visible, like a disability can be, must form the basis of action around inclusion and what it means to be human. At its most basic form, inclusion is a commitment to receiving the whole person as they are. And, our incapacity as a species to accept the whole person as they are, in our many institutional forms – whether as churches or mosques, whether as schools or universities – accounts for the fact that no democracy, not even our most modern democracies, allow for an absolute equality.

If we did recognise that equality, we would recognise that the borders of the state are nominal and must be porous; the definitions of citizen, subject and resident are slippery; that migration is as much a part of human activity as settlement is; that gender diversity is as much a part of our being as different thought is part of our thinking.

Universities and inclusion

The difficulty with exclusion is that it is underpinned by twin impulses antithetical to the practice of freedom: righteousness and rectitude, and shame and guilt: in other words, those two impulses which serve to justify why some cannot belong and ought not belong, and those two impulses which shame the desire to belong and the will to belong.

Unfortunately, not even our most advanced thinking and capacity to approximate objectivity, exemplified in scientific methodology, can avoid bias: the race and gender bias of AI is well known; the influence of the measure to alter the measured is known even in science (the Niels Bohr experiment). Universities are best as places of opportunity for those young people, and older people, with the academic acumen and interest in science. By necessity they are meritocratic because society recognises that university education is not suited to every talent, and not every talent benefits from an education that mostly, but not exclusively, focuses on the intellect in education. That noted, a meritocratic institution in a democracy that prizes diversity and celebrates inclusion, must recognise the dangers of any form of exclusionary practice (in that is also the practice of exclusion by elite groups) as fundamentally anti-intellectual.

The importance of solidarity

This emphasis on public good, the common good and the open-wealth, as it were, of the university, is important and returns me to the consideration given by Rancière to action and the practice of rights (to be). At the University of the Western Cape, for example, action has a history of interruption in the narratives of exclusion: its practice is not only the welling up of a human revulsion at the idea that violence can be justified by a state against whole groups of people, but a repulsion of the idea that violence as the practice of exclusion, can go uncontested.

In a world of weapons, it is difficult to argue for pacifism, but it is my belief that any society which is led by people who legitimise the taking up of arms against other groups, both inside and beyond the borders, is poorly led. This is why solidarity between marginalised groups is important and why the splintering of privilege to serve hierarchies of entitlement, is so dangerous. Universities are places made distinctive by their space in time and circumstance. Each is different; and each offers to the student and staff opportunities in abundance to thrive for the public and the common good.

While expressive of solidarity for many just causes and freedoms, universities are also deeply hierarchical and, in functioning, they are conservative about assessment, certification and standards. This latter aspect is sometimes interpreted as elitist when, in spirit, and at best, a standard should be only a measure guaranteeing to the public the worthiness of that education, in service of the public good. A commitment to excellence in service of the public good cannot be an elite proposition. And, neither should inclusion and diversity be divorced from what it means to be excellent in service of the public good.

If excellence means best practice and best action for what is most redeeming about humanity (its commitments to equality, its protection of the weak, its valuing of freedom) and what is also most hopeful in the academy (its innovation, community impact in arts and sciences), then diversity and belonging must come together, inclusion and freedom, must be one in action.

*This first appeared in the May edition of Inside Education, the quarterly print publication