Cape Town - Universities as a place of academic expression have come under the spotlight following what has been described as a “knee-jerk” reaction to cancel a pro-Palestine event at Stellenbosch University (SU).
The seminar by the Department of Global Health at SU in collaboration with Healthcare Workers for Palestine, which looked into the current state of healthcare in Gaza, eventually took place on Wednesday at the Tygerberg Medical Campus at SU. Healthcare Workers for Palestine has several members within the faculty.
Its steering committee member and Public Health Medicine registrar at SU, Dr Masudah Paleker, said before the event that some of the changes she was instructed to make were to remove the term “Israeli Apartheid Week” and the term activist in the bio of one of the speakers.
The original flyer by Healthcare Workers for Palestine also depicted the colours of the Palestinian flag. There was also a request to add other global conflicts.
Paleker said the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Professor Elmi Muller, contacted the department head and the post-graduate co-ordinator and asked them to retract the emails/calendar invitations that were sent out and to cancel the event “for now”.
Discussions were then held on how to change the advert and changes were subsequently done.
A standard Global Health seminar poster template was then used, which Paleker said was a reasonable request.
She said that in the end the event went forward and was a huge success.
“The university came forward, they approved the event in the end.
“It was a struggle but we got there.
“The turnout was phenomenal. Prof Elmi Muller ended up opening up the event alongside Professor Taryn Young, Head of Department of Global Health,” Paleker said.
“For me, after we advertised the event and that knee-jerk reaction to cancel the event without really questioning or understanding things more before cancelling, that part, I’m not sure if we can call it censorship, but that was a bit concerning for me and I wish that we could’ve had a bit more of an open dialogue before just being told to cancel the event outright.”
Healthcare Workers for Palestine member, Professor Usuf Chikte, said from an organiser’s view, Israel must be called out as an apartheid state committing crimes against humanity.
Chikte, emeritus professor in the division of health systems and public health at SU, said organisers wrote to the rectorate and the Academic Freedom Committee stating that there had been academic overreach by the dean’s office and gross violation of academic freedom principles.
“We face the moral collapse of our academia at several South African universities as they dither and fail to take a clear stand on the genocide and man-made famine taking place in Palestine.
“We call for the condemnation of this and call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli universities who are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians similar to what happened to South African institutions in the apartheid era.”
In a communique to Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences staff and students, Muller said concerns were raised over alleged restrictions or attempts to prevent a discussion on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“The best way to safeguard the freedom of academic discourse as a right and a privilege of all our staff and students, now and in the future, is to ensure that the protocols of academic engagement, rather than partisan political engagement, structure and inform our faculty interactions.
“The academic ethos of such freedom includes sufficiently open parameters for the discourse to take place, considered use of language and symbolism enabling broad-based participation, and the protection of academic values of fairness, balance, robots debate and mutual respect.”