103

 Book Review:

Contemporary Campus Life:
Transformation, Manic 
Managerialism and 
Academentia
– by Keyan G. Tomaselli

[2021. BestRed (HSRC). 244pp. ISBN 978-1-928246-26-8] 

By Donal P. McCracken

CULTURE

V o l u m e  9 0  /  2 0 2 2



104 T H E  T H I N K E R

It is with a certain hesitation that one opens a new book about the work experience written by a former colleague. Flicking nervously to the index I am relieved 
to see my name is not mentioned, only moments later to 
be mortified on flicking through his 244-page apologia 
to see my name up in lights. So, we shall start with a 
shoddy index. That and the 1970s drab brown cover do not 
speak well for a good read. Then the acknowledgements 
contain this ominous paragraph: ‘These chapters are 
constituted and rewritten from columns published in 
UKZNdabaOnline, with others from UKZNtouch, SUBtext, 
Wits Review, the Sunday Times and some other published 
and original materials. The first of these he wrote as the 
Griot, the oral storyteller of African communities. The 
chapters have been edited, updated and the original 
ideas elaborated on and offered here in essay form, 
rather than as columns.’ So, the 1970s are pushed back to 
the 1950s when in South Africa the common if quaintly 
outdated practice of selected published columns actually 
sold books. A quarter of a century ago I recall advising a 
celebrated journalist and broadcaster not to even think 
of such a retrograde step. And yet, like some remarkable 
madcap Grand Design, Tomaselli has succeeded where 
others have failed. The book is a success.  

Contemporary Campus Life: Transformation, Manic 
Managerialism and Academentia is a cry of anguish 
against the scourge of 21st-century university 
managerialism, where lip service is paid to clever window 
dressing, endless numbing box-ticking and to, at times, 
sinister bean-counting, all packaged in aspirational tones 
which brooks opposition — producing a pastiche of 
former Soviet exuberance where ‘this month 300 happy 
workers produced 400 new tractors.’ The result of this 
sustained and intellectually suicidal approach, not just in 
South Africa, has been that the professoriate have been 
relegated to a tame and minor role in universities leading 
in turn to their too often abrogating their sacred trust and 
entering their offices, closing their collective doors, and, 
in the words of the statesman William Pitt, ‘Tending their 
own gardens’.

I had another colleague once who gained a 
Commonwealth Scholarship and went to Edinburgh 
University to study for his doctorate under the eminent 
and daunting historian D.B. Horn (1901–1969). On 
entering the great man’s wood-panelled study the 
cantankerous Scot asked what his research topic was. 
This was a study of an 18th-century Scottish nobleman 
and diplomat (not a topic that would land one a 

tutorship in a South African university these days). 
When informed, he merely said, ‘Well, Laddie, you know 
where the archive is in High Street, then go there.’ And 
that was the sum total of his supervision. 

Though Tomaselli is noted as a meticulous supervisor, one 
suspects that he is not unsympathetic to the notion of self-
help and minimal administration. Apart from efficiently 
and effectively running his own postgraduate unit for 
several decades, he certainly avoided the managerial 
rat race, and as such cannot be accused of hypocrisy in 
this peroration against Mammon and Byzantinism in 
the academy. And being at heart a theorist it is difficult 
to question the logic within this volume, even if the word 
academentia somewhat sticks in the gullet. But, unlike 
most of my students, Tomaselli realises that there is a 
nexus between theory and reality, and where, as Arthur 
Quiller-Couch eloquently enunciated, the imperative 
for the faculty of action is subordinated to the faculty of 
knowledge. And that is the point of the book. The system 
just does not work, or at least if it does, it should not be 
called a university. 

There was a time when much of the mining industry in 
South Africa was run (after the days of the enigmatic and 
now unpopular Mr Rhodes) by historians. Fat hope of that 
happening in this age of tunnel-focused education and 
manic managerialism. In The Idea of a University, published 
in 1854, Cardinal Newman speaks of ‘the deficiencies and 
the irregularities of knowledge’ within leadership and 
‘the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle 
which they exhibit’. What he would have written about 
such leadership in 2021 one shudders to think. 

In a deceptively mild and humorous manner, Tomaselli’s 
book systematically dissects the mindset which dominates 
university management practices and beliefs, and which 
is now self-generating and promoting. It is focused on 
South Africa, but it is a universal tale of bowing the knee 
to rankings; the mystical god Science who employs all its 
worshippers; political and cultural correctness (though 
the index being so poor I cannot definitively promise to 
his use of the phrase); and the regimented and monitored 
office regime. 

It is a well-written book in somewhat satirical vein, which 
also flows well and makes a convincing point – one, sadly, 
which I fear will have no impact on the juggernaut which 
has relegated intellectualism (as distinct from popularism) 
in universities to a tame and minor role. 

CULTURE