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Second-order notes Series

The form of a branch campus

Second-order notes on ‘On Egypt’s African campuses: The forwarding address’

Second-order notes are the workings behind a commentary published elsewhere. The commentary is written to stand on its own and names no theorist. These notes name them, and show how the observation was built. [Link to the University World News article to be added on publication.]

Prologue: an article observing itself

A year ago I wrote in University World News that my day job makes me a small mechanism by which a university observes itself. This note is the same move one floor up: a commentary observing how it observed. If that sounds like the beginning of an infinite regress, it is a short one. There are two texts, one author, and the author has a day job.

The commentary asks a plain question about Egypt’s growing network of university branches in Africa: whose rules is a student at an Egyptian campus in Dar es Salaam under? It answers in plain English. Underneath the plain English sit two bodies of work that I have used without naming. The first is George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a calculus that begins with a single instruction – draw a distinction – and follows what happens when distinctions are drawn, repeated, crossed and, eventually, turned back on themselves. The second is Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, and in particular his late theory of organisations, which asks what happens when the distinctions are drawn not by a mathematician with a pencil but by communications that must connect to one another in order to go on existing.

Neither is needed to read the commentary. Both are needed to explain why it is shaped the way it is.

1. Two descriptions, one form

The commentary opens with a figure: every campus built abroad arrives with two descriptions, one written for the ribbon and one written in somebody’s statute book.

That sentence is a form in Spencer-Brown’s sense. To draw a distinction is to split a space into two sides, to indicate one of them, and to leave the other as the unmarked space in which the indication sits. One cannot indicate without distinguishing, and one cannot distinguish without leaving something unindicated. The ribbon marks partnership, capacity and goodwill, and leaves jurisdiction unmarked. The statute marks jurisdiction, and leaves goodwill unmarked. Neither description is false. Each is one side of a form whose other side it cannot, in that moment, see.

The question “whose rules?” is therefore a question about which distinction becomes operative when the two sides collide – when a student is expelled, a lecturer dismissed, a degree disputed, or a government changes its mind. The commentary is less about Egypt than about the form of a branch campus. Egypt is simply the case in which the form is currently being drawn most energetically, and most candidly.

2. Soft power as a self-description

Egypt’s candour matters. Its higher education minister described education this year as “a powerful tool for soft power”, and its universities’ branches as a means of exporting educational services. A deputy chair of the parliament’s African affairs committee named the priority regions: the Nile Basin, the Horn of Africa and West Africa. The campus in Chad was presented in August by the foreign minister, in a list that also contained a road corridor and a dialysis centre.

The phrase soft power is Joseph Nye’s. He coined it at the end of the Cold War for the capacity to obtain what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment. In Luhmann’s vocabulary, it is a semantics: a stock of descriptions through which a social system describes itself. More precisely, it is a self-description of the political system, and specifically a description of how the political system proposes to make use of operations that belong to other systems.

This is where functional differentiation becomes useful. Modern society, on Luhmann’s account, is not a pyramid but a set of function systems – politics, law, economy, science, education and others – each operationally closed. Each reproduces itself through its own operations and observes everything else through its own distinctions. Politics produces collectively binding decisions; it cannot teach. Education admits, teaches, examines and certifies; it cannot make collectively binding decisions. Each can only observe the other and build its own expectations about what the other will do.

Seen this way, the communiqué from N’Djamena is not a category mistake. It is an accurate observation from one side of the form. From within politics a campus is, correctly, an item among items – a line in a bilateral relationship, like a road or a clinic. The commentary’s small joke, that the list describes a university by someone who does not run universities, is functional differentiation made visible in a list.

The consequence is that soft power is always second-hand. It is politics’ wager on what another system’s operations will come to mean to third parties: to graduates, their families, their employers, their governments. The wager can pay. Egypt has placed it for seventy years; in 1963 alone it awarded 14,500 cultural scholarships to African and Asian students. But politics cannot decide the payout into existence. It can create occasions for education to happen and wait for attribution to follow. Influence is not produced in the classroom. It is ascribed to the classroom later, by observers who were not in it.

3. The memorandum: coupling and premise

If politics and education cannot operate inside each other, how do they relate at all? Luhmann’s answer is structural coupling: durable arrangements through which one system’s operations become occasions for another’s, without the two merging. His standard examples come from law. A constitution couples law and politics; property and contract couple law and economy. Each system reads the arrangement in its own way, and the arrangement survives because each reading is useful to its reader.

A memorandum of understanding between ministries, universities and a host government is a humbler coupling of the same kind. Politics signs it. Education must live inside it. Law will one day be asked to say what it meant.

Luhmann’s theory of organisations makes the point sharper. Organisations, for him, are social systems whose elements are decisions. They persist by connecting decisions to further decisions, and they need something that makes the next decision more likely than any other. Hence decision premises: decisions that settle the conditions for later decisions without determining them. The decidable premises fall into three families. There are programmes, which fix what is to be done and what counts as doing it correctly – in a university, curricula, syllabuses and assessment rules. There is personnel, which fixes who will do the deciding. And there are communication channels, which fix who may decide what and who answers to whom. Beneath these lies a layer of premises that no one decided at all – the organisation’s culture, its habits and its taken-for-granted – which shapes decisions precisely because it is never put to a vote.

This is why the commentary treats the memoranda as foreshadowing rather than as paperwork awaiting buildings. A memorandum decides premises for an organisation that does not yet exist. It fixes programmes (which faculties, in which languages), personnel (who staffs the campus and who appoints them) and channels (to whom the branch reports). Luhmann also describes organisations as machines for absorbing uncertainty: each decision turns an open question into a settled one that later decisions take as given. A memorandum absorbs uncertainty on behalf of a campus that has, as yet, no uncertainty of its own. The question it cannot avoid answering, even by silence, is whose uncertainty it absorbs, and whose it leaves for later.

The commentary renders all of this as a single sentence: an agreement is a decision about which decisions will later be allowed.

4. Khartoum: three premises, one decree

The history of Cairo University’s branch in Khartoum is the case that makes the theory concrete, and it does so with unusual completeness.

The branch opened in 1955, on the eve of Sudanese independence. A Sudanese scholar, Zaki El-Hassan, later described it as the product of an Egyptian quest for influence among the country’s emerging modern classes – soft power’s self-description some decades before the phrase existed. By around 1990 it taught some 13,000 students, more than the University of Khartoum.

On 9 March 1993 a Sudanese presidential decree revoked its licence. El-Hassan records the government’s concern as its inability to control the branch’s syllabuses and the appointment of its staff. A contemporaneous letter from the Middle East Studies Association adds that a Sudanese head was appointed in place of the Egyptian one.

Set these against Luhmann’s three families and the fit is exact:

Decision premise What the 1993 decree redecided
Programmes the syllabuses the government said it could not control
Personnel the staff appointments it said it could not control
Communication channels the head of the institution, and with it the line of accountability

All three decidable premises were redecided at once, by an observer outside the organisation, using an instrument – a decree – that belongs to politics and law rather than to education. The buildings, and presumably many of the students, remained. But an organisation is not its buildings. Decisions that now connected to different premises made a different organisation, and it was given a different name: Al-Neelain University.

What the decree could not reach was the undecided layer: the habits and culture of the place. How long those persisted is a question I cannot answer from the sources, and I will not invent an answer.

The name as memory

Cairo University kept the name. Its Khartoum branch today occupies premises on its own campus in Giza, admitting a few hundred students a year from Sudan and South Sudan. The commentary calls this a forwarding address. Formally, it is a re-entry.

In the final chapter of Laws of Form, Spencer-Brown considers what happens when a form is allowed to re-enter the space it distinguishes. The value of such an expression can no longer be settled once and for all from inside the calculus. It requires time, and some re-entering forms behave like a memory: they hold a state after the condition that produced it has gone. The Khartoum branch in Giza is the distinction Khartoum/Cairo re-entered on one of its own sides. The name holds the state of a crossing that the ground no longer holds.

Figure 1. The forwarding address as re-entry Three panels drawn in Spencer-Brown’s notation. Left: 1955 to 1993, the Cairo University Khartoum branch marked inside the Sudanese ground. Centre: 1993, the same inner space re-marked as Al-Neelain University. Right: today, the name ‘Khartoum branch’ re-entered inside Cairo University’s own mark in Giza. A dashed arrow from left to right reads: the name crosses; the ground does not. the Sudanese ground Cairo University, Khartoum branch the Sudanese ground Al-Neelain University same ground, new premises Cairo University, Giza ‘Khartoum branch’ the name, re-entered 1955–1993 9 March 1993 Today the name crosses; the ground does not
Figure 1. The forwarding address as re-entry. Left: 1955–1993, the branch marked inside the Sudanese ground. Centre: 9 March 1993, the same inner space re-marked with new premises as Al-Neelain University. Right: today, the name re-entered inside Cairo University's own mark in Giza. The name crosses; the ground does not.

This is also what makes the image funny rather than merely sad. The humour of re-entry is always the humour of a system finding itself on the far side of its own line.

5. The hosts answer from the other side

If the Khartoum case shows a host redeciding all three premises after the fact, the present-day hosts show the alternatives.

Tanzania answered in advance, in law. Its Universities (General) Regulations of 2013 provide that every university operating in the country, whether domestic or foreign in origin, is administered under Tanzanian law; that no institution may offer university education without the Commission’s express approval; and that a foreign university’s foreign staff may not exceed half its local staff. Read against Luhmann’s families, the regulations reach programmes (through approval), personnel (through the staffing ratio) and channels (through administration under the Act). Law observes organisations from their environment; it cannot decide for them. The memorandum is the point at which the host’s legal expectations are converted into the campus’s own premises – or are not.

South Sudan answered in a scholar’s voice. When the Tonj branch was first announced in 2013, John Apuruot Akec welcomed it, warned that it should not become merely a source of jobs for Egyptian academics, and added that he did not believe in free lunch: Egypt had an interest. This is second-order observation in its most useful form. Second-order observation does not see more than first-order observation; it sees differently. It sees the distinction another observer is using, and therefore what that observer cannot see. Akec observed the guest’s self-description – assistance – and redescribed it as interest. Once the interest is named, it can be bargained over. The staffing ratio in Tanzania’s regulations is, among other things, a bargained answer to exactly his worry.

Chad answers in its grammar. Its higher education ministry describes Alexandria University’s operation not as an Egyptian campus in Chad but as a faculty délocalisée à l’Université de N’Djamena. The host draws the same form the other way round. From Cairo, the mark is Alexandria and the unmarked space is Chad; from N’Djamena, the mark is the University of N’Djamena and Alexandria’s faculty sits inside it. Both descriptions are correct. They are the two sides of one form, and “whose rules?” is the question of which side will be treated as the inside when a decision is contested.

The student in Dar es Salaam, finally, is not hypothetical. During Sudan’s war, students of a Khartoum medical university sat their examinations in Dar es Salaam, and Tanzania absorbed several hundred Sudanese medical students into Muhimbili and regional teaching facilities. Faced with a foreign university’s students and no foreign university able to hold them, Tanzania marked them inside its own organisations.

6. Egypt’s re-entry, and the unfolding of a paradox

The commentary’s central move concerns Egypt itself.

As a host, Egypt governs foreign branch campuses under Law 162 of 2018. A foreign university must pass a ministerial committee and the cabinet, is established by presidential decree, and bears the cost of its own branch. As an exporter, Egypt’s plan for its campuses abroad, presented to the president in January 2025, foresaw agreements with host countries and private partners made “without the Egyptian state having to bear any costs”.

The distinction host/guest has re-entered the system that uses it. Egypt occupies both sides. What it asks as host, it does not ask of itself as guest. Formally, that is a paradox: the same observer marking both sides of one distinction, with incompatible values.

Luhmann’s treatment of paradox is the key to the commentary’s tone. Paradoxes, for him, are not errors to be corrected. They are conditions that every observing system meets as soon as it observes its own distinctions, and they are unfolded – made livable – by introducing a further distinction that keeps the two sides apart. Time is the classic unfolding: first this, then that. So are place, jurisdiction and genre. Egypt unfolds its paradox across two documents: a statute for guests at home, a plan for itself abroad. The two never have to meet on the same page.

That is why the commentary insists that this is not hypocrisy. No observer can see the distinction it is using while using it; this is the blind spot that comes with every act of observation, not a failure of character. The commentary’s proposal – reciprocity, whatever Cairo asks of Exeter, Dar es Salaam may ask of Ain Shams – is formally an invitation to self-observation of the second order: to read the export plan in the light of Law 162. An observer cannot see both sides of its own distinction at once. It can, however, see them in sequence, if someone hands it the second document at the right moment. That is all the commentary does.

The line “Egypt already knows the answer; it keeps it on the other side of its own line” is where the re-entry becomes visible in plain English. It is also why the humour of the series is self-observing rather than satirical. Self-observation is the only kind of joke that does not need a victim; the laughter is at the form, and everyone is inside the form.

7. The unmarked space waits

In Spencer-Brown’s calculus the unmarked state is not nothing. It is the space in which every mark is made. What a memorandum leaves unmarked – which regulator can close the campus, whose examiners moderate its assessment, who is responsible for enrolled students if either government changes its mind – is not absent. It is pending. Sooner or later a crisis crosses into it, and somebody marks it then, usually by decree.

Sudan supplied a second illustration this year. Its Decision No. 83, issued in June, ordered the country’s own universities operating abroad to return to their approved campuses or lose their next intake – the logic of 1993 applied to itself, a state reasserting that an organisation’s premises include its place. Whether the order was enforced I could not verify, and for the argument it does not matter. The form is the same whether or not the ground cooperates.

The commentary’s three proposals – registration under the host’s law, a funded duty to teach out enrolled students, and a degree that says where it was earned – are, formally, a single instruction: mark in advance what would otherwise be marked later by decree. They are premises, not promises.

The continental layer is thinner. The Addis Convention on the recognition of qualifications has been ratified by Djibouti but, in UNESCO’s most recent published status, not by Egypt, Tanzania, Chad, South Sudan, Eritrea or the Comoros. The African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance explicitly include cross-border delivery and bind no one. In systems terms, these are couplings that exist as texts but have no operations holding them in place – forms without a system to keep drawing them.

Coda: the author’s blind spot

In February I argued in University World News that credibility crosses borders whether we like it or not, and proposed a continental seal to carry it. The distinction I was using was credential versus institution: credentials travel, institutions stay home. I did not see that distinction while using it. Egypt showed it to me. The commentary reports this as a joke against myself, which it is; here it is also a small confession of method. An observer learns its blind spot only from another observation.

Readers of University World News need none of this, and the commentary is written so that they do not. But if the theory is right, it should be possible to show the working; and if the working is elegant, it should be a pleasure to read. That, at least, is the wager of this series. Like the commentary, these notes were co-created with the #re_v5 engine, and the errors, as ever, are mine to observe.

References

Theory

  • Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Trans. J. Bednarz Jr with D. Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Luhmann, N. (2002). Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Ed. W. Rasch. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (See especially “The Paradox of Observing Systems” and “Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing”.)
  • Luhmann, N. (2004). Law as a Social System. Trans. K. A. Ziegert. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Ch. 10 on structural couplings.)
  • Luhmann, N. (2018). Organization and Decision. Ed. D. Baecker, trans. R. Barrett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chs 6–9 on uncertainty absorption, decision premises, decision programmes and personnel.)
  • Nye, J. S. (1990). “Soft power”. Foreign Policy 80: 153–171.
  • Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: PublicAffairs.
  • Spencer-Brown, G. (1969). Laws of Form. London: George Allen and Unwin.

The case