A new Vice Chancellor (VC) at the University of Cape Town (UCT): The ‘Prequel’?

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.”

 “Blood is on your hands.”

“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.”