We are currently faced with the rise of disregard of evidenced knowledge and critical thinking competencies in the public discourse, which are being easily replaced by common sense opinions, slogans, emotions, and impulsive intuition. Added to this challenge is conducting life at the intensity of the hashtag, wherein the contest amongst people is not on qualitative arguments, but rather on who was the first one to come out with ‘breaking news’, and who played with the vocabulary of crisis accurately in order to spike reactions. No time is given to the durable processing of incidents properly and the proper exchange and testing of valuable ideas. The currency of such an environment is the selling of conflict at the fingertip of the internet, targeted mainly on manipulating mainstream media and monopolosing public life. These are the characteristics of the post-truth era.
Post-truth was declared as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016 and is defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ ( Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2017). Walsh and Black (2019) argue that in a post-truth world reason is overruled; normative fundamentals are eroded and substituted by emotion. In this world, everything is about personal aggrandizement as opposed to ‘community imaginations’ and petitions are made to emotional state over facts and to sentiment over evidence. Mair (2017) surmises aptly the period as that of over reliance on social media for information and news to a greater extent. Basically, people are dependent on their social circles and are marooned in the 'facebook bubble', or 'social media echo chamber'.
On this score, what then becomes the role of the university generally and of students particularly as an antithesis to the post-truth era?
The University prides itself as an enterprise of innovative ideas, robust engagement, critical research, and an enabling space for creativity and disruptive curiosity. Critique of social systems and the rigorous search for underestimated alternatives is what makes the university become a community of scholarship. These are compelling values that each stakeholder associated with it should absorb. In addition, these are not just cosmetic values that should be selectively applied in the university as academic hobbies, but rather they should be daily practices of survival that should be vigorously expressed to maintain the rhythm of critique as a sociological requirement of communal life wherever we may be found in our democratic society.
To our students; I invite you in these challenging times to heighten your abilities to question and take pride in thinking differently. Be innovative and disagree with wrongdoing whenever it is committed in your immediate environment, even when it is being done by your own closest associates. You must resist a single school of thought, resist the dogma that comes with ideologies and philandering in anti-intellectualism; do not at all fear democratic contestation or succumb to the easy direction of suppressing ideas that are different from your own.
In this post-truth crisis, members of the university must go the extra mile in engaging both their supporters and opponents alike. The environment must cherish a constant desire to learn and unlearn; individually amongst ourselves we must have the patience and the level of responsibility to constantly search for the injustices of our deepest convictions. We must be able to self-criticise and interrogate our own daily practices; we must place devotion and duty in doubting our own selves.
These are the attributes required in our struggle against the post-truth era. The mass building of conscientious communities, the embracing of critical thinking, and the encompassing of qualitative engagement underpinned by the exquisiteness of evidence is what will make us dare not linger in calling ourselves a truly cosmopolitan African university ka Dalibhunga.