Disgraceful response to academic’s comments threatens freedom of speech

If you want to see a political mob in operation, watch the mobilisation around the speech of a Wits professor last month. On February 19, Prof Srila Roy, then head of sociology, posted on X that “South Africans have little ambition, are complacent and have a poor work ethic”. In the firestorm that promised, she deleted the tweet.

Not good enough, the mob came for her. Roy resigned as head of department. A demotion is not sufficient, said the agitated.

Wits placed her on precautionary suspension. They need to go further and fire her, was the response from some quarters. She apologised twice “unequivocally and wholeheartedly” acknowledging that “this tweet was simply wrong”.

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Everyone weighed in, from censorious student organisations on campuses and a figure no less than the chair of the portfolio committee on higher education, one of the most intemperate people to occupy that position in the brief history of our democracy: “Her comments were offensive, derogatory and undermined the dignity of many South Africans … we cannot tolerate individuals who openly express views that are widely seen as discriminatory …” This was the same person who lambasted Wits University at one of its hearings for being “untransformed” because its registrar was white, and whose committee has doggedly pursued the small number of “foreign nationals” who had the temerity to take up academic positions on offer at South African universities. The chairman’s committee is a shameful monument to xenophobia which begs the question: why single out the professor when political leaders have engaged in relentless xenophobic attacks on blacks from other African/Asian countrieswithoutconsequences? It was in factthatcontext that led to the tweet, the lament (again) by the committee that 7.7% of university appointments are foreign nationals. To which Roy responded in parentheses following the main tweet: (take that for your xenophobia that us foreigners are meant to suffer in silence, as we nurture successive generations at university.)

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