On pushing a pen and questions about academic freedoms and restrictions in a transitional setting

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Date: 01 January 2014
• Published date: 01 January 2014
• DOI: 10.10520/EJC162993
• Pages: 134-158
• Published By: UNISA Press
• Author: Johan Beckmann,Justus Prinsloo

The Grantholder acknowledges that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations

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expressed in any publication generated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) supported

research are those of the author(s) and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

BA DEd Professor in the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria.

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BIuris LLB. Senior Researcher in the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Education, University of

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Pretoria.

Herman ‘Political transformation and research methodology in doctoral education’ (2008) Higher

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Education Close Up 4 (HECU4), University of Cape Town, Breakwater Conference Centre, 26-28

June, 2008 DOI 10. 1007/s10734-079-9261-6 (accessed 2013-02-27).

Id 5.

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On pushing a pen and questions about

academic freedoms and restrictions in a

transitional setting*

Johan Beckmannand Justus Prinsloo

** ***

1 Introduction

In a paper published online, Chaya Herman examines the relationship between

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political change and epistemologies and methodologies employed in research at

doctorate level in the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria from 1985.

She groups the doctoral dissertations under scrutiny together into three periods:

1985 – 1990, 1995 – 2000 and post 2000. She presents particularly negative

assessments of the theses in question, characterising them among other things

as research fundamentalism, patronising and pseudo-scientific knowledge,

pseudo-philosophical knowledge, ‘ideology masquerade [sic] as science’ and

disengaged knowledge lacking critical discourse and relevance. It would be

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understandable if the university management in general, deans of education, staff

of the Faculty of Education and the PhDs who graduated during the period

reviewed by Herman questioned her ex post facto analysis of their work. The

paper by Herman evokes intriguing questions about issues such as fairness of

comment, academic rigour and freedom, dignity and freedom of expression and

how they play out in a before and after scenario of far-reaching political change

and transformation. In this article we examine Herman’s article (which suggests

On pushing a pen and questions about academic freedoms and restrictions135

2008 4 SA 168 (C). Quotation marks inserted by Desai J. See also

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http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAWCHC/2008/39.pdf at 15.

(N 3) 21–22.

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(N 1) 1.

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to us a certain reluctance to deal with the above questions in her analysis

regarding the circumstances in which the text(s) on which she reports were

written) in the light of their apparent relevance to the constitutional right to

freedom of expression including academic freedom with its r estrictions/limitations.

Our paper introduces aspects of common law and the notion of ‘who pushed the

pen’ into the critical consideration of the article and its possible implications for

examining long-established academic and research traditions as they manifest

themselves in a transformed setting. We conclude with comments on how the

notion of ‘pushing the pen’ and knowledge of the meaning, limitation and

application of the right to freedom of expression could apply to Herman’s article

and to all academic texts produced after the apartheid era in the democratic

South Africa.

2Who pushed the pen?

In Peter-Ross v Ramesar Desai J quotes with approval Cala Homes (South) Ltd

v Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd 1995 FSR 818 in which Laddie J held that to

have mere regard to ‘who pushed the pen’ is to take too narrow a view of

authorship. Desai J suggests that it is perhaps not a simple matter to assess

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‘who pushed the pen’ in a given situation and that one needs to have regard to

more than merely the name of the author who is credited with the publication. In

this particular judgement, the question was whether one specific academic had

the right to write an article and have it published without acknowledging another

academic who had clearly been involved in the research on which the article was

based as his name was mentioned in the first draft of the article. Desai J found

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that the applicant, who tried to publish a second draft of an article without the

consent of the first respondent who was mentioned as an author in the first draft,

was not entitled to publish the article as sole author. It is Herman herself who

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provides what is probably the most useful description of what is meant by

‘pushing the pen’. She articulates a thought which led us to the idea that a pen

is not only pushed by a human being but also by various other factors and

influences which cannot be ignored when analysing academic texts such as PhD

theses:

The PhD theses on the library shelves bear traces of the setting in which their

author lives and worked [sic] – biographical, familial, institutional, cultural,

historical, political and geographical. What is possible for the individual