Is it even reasonable to expect any university leader to manage such complex and compounded crises? South Africa’s vice-chancellors are natural scientists, sociologists, physicians, medical scientists, psychologists, curriculum theorists, physicists, biochemists, political scientists, and engineers. In most cases, they were chosen as leaders because of their academic prestige and their basic leadership competences. None of them received training in crisis management, crowd control, or political strategy. Some had experience of protests from their days as student activists, but many were not schooled in the rough-and-tumble of anti-apartheid political strategy. Even if they were, they now face a different kind of confrontation demanding a new skill set for which none of these leaders was prepared.
The South African university crisis in a global context
The South African student uprising of 2015–2016 did not occur in a vacuum. To begin with, the movement is part of a long and unbroken line of university student protests around the world over more than a century, as described in Mark Boren’s historical account of ‘the unruly subject’ since the origins of the university.15 But in recent years there has been a striking resemblance between student protests in the US and in South Africa, suggesting copycat tactics in each locale.
In November 2015, students at Princeton University, New Jersey, occupied the university president’s office for 32 hours, demanding that the name of former US president Woodrow Wilson be removed from university buildings since he was a known segregationist who supported the Ku Klux Klan. In September 2015 at the University of Missouri, a series of rolling protests began that included students building a tent city on the campus, while one protestor staged a hunger strike against a racially segregated and unwelcoming university environment (e.g. a swastika made with faeces appeared in a residence toilet). In the same year a group called Royall Must Fall protested the racist environment at Harvard University by calling for the removal of the law school seal, which included the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr, a violent slave-owner. Meanwhile, students from Brown University in Rhode Island protested against racial discrimination on campus and, with students from another college, stood in solidarity with their peers at the University of Missouri. Across the US, protests broke out in some 60 colleges and universities, often against acts of racism and alienating symbols, with students demanding a more welcoming environment for blacks and other minorities at institutions such as Yale University (Connecticut), Ithaca College (New York), Claremont McKenna College (California), the University of Cincinnati (Ohio), and Amherst College (Massachusetts).16
Once again something had stirred in the student heart around the world, including South Africa. Issues were similar – Rhodes, Wilson and Royall were symbols of racial offence, social exclusion, and cultural alienation on the part of black and other minority students. Tactics and strategies diffused across campuses and countries. Some protest actions were reminiscent of the ‘shantytown’ protests through which US students demanded that their universities divest from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa.17 Across time and space, students would express a deep discontent with their universities as a reflection of problems in the broader society.
There are, however, important differences between the student protests in the US and what is happening in South Africa. In the US the protests were seldom violent, even under police provocation. There protests were focused and brief, and ended when the university leadership officially responded to demands. If some demands were not met through the official response, students accepted the leadership dispensation on other demands and vowed to return to fight another day. In none of the US protests did the students disrupt university classes or events in the course of making their demands; they respected the rights of others. And in the US institutions mentioned, none of the protests was concerned with financial exclusion per se, even though affordability of university education was a major issue and the problem of student debt would feature in the 2016 presidential primaries, championed by the Democratic Party contender Bernie Sanders.
It will be the task of scholars of comparative history, politics, and sociology to explain more fully the differences between the US and South African student protests. But what we do know is that the South African protests have been violent and persistent, with student organisations often aligned to external political parties and making their demands on both local universities and the national government. In this sense, South African student protests are more similar to protests at other post-independence African universities, but they are still distinguished by their scope and by the intensity of violence on local soil. That must be explained, as is attempted in the final chapter of this book.
One more thing: in the US context, university presidents did, on occasion, resign under protest-related pressure (such as at the University of Missouri and Ithaca College). While this book on South Africa’s university leaders was still in production, one vice-chancellor in the study was placed on special leave by the university council, two had left their jobs, and two others had announced plans to leave in the near future. The leadership costs of the crisis are mounting.
Chapter 2
The Roots of the Crisis I: Financial Exclusion
Professor, as you can see, I have a beautiful face. I do not want
to use it. But I need food to eat. Money to study. A place
to live. I cannot go on like this. But if I must, what can I do?
I can make lots of money with this face.
– Excerpt from a UFS student’s email
Having spent most of my working life teaching and leading young people, I know a blackmail note from a student when I see one. But this particular email (see excerpt above) was not blackmail. Ntokoza (not her real name), a young, soft-spoken woman from Umlazi township in Durban, had travelled all the way to Bloemfontein on her own. She was not one of the top students we had selected for full funding; her marks were good, but not as competitive as those of other students who qualified for the limited pool of full state aid. She came to UFS anyway, made her way into classes, squatted with some friends, and now that tuition payment was due, she faced the real possibility of financial exclusion.
It often happens that students without a cent for their studies take advantage of provisional registration (a partial payment arrangement) in the faint hope that money will materialise from somewhere – a miracle, nothing less. This provisional arrangement to access university and attend classes is an accommodation sympathetic universities make to give students more time to find the funds for their studies. One deadline for payment is pushed back to another deadline and, under pressure from student leaders, pushed back again. Suddenly, the year-end examinations loom and there are still students who do not have the funds to pay. Unsurprisingly, students then enter the next year of studies with debt from the previous year, and the administrative dance between deadline enforcement and sympathetic accommodation takes place all over again.
Ntokoza had eventually run out of options as another cut-off deadline loomed, and in desperation she sent me an email, begging for assistance. ‘Ask her to see me,’ I instructed my secretary, and within hours the frail, downcast student appeared in my office. Rarely had I seen such deep sadness in another person, and I had to ask Ntokoza to raise her faint voice so that I could hear her from across my desk. I clicked my computer mouse and the screen showed that there really was very little money left to support students from my ‘cost centres’ – unless I once again dipped into my personal banking account. But if my wife found out I would be dead meat; we were already supporting too many students from the family budget. And I could not bear my secretary coming into my office and once again giving me those big eyes that said, ‘Alweer’ (Not again). That would be infinitely worse than appearing before a long-suffering priest to confess that you had sinned again.
How does one explain the situation of this academically talented student – and many others – in a university that desperately wants to help each and every high school graduate qualifying for degree studies? Four factors converged to create this state of affairs: (1) a steady decline in the state subsidy to universities over