A new Vice Chancellor (VC) at the University
of Cape Town (UCT): The ‘Prequel’?
Tim Crowe – Emeritus Professor (40 years’
service) and Life Fellow UCT
Ten years ago at UCT, the
administration of the experienced administrator, eminent scholar and public
intellectual, VC Prof. Njabulo Ndebele, ended. Unlike his predecessor, the forceful
‘transformer’ Dr Mamphela Ramphele,
he attempted to be both a universal ‘pacifier’ and a transformer.
With regard to the latter, he supported massive increases in the
admission of non-comprehensively financially supported, first-year ‘black’
students educationally ‘disabled’ by a horrifically dysfunctional, mismanaged,
unaccountable National
System of Basic Education. Sadly, this was done without the necessary
concomitant increases in the population of academics (let alone ‘progressive’
ones), key support staff, and strategic changes in curricula and teaching
methods.
With regard to the former, ‘ivory tower’ academics were ‘pacified’ by
implementing the aggregation of the struggling Academic Development Programme
(ADP) and other components involving learning into a separate, new, costly, faculty-like
entity, the Centre
for Higher Education Development (CHED).
This greatly expanded the Saunders-initiated Academic Support Programme (ASP)
which was set up in the early 1980s to help educationally ‘hamstrung’ matriculants
to “bridge the gap” between “Bantu Education” and globally competitive tertiary
education.
In retrospect, I (and other knowledgeable academics – including
ASP/ADP/CHED educationalists) are convinced that the creation of ASP/ADP and
their evolution into CHED were strategically poor decisions. It dramatically
reduced the responsibility for academic support/development by the Core Academic
Departments (especially those in the School of Education), and allowed far too
many ‘CHED-kids’ to become socio-educationally “stigmatized”,
fail academically and/or receive a poor-value education. More than half admitted never earned a
three-year Bachelor’s degree, and the majority of those who eventually
graduated did so without academic distinction and only after more than four
years of study. Only a small fraction (mainly males) went on to post-graduate
research and even fewer still developed into university academics. Once these resilient
few got into the academic ‘shark tank’, many received little or no mentorship
and struggled to progress within the stringent process of ad hominem promotion.
That’s why UCT has so few black womxn
professors.
The
new ‘capo’
The selection of Ndebele’s
successor was a highly contentious process.
There were 27 potentially acceptable applicants, including several
highly respected and
experienced candidates.
Prof. ‘Daya’ Reddy: an NRF A-rated mathematician (+-200 publications) and eminent educator (+-70 post-grads); and President - Academy
of Science of South Africa, President - International
Council for Science, and long-serving
Head of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at UCT and Dean of Science.
Prof. Jonathan
Jansen: an NRF A-rated, educationalist, public intellectual, university administrator
(including eight years as a dean of education). He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a fellow of the Academy of Science of the Developing World, president of both the South
African Institute of Race Relations and the Academy of
Science of South Africa, authored
many influential educational works, and has an unsurpassed understanding
of education and curriculum reform in South Africa from cradle to grave.
Prof. Martin Hall: arguably, the world’s leading archaeologist specializing in the
pre-colonial history of Southern Africa, and a recipient of UCT’s Distinguished Teacher Award. He served as Deputy
Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town (2002-2008) and the inaugural
Dean of CHED (1999-2002). He is a Life Fellow at UCT, a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts. Prof. Cheryl de la Rey - whose Ph.D. research focused on career narratives of South African women professors. She lectured and ‘professed’ psychology at several South African universities (including UCT - 1987-2002), before becoming Executive Director at the National Research Foundation (2000-2002), Chair of the Research Output Evaluation Committee at the Department of Education (2001-2008). Chair - National Research Foundation Rating Panels, (2002 - present) and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for research at UCT.
Dr Max Price: - a qualified medical doctor specializing in tropical medicine who obtained a BA (Hons) PPE at Oxford while he was a Rhodes Scholar. He subsequently earned an M.Sc. in Community Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a Diploma in Occupational Health from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Prior to applying for UCT’s VC post, he was Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits, and spent two years in the private sector as an independent consultant in the fields of public health, health policy, medical education, and human resources for health.
Reddy and Jansen didn’t even make the short list.
The UCT
academics’ initial favourite was del la Rey due to her extensive and highly
relevant academic history and grass-roots-to-boardroom managerial
expertise. The other prominent in-house
candidate, Hall, apparently used his ‘Old Boy’ influence to successfully protest
his initial exclusion from the shortlist.
The
‘outsider’ Price ‘sold’ himself on his transformation credentials, presented at
open seminars (characterized by hard and probing questions) attended by a broad
spectrum of the UCT Community.
Great expectations
VC Price’s ‘transformation’ administration began
with enormous anticipation. In his inaugural address in
2008 he committed himself to developing an “Afropolitan” UCT, following on from
Ndebele’s policies. What he actually did during his first six years in office
was to massively strengthen the power of the highly bureaucratic, centralized
administration, raise lots of money and admit more financially and otherwise non-comprehensively
supported CHED-kids who brought in large financial government subsidies.
In effect, he abandoned the 70+-year-old dictum of
UCT’s first registrar, Wilfred Murray: centralized
administration must be small, decidedly supportive and decentralized, and, most
importantly, “justify its existence”.
Price’s indecisive, arguably uncaring, ‘pacification/’managerialization’/commodification’
strategy failed.
Academically, by continuing to back the CHED-strategy
and not implementing constructive transformation of undergraduate curricula, it
encouraged staff to focus on post-graduate education, research and gaining and
improving their NRF rating. This did not foster the development of black
academics. It promoted the development of large numbers of marginalized and aggrieved
students and staff, irrespective of racial ‘self-identification’. But, much
more seriously, it fomented the creation and ‘development’ of a small core of aggressive,
politically highly radical and racially/nationalistically focused, destructive
‘decolonists’ who evolved into hardcore, lawbreaking Fallists.
Administratively, it undermined the
functioning of faculties and heads of departments by blocking academically
strategic decisions and simply ignoring complaints from all and sundry
vis-à-vis bureaucratic thromboses and ineffective transformation. This is outlined
in some detail in the comprehensive, Ndebele-commissioned, Price-ignored, Moran Report (accessible on my
Blog Site – timguineacrowe.blogspot.co.za). Perhaps worse still, it ceased to
react to fact-based evidence, allowed the forcible cessation of debate, refused
to consult the UCT Community democratically (partitioning it into
cabal-controlled ‘constituencies’) and pandered to (colluded with?) a small minority
of lawbreakers.
In response to this, I and former UCT Students
Representative Council President (now member of parliament) Gwen Ngwenya,
proposed motions requiring Price to cease negotiating with lawbreakers. Faculty
of Commerce lecturer Gao Nodoba, further proposed
a well-received no-confidence motion in the Price-led Executive. He accused it
of: not supporting transformation and student demands until forced to do so by
lawbreakers, offering only “indecisive, visionless fixes” and “inconsistently
applying institutional rules”. When law
academic Cathleen Powell attempted to support this view, she was mocked openly by Fallists, who mimed clown-tears, cat-called, and shouted:
“Shut up you bitch”. Ngwenya was subsequently branded a “sell-out” and “house
ni**er” by Fallists.
This echoes comments made more than a year before by a range of ‘black’
students at the University
Assembly created to discuss (but didn’t) the removal of Rhodes statue. Here
are some quotes:
“What exactly have you [Price] done in your two terms?”
“I call upon you to stand up and take leadership. Put your values and
policies and implementation where your mouth is.”
“This varsity doesn’t care
about you; it’s not going to help you; and it’s not going to listen to
you.”
“Max Price and his management
team have failed you.”
On
the day prior to this epic event, in an address entitled Whose heritage
are we preserving?, the top
spokesperson for students, SRC President Ramabina Mahapa, pronounced unequivocally:
“We have reached an impasse with the university
leadership and are fatigued at asking for meaningful transformation. We have
begged, growled, and pleaded with management. NO MORE!!
Criticism
of UCT’s ‘Afropolitization’ has not come only from academics and students. UCT
alumnus and UCT student-parent Dr William Guild recently summarized matters succinctly:
“In short, during almost three years of
intermittent violent protests on campus, UCT’s internal disciplinary body(ies)
acted against 12 students, all of whose sanctions were suspended by the
granting of clemency. The clemencies will be considered by the Institutional
Reconciliation and Transformation Commission (IRTC), a body only very recently
constituted. The Commission’s hearings, whose costs will run to about 5 million
Rand”.
“Three years of violent student demonstrations
resulted in extensive property damage, defilement of several buildings,
destruction by fire of numerous artworks, violent intimidation of many students
and some faculty, not to mention at least three assaults on the person of the
VC, multiple acts of arson (including that of the VC’s office), the complete
closure of multiple campuses on several occasions, deferment of end of year
examinations in all three years.”
