THE CURRENT standoff at University of Cape Town, brought to a head by the vice-chancellor and chair of Council’s apparent economy with the truth with Senate about the departure of a member of the executive, has raised alarm bells again about the state of higher education in South Africa. This concern about governance is long-standing, so it is instructive to wind back the clock nearly two decades for a comparison with the crisis that afflicted the newly merged University of KwaZulu-Natal from 2004 onwards.
In both cases the fundamental problem lies in managerialism, a virus that first afflicted universities in the early 1980s as an offshoot of Reaganite and Thatcherite ideology. Thatcher famously declared that the main drivers of human behaviour were money and power. She also denied the existence of society. But universities are (or should be) societies in their own right; more precisely academic guilds. At their most advanced they are run collegially with due regard for academic rule and the conventions of academic discourse, including academic freedom. Authority in a university should be vested in intellectual achievement and rigour. Respect is earned by cerebral means.
Clearly this is totally at odds with managerialism. The import of the latter into universities has been a disaster. Its authority derives from power and hierarchy; thus the concept of the line manager, a term unknown and inconceivable in genuine universities before 1980. Power is concentrated and exercised in a top-down fashion by a structure of enforcers operating at various levels. It is quintessentially authoritarian. Universities on the other hand are liberal, democratic institutions that conduct their business, govern themselves and resolve their problems through reasoned argument, logic and persuasion. In the days before managerialism was introduced, deans of faculties (then key to academic rule) were elected by staff. Ultimately, managerialism depends on diktat and punishment as has been seen by the growth in disciplinary cases and litigation in universities.
The advance of knowledge and development of ideas require a stable environment governed by the rule of law we know as academic freedom. That is endangered by managerialism, but becomes threatened with extinction when authoritarianism is harnessed to racial nationalism. It goes without saying that universities are no place for experimental social engineering based on supposed race (categorisation around pigmentation) although they need to be places of diversity. A combination of racism and authoritarianism will strip any university of initiative, imagination, purpose and enthusiasm. No room here for the the exercise of reason or triumph of the intellect. These attributes are of course highly subversive in the eyes of authoritarians.
Such is the context of the troubles at both UKZN and UCT, notwithstanding their different histories and the passage of time. What they both suffered was the appointment of vice-chancellors temperamentally ill-suited to the role. UCT’s was appointed in the full knowledge that she required ‘mentoring’; an extraordinary admission of irresponsibility with a high chance of future trouble. The actions and writings of UKZN’s appointee, a clear warning of intent, set off loud alarm bells that fell on deaf ears. Both took office with a belief that a university vice-chancellor is akin to a company CEO with a board of directors called the executive. With this assumption came a sense of semi-ownership, a hire-and-fire mentality, and an overweening sense of power entirely at odds with the collegial and custodial approach of a traditional vice-chancellor.
The upshot was a rash of disastrous interventions at all levels. One from UCT in 2000 is particularly illuminating. A member of staff conducted research among biological science students, which was summarised as a discussion document accepted for publication by one of the country’s top periodical publications, the South African Journal of Science. The research findings were not to the liking of the black academic caucus, a race-based political interest group, and a social media crowd started its usual abuse. Various demands were made of UCT and the SAJS regarding repudiation of the research and withdrawal of the publication.
Instead of giving the baying mob a lesson about academia, the UCT executive called the published research offensive and unethical without advancing a shred of evidence. Not only was this reckless populism thoroughly unacademic, but university executives have no business making such pronouncements. The DA shadow education minister pointed out that UCT was depriving Nicoli Nattrass, the author of the research, her academic freedom. Nattrass noted that condemnation had preceded rational debate. In this disgraceful episode the UCT executive behaved not as the custodian of academia, but like a political regime; perhaps like a university in a totalitarian state.
Both universities have been victims of egos and nationalist ideology antipathetic to the custodianship and universalism required by a well-functioning university. Those qualities have been undermined by the illiberalism that is currently spreading globally like a virus in a pandemic. It is worth revisiting the anti-apartheid struggle in which there was a strong antipathy in some circles to vanguardism and messiahs, what would today be called icons. These were characteristic of the ANC and its Soviet minders. Other tendencies within the Unity Movement and Trotskyite traditions downplayed leadership and emphasised the grassroots.
Universities do not need visionaries, disruptive interventionists – or messiahs. They need down-to-earth custodians and administrators (not managers or frustrated businesspeople and politicians) who maintain an enabling environment for intellectual endeavour. This requires people whose first reaction is to listen and think rather than assert their personalities and command; and who have a sound understanding of academic rule. There have been sufficient examples in the recent history of South African higher education – Jonathan Jansen, Saleem Badat and Adam Habib immediately spring to mind and there have been others – to show up those institutions that have made disastrous appointments.
Institutional culture takes years to build, a moment to destroy, and ages to restore. A top-down, managerial university is no university. Intellectual creativity flourishes under collegial and consultative flat management at all levels. Messiahs and visionaries are driven by egos and narrow agendas that steer universities in destructive directions.