In the mid-eighties, the academic community in South Africa was rocked by a totally unexpected debate concerning the morality and purpose of an academic boycott of South African universities (and other tertiary educational institutions). The debate began with the "O'Brien Affair". Connor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish academic and politician, in South Africa at the invitation of the University of Cape Town, declared that the academic boycott, viewed in isolation, was ineffective ("Mickey Mouse stuff" in his words !) and that a much more comprehensive approach to the isolation of the "racist Pretoria regime" was called for (without shooting oneself in the foot, as it were).

Even at the best of times, such a "complex" message would have been difficult to communicate. Given the insurrectionist climate among the black youth of South Africa at the time and the defensiveness of white students and some academics, the messenger and the message were bound to be misunderstood. O'Brien was interpreted as saying that the equivocating university authorities who had invited him were "good guys". The students, convinced that the authorities were all unreconstructed "baddies" in league with the evil empire of the apartheid regime, responded with militant rejection. The university authorities and most of the faculty agonized in the cross fire.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular event, the debate expanded until the entire intellectual community of South Africa was involved to one degree or another. We can, I believe, derive some useful observations from these events and their aftermath.

The Trajectory of Boycott
States usually justify application of economic and diplomatic sanctions as an alternative to settling international disputes by violence. Inevitably, the cultural boycott of the target state follows and the academic boycott is, clearly, a subset of the cultural. This was the trajectory in the South African case. The national liberation organizations saw the isolation of the South African regime as one of an ensemble of strategies which would compel it to move towards the negotiating table. In retrospect, I have no doubt that they were right.

It is, therefore, all the more interesting that they seemed not to notice that differences in the terrain of struggle might require different approaches. For example, it was possible to make out a case if merely at the level of propaganda for so-called universal mandatory economic sanctions as a foolproof tactic for strangling the regime into submission. But, even at the time, many publicists in the labor movement pointed out that, because it inevitably increased already severe unemployment, such a "total boycott" would have devastating consequences for the urban and rural poor. A "total boycott" assumed that human beings-working people especially-were willing instruments in a political game played by elites that had absolute control over them.

At the time, such control seemed not to exist; events since have, I believe, confirmed that it did not. "Total boycott," though popular as slogan, was in practice completely at variance with the immediate interests of most people. The demand that "the people" be "willing" to accept more suffering for a little while longer (Bishop Tutu) is a textbook example of middle-class presumption and of the remoteness of the "leaders" from their "flock"!

Long-term Assessment
This observation is important because it suggests a longer-term view, planning the boycott on the assumption of victory. The fatal malaise of the South African economy at present is in no small measure the result of the cumulative distortions occasioned by, among other causes, sanctions against the apartheid state, including the academic boycott. If the purpose of sanctions were purely destructive, any sanction could be justified. The boycott would then be the economic equivalent of modern warfare's saturation bombing. But destruction is hardly ever the stated purpose of those who advocate sanctions. Indeed, choosing sanctions rather than warfare implies a constructive, albeit punitive, approach to relations between nations. The advocates of sanctions are necessarily interested in resuming normal relations either with a reformed, if chastened, regime or with a new regime (the former opposition).

In South Africa, the debate over the academic boycott was between broadly liberal academics, on the one hand, and radical academics and activists, on the other. The liberals opposed the academic boycott completely, arguing both that it transgressed the principles of academic freedom and university autonomy and that it would shut off essential communication between South African scholars and their international counterparts. South Africa would suffer a catastrophic drop in academic standards and an erosion of its economic and technological capacity. The more radical groups insisted that the academic boycott was correct in principle but that it should not punish the robber and the robbed at the same time. They argued for a selective boycott rather than the simpler but impracticable "total boycott" (the slogan of the students in particular).

The practical problem was obvious. Those favoring an academic boycott had no way of monitoring the comings and goings of foreign scholars. They could not prevent racist and even fascist scholars from teaching or doing research at some of the institutions concerned.

Debate over the boycott also raised deep questions concerning the morality and political point of only excluding scholars coming from outside the country when the majority of scholars who supported apartheid were South Africans employed by the very institutions that were to carry out the boycott.

Consensus
Eventually, consensus was attained, at least in the more left-leaning academic community. All anti-apartheid academics and intellectual activists should band together in academic staff associations explicitly opposed to the regime and committed to the eradication of apartheid. These associations would be mandated, as appropriate, to invite foreign scholars to South African universities or to prevent them from coming. The boycott should not be a suicidal weapon cutting off all communication between the progressive academic community in the rest of the world and ourselves living in South Africa.

In my view, this understanding came too late. Some of the scholarly backwardness of South Africa today is, I am sure, due to the marooning of much of our scholarship in the 1980s. Take, for example, my own field, education: we were almost completely ignorant of the work that was being done in the 1980s on the question of multilingual pedagogy in such countries as Australia, Belgium, and Canada, not to mention India, Nigeria, Tanzania, and the like. Similar examples from all fields are legion, the direct result of an indiscriminate academic boycott. The boycott was too blunt an instrument for too long.

The question of academic freedom was treated as an aspect of the democratic principle of free expression. Many scholars argued that the universities could not luxuriate in the illusion that they were somehow different from the rest of the country's institutions. The response that the academic boycott was a form of self-censorship was countered by the question why the universities had not taken a principled stand against censorship before the O'Brien Affair spotlighted the issue in the mid-1980s. In short, the self-seeking and elitist nature of the "pure" liberal argument for academic freedom and university autonomy was exposed and, at least for a while, laid to rest.

Final Assessment
I have no doubt that when a state deliberately and systematically abuses human rights, a case can be made for academic boycott as part of an ensemble of punitive strategies to compel the state to right the situation. But sanctions and boycotts are always two-edged weapons. They should never be instituted without careful consideration of the likely effect on those whom they are supposed to help. Due attention should be given to the probable effects of a successful campaign so that the boycott does not become the proverbial cure worse than the disease.