Higgins champions the importance of public culture
He delivered the first, Round Pegs in Square Holes: the Humanities in higher education reform policy, at the Academy of Science of South Africa's Symposium on the Humanities, held in Pretoria on 27 October.
The second, entitled Karl Marx and Press Freedom: Critical Thinking and Public Knowledge, was a public lecture that took place at the University of Johannesburg on 28 October.
In Round Pegs in Square Holes, Higgins examined the recent debate on the idea of 'impact' as a measure of research excellence. Arguing that higher education templates were increasingly seeking to force the round pegs of research and teaching in the humanities into the square holes of applied knowledge, he argued for the recognition of the social force and value of what he termed the NAIL disciplines (Narrative, Analysis, Interpretation, Literacies), as an alternative to the current emphasis on the STEM disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
'The NAIL disciplines provide a worthwhile contribution to Public Knowledge and Civic Capital that can't be adequately measured in terms of market-oriented innovation and too-narrow definitions of economic capital,' he said.
In the UJ lecture, Professor Higgins extended his argument by suggesting that Marx be best understood today as a founding figure of the NAIL disciplines. This came through in his early championing of the idea of press freedom: the essential right of citizens to confront and question the state through the medium of a free press.
'In his transfer of the skills of analysis and interpretation honed in the course of his PhD studies in philosophy, Marx developed the powerful new ideas and narratives that were both to transform the understanding of public knowledge as well as to reconfigure the very idea of the public,' said Higgins.
PRESSING ISSUES: An image from The Collected Works of Marx and Engels Vol 1, captioned 'Prometheus Bound: An allegory on the prohibition of the Rhenish Gazette'