In this self-critical account, I engage the concepts of critique and judgement and why they are crucial for protecting and maintaining the integrity of academia and scholarship. I argue that a naive or ignorant academic is a somewhat paradoxical position to assume given that academia is necessarily a critical space that demands astuteness and constant vigilance. I contend that blissful ignorance is a fragile justification for the neglect of due diligence as it relates to the selection of locales for knowledge dissemination. I engage the tenets of self-study and critical autoethnography to reflect on my practice as an academic and the consequences of my own poor judgement, not as an act of arrogant disclosure, but with a view to embracing this "elephant in the national academic room" and also bringing to the fore, other "frail" current knowledge vetting processes. The article draws on a Žižekian notion of perverse analysis with the view to evoke a primal confrontation of a particularly sensitive issue. I draw attention to the gravity of the act of predatory publishing and its almost irrevocable consequences. I also reflect on my grief, trauma, guilt, and shame of this self-inflicted academic reputational mutilation, and the arduous task ahead of rebuilding my academic integrity. I hope that this paper might serve to intensify our alertness to the potential new perils that present in the neoliberal research productivity-driven higher education space where online publishing and open access have become common place, and where "opportunities" to transgress and expose oneself to risk present themselves on a daily basis, often with welldisguised "authenticity." Finally, I reflect on my public exposé of personal flaw and its restorative effect of a necessary humility in the academic space.
Neoliberal performativity imperatives that drive the strategic vision and mission of many higher education institutions in South Africa have begun to shape the higher education project in particular ways. While research and knowledge production will always remain the defining hallmark of a university, the fragility of the system to deliver on this objective in substantive ways remains a challenge. Graduate supervision capacity and competence continues to be a serious obstacle for many higher education institutions in South Africa. Of concern for this article, is that in the quest to rapidly develop supervision competence amongst faculty, to what extent will fast tracking be at the expense of learning as 'process' and deep conceptual development of the young academic. How do novice supervisors negotiate liminality as they learn to be researchers while simultaneously teaching the craft to their assigned research students? In this article, I reflect on my experiences of teaching a structured, accredited postgraduate supervision programme at seven merged higher education institutions in SA from 2014 to2016. I argue that high-level research supervision depends on having certain minimum threshold research supervision competences, the achievement of which necessitates a process approach. Young novice faculty however, have to negotiate a precarious liminal space in which they learn the research 'trade/craft' as apprentice whilst simultaneously teaching the research 'trade/craft' to research candidates they supervise. I engage the implications of this risky and contradictory agenda for novice faculty and a discussion of how this 'parallel learning', which entails learning the research craft and simultaneously learning how to teach the research craft is likely to play out in the South African higher education research context.
In the past decade, higher education institutions in South Africa have witnessed a firm and decisive move towards corporatisation. It may well be argued that this is an inevitable trend, driven largely by globalisation and the need to remain or become competitive in a highly market-oriented local and international higher education sector. This need to attain a competitive edge demands that the status quo cannot remain. Higher education institutions have to respond to indicators of quality contained in the international rankings machinery. In an era of fiscal austerity, this necessitates a greater extraction of output from existing higher education production factors. Labour in particular requires a more sophisticated disciplinary regime: one that defines the work of academics in explicit quantifiable terms, and sets and measures performance standards for the different facets of an academic’s work. In this commentary, I present a Foucauldian analysis of the effect of accountability and performance regimes on academics at a South African university. I argue that particular constructions of performance expectations produce particular effects. This paper draws attention to the subjugating effect of stringent control technologies on the lived experience of the higher education pedagogue with a view to exploring possibilities and spaces of resistance.
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