As an insider myself, a fellow vice-chancellor, I wanted to know from my colleagues what they saw and heard, what they felt and feared, in their efforts to manage the crisis. And so I sent each of them an email invitation to a one-on-one dialogue, a relatively unstructured interview session in which I would probe their understandings of and emotions around the three broad questions that this book tries to answer. The interviews were conducted in their offices, at hotels, in restaurants, or in my own campus office, in the period between June and August 2016. Eleven vice-chancellors of the most troubled universities agreed to meet with me, and in fact were exceptionally generous with their time.
These university leaders were so clear and articulate in responding to the three framing questions of the study that I decided to let their words speak for themselves rather than edit, paraphrase, or interpret what they had to say. Hence this book includes extended passages from the interview transcripts, which have been only lightly edited for clarity and readability. What you will read are the perspectives and emotions of university principals inside the turbulence of an unprecedented crisis that most of them worked eighteen hours a day and over weekends to resolve.
I began the interviews by asking a single broad question and then allowed the vice-chancellor to take the response in any direction he or she wished to go. This explains the unevenness of responses to different trigger questions since respondents chose to spend varying amounts of time on particular aspects of the crisis. Each vice-chancellor was asked to respond from the vantage point of his or her own institution. Under the ambit of the three broad research questions, additional interview probes included the following:
•Why did the crisis happen in the first place?
•What explains the shift from a broad-based and generally peaceful movement in early 2015 to a black-based and increasingly destructive movement from October 2015 onwards?
•What do the protestors really want?
•What are the kinds of student political formations involved and how do their interests shape the protest movement on each campus?
•What has been the role of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in the student movement, and how did its standing change, if at all, over the course of the protests?
•Was the 2016 protest moment different, as some claim, from the 2015 moment?
•Did the vice-chancellor’s relationship with student leaders change or stay the same over time?
•How did this national movement express itself within the political ecology of the campus or campuses (for multi-campus institutions)?
What leaders actually do
There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the real influences of leaders in complex organisations such as universities.2 Are universities in effect ‘leaderless organizations’ in which ‘the [university] presidency is an illusion … [and] the president’s role more commonly sporadic and symbolic than significant’?3 Or are university leaders in fact ‘strong and effective’, with the power to make important symbolic, political, intellectual, and administrative decisions?4
Neither of these views completely captures the leadership influence of South African vice-chancellors in the twenty-first century. These are indeed influential figures in different ways. Some are charismatic leaders whose persuasive powers and political instincts carry considerable authority within their institutions; others are hamstrung by interfering councils and dominating senates that may steer the university in a direction that goes against the desires of their vice-chancellor.
Institutional conditions matter in enabling or limiting the authority of a university leader at different times. And yet all of the vice-chancellors are senior managers, directors of the institutional budget, and leaders of the academic estate. On a day-to-day basis they can and do make critical decisions that affect the direction of their universities. But they are not all-powerful, and something as simple as the appointment of a female or black colleague that also advances transformation can easily be undermined in one of a multitude of academic departments that no vice-chancellor, however powerful, can influence or direct 24 hours a day.
It is precisely this circumscribed authority of the vice-chancellor that drew me to these leaders. How do they actually negotiate their authority in a crisis? What is the leadership practice – what leaders actually do and what they cannot do – in severe and sustained institutional crises such as in the 2015–2016 period? When the general public rages against the local university vice-chancellor, they do so with little knowledge of the intricacies of power and powerlessness that inform a leader’s decision making in a time of crisis. Through the direct approach of the one-on-one interviews, this book attempts to shed light on leadership practice from the perspective of sitting vice-chancellors in South African universities.
Since this is an account given in the words and from the vantage point of university leaders, it obviously cannot be the only view of the crisis. A student, a worker, a protestor, a non-protestor, a parent of a first-year student, or an alumnus would each see the university crisis from his or her own vantage point. Yet the perspective of university leaders is undoubtedly unique and valuable. My main objective has been to weave together the vice-chancellors’ stories in the hope of conveying a fuller account of what happened (narration), why (explanation), and with what possible effects (prediction).
Overview of As by Fire
As my fellow vice-chancellors and I pursued the main questions guiding this study, other issues were addressed along the way, and the ten chapters in this book capture those themes and concerns.
Chapter 1 deals with the problem of university leadership in crisis situations. It briefly surveys what we know about leaders, and university leaders in particular, when they are called on to lead when a crisis breaks. The focus in this chapter is less on what textbooks say university leaders are supposed to do than on what they actually do when major crises envelop campuses. While each of the stakeholders, such as alumni or students or workers, makes particular demands on the vice-chancellor, this chapter draws attention to the delicate balancing act that the university leader must perform to steady and steer a large and often unwieldy institution in difficult times. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the global context of student protests, in which the crisis of South African universities is certainly not exceptional.
The next two chapters should be read in tandem since they present the foundations on which the 2015–2016 protest movement was launched – the one financial and the other cultural.
Chapter 2 traces the financial origins of the 2015–2016 protests. It explains how the decline in government subsidies and the increase in student fees brought on the October 2015 protests, and describes the nation-wide consequences of what followed. The impact of the financial impasse is illustrated through stories of the lives of poor and desperate students under funding constraints. The logic of the crisis is explained from a financial point of view by the eleven vice-chancellors, whose voices are heard throughout the chapter. These leaders must manage budgets constrained from the outside and manage discontent inflamed from the inside of the university campus. Although their views are expressed in individual one-on-one interviews, the striking resonance of diverse leader voices on the subject of the financial crisis is telling.
Chapter 3 recounts the cultural origins of the crisis. It delves into the social, cultural, and intellectual alienation that black students claim to experience on former white liberal campuses in South Africa, the most prominent institutional case for this exploration being UCT. Why would black middle-class students, who had experienced racial integration in top public and private schools, react so vehemently against ‘white symbols’ at UCT and similar English-origin campuses such as Rhodes and Wits? Much time is given in this chapter to the voice of Max Price, the vice-chancellor of UCT, where the first of the two revolts happened, and where the statue of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes became the focus of a broader grievance against white dominance in the curriculum, campus artworks and symbolism, and the professoriate itself.
Chapter 4 locates the crisis inside universities in the broader context of the failure of democratic consolidation, both political and economic,