The public university’s intellectual capacity is inseparably intertwined with moral views, which relates especially (although not exclusively) to disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. (Graphic: ChatGPT)
The Faculty of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal recently introduced a compulsory university-wide module titled Critical Social Justice & Citizenship, which includes opinions on sex and gender.
On closer inspection, this module teaches that sex and gender exist across a range of possibilities, hereby discounting a binary view of sex and gender.
Stated otherwise, this module excludes the view that sex and gender resort exclusively to male and female categories.
Unsurprisingly, this has triggered growing concerns; the topic being related to deeply held and impassioned moral convictions.
Should UKZN, being a public university committed to inclusivity and non-discrimination, be teaching such a course on a compulsory basis?
It is argued that to enforce on students a specific category of subjective views on sex and gender directly opposes the advancement of diversity and profoundly violates the right to freedom of belief, conscience, thought and opinion of many.
The constitutional court of South Africa has, in no uncertain terms, expressed the importance of allowing for diversity as well as the importance of the right to freedom of belief, which includes our innermost-held moral convictions.
How does this relate to students?
Students are not isolated beings; rather, they enter our universities accompanied by moral convictions in which they were nurtured during their upbringing, and included here are views on sex and gender.
Communities or spaces of meaning such as the family, school, and religious association play an integral role in cultivating the moral make-up of many students, and it is not for a public institution of higher learning to risk the emancipation of a student’s sense of morality through compulsory teaching that comes with a preferential approach on contentious moral matters.
Having said this, this should not imply that the student may not freely choose to participate in learning programmes that include moral content that may stand in contrast to their beliefs and customs, on condition of course that such avenues be entered upon voluntarily.
The philosopher John Gray, in his Two Faces of Liberalism, points to a type of liberalism that unrealistically aims towards reaching rational agreement across all of society, hereby resulting in the domination across all of society of only a specific category of values, hereby ultimately ending diversity.
Realistic liberalism
This stands in contrast to a more realistic liberalism that embraces different ways of living, in other words, a value pluralism, and it is this latter type of liberalism that needs to be pursued.
To allow for a one-size-fits-all approach, as is the case with the UKZN module on sex and gender, thwarts the advancement of this latter type of liberalism.
Authoritarian regimes have always sought to make all matters subject to law – to make law, in fact, “comprehensive” in the way that theocratic regimes in times past viewed the state – with all of its aspects framed by religion.
Now that we have, in the West, moved beyond theocracy, we are in danger of the law extending its ambit beyond where it should go to a kind of juristic theocracy if we are not careful.
We see the risk of “comprehensive law” that fails to understand its competence and its jurisdiction and that would, thus, threaten the various plural goods that a richly federated state needs to nurture.
Struggles for domination, including the enforced infusion of one-sided moral views throughout all of society are evident throughout history.
Such struggles arise from the human condition, hereby presenting challenges for any society that prides itself on being committed towards tolerance and diversity.
We should understand liberal democracies as coming into contrast to dictatorial regimes where foundational beliefs and related morals are enforced upon the whole of society, in other words, indoctrination on a mass scale.
Allan Bloom, in his popular The Closing of the American Mind, states that freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
The public university, which houses a magnitude of intellectual know-how, conveys a high level of authority and is consequently respected by society in general.
It is therefore sensible that the university is referred to as “the cathedral of our modern age”; the university being viewed as that which relates to spiritual growth, the progress of society and where the customs of society are maintained.
Knowledge is viewed as the key to success, and an important path to success is therefore through a higher education institution such as the public university.
However, such authority carries with it considerable power and, therefore, the need for caution against practices of indoctrination.
The public university’s intellectual capacity is inseparably intertwined with moral views, which relates especially (although not exclusively) to disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
The public university is therefore not to be understood as being detached from the rest of society.
A large part of the tax revenue is channelled to the public universities and, as alluded to earlier, a sense of right and wrong already embedded in the student on entering not only the public university but any public institution of higher learning, signifies a connection that a public institution of higher learning has with society.
This also relates to the earlier mention of the communities and spaces of meaning in society, including the family and schools as well as religious associations, all of these representing a certain ethos, value system, a measure by which to judge things, as well as views on the meaning and purpose of life.
What is more, these communities or spaces include their own unique laws and sense of authority. The day-to-day functioning of the family is exercised in accordance with certain laws that do not form part of law as applied by the civil authorities.
The functioning of the family consists of, for example, verbalised rules similar to what we understand legislation or the laws of the land to be.
How marriage or parenthood is approached in many instances relates to informal laws and authority applied within the family structure.
Sprouting from this is the inculcation of views on what should be viewed as right or wrong, moral or immoral.
Consequently, the family represents a unique and independent domain in which meaning is cultivated, and related to this is the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights that also emphasises the importance of the family.
The family is viewed as the guardian of morals and traditional customs as well as values, and this should include views on sex and gender.
The same insights relate to religious associations such as churches and mosques as well as groups aligned with the practising of specific cultures.
It is in these communities that we find an inherent and specific moral dimension, these communities being the bearers of their own sense of right and wrong, and students should not be understood as being disengaged from the community or spaces of meaning from which they come.
It therefore stands to reason that the public university (and any other public institution of higher education) does not only belong to a few or selected groups representing specific moral views; rather, the public university belongs to the whole of society.
UKZN’s compulsory undergraduate course that teaches sex and gender to exist across a range of possibilities, hereby discounting a binary view of sex and gender, is a prime example of a disregard of who the public university belongs to in a constitutional democracy that prides itself on tolerance and the celebration of difference.
Shaun De Freitas is professor of public law at the University of the Free State.
