What makes one ‘qualified’ to manage, let alone lead, the University of Cape Town

What makes one ‘qualified’ to manage, let alone lead, the University of Cape Town (UCT)

Emeritus Prof. Tim Crowe

Background

UCT employs lots and lots of ‘leaders’, ‘directors’ and senior managers. She pays/bonuses them much, much more than the academic staff they are hired to ‘administrate’. These include: a Vice Chancellor (VC), several Pro[are there amateur?]-vice Chancellors, four Deputy VCs, several brace of Directors/Executive Directors, a Registrar, a couple of Deputy Registrars, six Deans and a host of Heads of Departments. These ‘capos’ are ‘supported’ by scads of deputy-deputies and personal assistants who cost her even more. During the last three years at least, ALL of the many academics and students, and most of the alumni I’ve studied and communicated with, agree that they are poorly served by those ensconced “down the hill” in the Fallists’ Azania House (formerly Bremner Building).

In the ‘bad old-old days’ pre-WWII, the racist/sexist/colonialist mini-admin-hegemony of first VC ‘Jock’ Beattie and Registrar Wilfred Murray was small, decidedly supportive and decentralized.

I quote Murray:

“The administrative staff must justify its existence by setting standards and methods of procedure of high order.  It has no claim to existence in a university unless it can relieve the teaching departments of the responsibility for those duties which can be carried out more efficiently through a central office”.

When I joined her in 1973 during the just ‘bad old days’, the admin vs student/staff demographics at UCT were still ‘untransformed’. But, the Community had formally rejected racism in all forms since 1950, and its handful of capos actively resisted the Apartheid system, hence the moniker "Moscow on the Hill".  However, sexism still featured, albeit at diminished levels, and UCT retained much of its “Cambridge of the Cape” academic culture, especially in the Humanities.  Then came VCs Saunders and Ramphele, who put the transformation ‘pedal to the metal’.

Despite the evidence-free pronouncements of Fallists, during the last two decades of the 20^th Century and the first one of the new millennium, UCT assumed a broad scale, non-racial, anti-sexist character and curricula (except still in some segments of the now mega-Faculty of Humanities). This is fully documented in Was/Is UCT an institutionally colonialist/sexist/racist institution? Parts 1 & 2 in my Blog Site – timguineacrowe.blogspot.co.za).

More recently

During the last decade, there has been an unprecedented ‘capo’ and academic turnover. The latter has been exacerbated by neglect and direct intrusion by/from admin capos, intimidation by Fallists and offering academics generous retrenchment packages. The departure of many of its ‘best and brightest’ (and, too often, youngest) is invariably explained as ‘moving on to greener pastures’. The latest of these are the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce (after less than two years in office) and the Library Executive Director, only a few days after she refused VC Price’s instruction to ‘re-robe’ the Fallist-censored statue of "Saartjie" Bartmann.

For me, the greatest loss was that of Prof. and DVC for Transformation Crain Soudien, literally a ‘gentle man’ and Africa’s preeminent ‘race’ scholar and advocate of non-racialism, soon after he was defamed by Fallists as a ‘sell out’.

Then, of course, there is eminent (NRF B-rated) art academic Prof. Sandra Klopper who served as DVC of teaching and learning, and academic planning. She is famous for “condemning” faeces, flinging, founding Fallist Chumani Maxwele’s acts as “reprehensible” and promising the never-implemented decisive action against him. Her contract was not renewed in 2016 after the burning/censoring of art at UCT and her participation on the highly controversial Curriculum Change Working Group that invited decolonist/defamer Prof. C.K. Raju to ‘promote’ the decolonization of Mathematics.

Maybe she just didn’t fall in with the Fallists?

Non-racialism abandoned

Another disturbing recent development at UCT relating to staff recruitment/promotion at UCT has been the clandestine (not reviewed by Senate) formal recognition of the secretive Black Academic Caucus as an “Interest Group” within UCT. The BAC is, literally, run by an unidentified “BAC Executive Committee who has the right to decide on membership”. An individual’s BAC “membership terminates if a member is removed by a resolution of the Executive Committee”. The BAC’s difficult-to-obtain Constitution and the Memorandum of Understanding (accessible on my Blog Site) claim the existence of “hegemonies [that] reproduce colonial relations of power” and “unfair practices that obstruct the career paths of black scholars” within UCT.  To that end, in June 2017, when Dr Robert Morrell, who was employed specifically “to provide mid-career support and manage various staff development programmes”, reported that his research demonstrated that there were no “unfair practices” in the ad hominem promotion process at UCT, members of the BAC objected vociferously. Morell’s findings are still not in the public domain. 

Is this an example of “consultation and cooperation between both parties [UCT Executive/BAC Executive Committee] with respect to policies and decisions related to transformation at UCT” as laid out in the MoU?

The MoU also initiates the process of direct “representation of the BAC on university structures such as Council and Senate, and other university committees [e.g. relating to appointments of senior academics and administrators]. Since the mission of the BAC is to achieve “social justice [for] and [promote] the experiences of black people”, its key goal is “increas[ing] number/s of black academic staff employed by the university, particularly in the professoriate” and within “the governance of the university”.  

The BAC also asserts, without evidence, that the decision to establish and Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission (IRTC) is tantamount to an admission by the UCT Executive that there is institutional racism at UCT. Former SRC president (now parliamentarian) Gwen Ngwenya refutes this assertion/decision decisively as a consequence of nothing more than a “negotiation for non-violence”, describing it as one of “a series of decisions by the executive, grounded in the appeasement of unelected and unrepresentative student lawbreakers and ideologues who have been party to violence”.

UCT psychology lecturer Shose Kessi, one of the founders of the BAC, makes its racial ‘position’ clear in parts of a poem:

‘Benevolent’ white massa finally reveals his true colours?

How does it feel, sista, to know that after you [a BAC applicant for a senior post at UCT] saved their [the UCT Executive’s] ass’ in 2015 and 2016, they toss you aside in the name of stability; code name for whiteness?

How does it feel, sista, to know that despite the degrees, the awards and the professorships, we are only ever there to be ‘maid’ cleaning up their shit?

So much for UCT’s pledge to “transcend the idea of race” and its “commitment to the goal of non-racialism”.

2017/18

Since Prof. Anton le Roex was due to finish his distinguished service as Dean of Science at UCT at the end of 2017, a selection committee charged with recommending his successor started its work in April. After an extended search locally and internationally, three eminently appointable, short-listed, “A-rated” candidates were identified. When two of these withdrew at short notice, the selection committee was persuaded by a BAC-connected member not to select the remaining candidate (a ‘white’ woman) and search again. Two new candidates were found.  When the committee (minus VC Price) sat again, the same BAC-member successfully argued against recommending the appointment of the, now doubly “A-rated”, candidate (DAC).

When they learned that the VC could now unilaterally appoint an acting dean (including a non-applicant or unsuccessful candidate) to ‘lead’ the faculty for a short period, many senior members of the Science Faculty cried ‘foul’, saying that this could render the faculty “headless”.   

This prompted Price to democratically canvas faculty academics, the vast majority of whom independently indicated their support for the DAC.

The DAC is arguably an ideal, home-grown appointee. She obtained her first degrees and Ph.D. (in 1991) at UCT with distinction. After a highly productive postdoctoral stint in the USA, in 1994, she was appointed by UCT as a lecturer, achieving professorial status via ad hominem promotion in 2008, an NRF B rating and a high h-index of 24.  She was elected a Fellow of UCT in 2010, head of the department in 2012, and served on many faculty/university committees (including ad hominem promotions) and as deputy dean from 2013 to 2016. She performed these tasks with distinction while publishing +-150 peer-reviewed research papers/chapters and supervising 40 postgrad students.  She has also served on a number of national and international scientific bodies, often achieving election to high office.

Despite all these achievements, massive democratic within-faculty support and her forbearance, the DAC has only been appointed to serve as an interim dean.

So, gone is the non-racially selected and democratically elected dean, chosen by a specific faculty to offer academic leadership, defend the academic project, and represent the needs and concerns of staff and students to management.

Is this another example of “consultation and cooperation” between the UCT Executive and BAC Executive Committee?

Let’s move up the hierarchy

To replace Prof. Klopper, UCT searched long for a DVC for Teaching and Learning. Two finalists were identified. Both were women, one being a ‘home-grown’ ‘black’.

The ‘Insider’

After earning B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in a health sciences discipline, the Insider obtained a UCT Ph.D. in 2009, specializing in a particular form of therapeutic heath science. She has extensive clinical experience in rural South Africa and the USA. She was appointed as a lecturer in a department in the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2009. Within a year, she was appointed as head of a specialist division within that department, served with distinction for three years, and was rapidly promoted ad hominem to senior lecturer and associate professor. In CV-like documents [I cannot find her full CV in the public domain] she refers to teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, but does not list courses taught or provide names of Ph.D., graduates and candidates or list their publications or career success. She lists 20+ publications, authored mostly as a junior contributor, relating primarily to her Ph.D. research specialty, intergenerational play and the conceptualisation of occupational consciousness, informed by liberation philosophy, and coloniality. She has no NRF rating and an h-index of 3. Professors in Health Sciences generally have NRF B-ratings and h-indices > 15.

Philosophically, the Insider identifies with Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Frantz Fanon. The former advocates an decolonialist version of Nazi philosopher Prof. Martin Heidegger’s “Dasein”, a “primal nature of being”, a self-identity based on a “shared history and destiny” underpinned by the anti-Cartesian ontology-based belief: “I think BECAUSE I AM”. 

However, demonstrating a Dasein for ‘black’ peoples sensu lato in southern Africa is a hard-sell.

Fanon‘s ideas are potentially much, much more worrying.

Both of her philosophical ‘heroes’ use words like “power”, “rage” and “violence” too frequently for my taste.

During height of the Fallism ‘Troubles’, the Insider was co-opted to serve as a special advisor on institutional transformation to VC Price and the relevant(?) DVC. She is an ardent academic/admin ‘decolonist’ and served at institutional level as co-Chair of the Curriculum Change Working Group [who invited Raju] and as Chair of the Academic Freedom Committee [that invited Prof. Mahmood Mamdani to give the controversial 2017 T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture]. With regard to the latter, she is a strong supporter of censorship of art, e.g. the sculpture of Sarah Baartman which she describes as “perpetuating sick voyeurism over subjugated black womxn bodies”. She is critical of UCT’s choice to retain academic “post-retirees” [overwhelmingly ‘white’] who contribute significantly to research and post-graduate supervision, and of VC Price in particular: “I remember that Max Price came to UCT on a transformation ticket. Has he delivered?”

On a personal note, she erroneously reports a “a unanimous [positive] response” at the most recent UCT Convocation AGM to my question “Is UCT institutionally racist?” In fact, of the 60+ attendees present, only seven ‘voted’ “YES”. This included one, whom I have never met or communicated with, who repeatedly and unapologetically [despite a request from former Convocation Barney Pityana] defamed me racially as Jim Crow. Like other cowards, he refused to reveal his identity. Yet the Insider claims this somehow “vindicates” the BAC position. Indeed, she seems to harbour doubts relating to the utility of “white people” full stop: “Soon we will know if we can trust white people as allies in the decolonial project or not”.

Those doubts might even be interpreted as outright anti-white antipathy. When she heard that senior librarian William Daniels, as an “expression and academic freedom", had restored the Bartmann sculpture to its original state after two years of censorship, she tweeted: "Why would a [not this] white man see the need to derobe [sic] a sculpture in order to expose a naked Sarah Baartman yet again?" May she should ask the sculpture’s creator, Willie Bester, a ‘black’ man.

Proto-Fallist [now Fallist critic] Imraan Coovadia, a novelist and professor of English at UCT, praised Daniels: "It’s wonderful!" "I've been watching this dreary march of censorship and hatred with such dismay."

Like so many others, Daniels has left UCT, seeking refuge overseas.

The ‘Outsider’

I know much less about the BAC-much-criticized ‘outsider’. She is an honorary professor and has a B.Sc.(Hons) in history, an M.A. in African studies and a PhD in History (1998). Her immediate past post was DVC for Academics (2014-2017) at another leading South African university, where she served with distinction. She had previously (2003-2014) served as Director of Monitoring and Evaluation, Executive Director, Higher Education Quality Committee and Senior Director, Directorate of Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the Council on Higher Education (CHE).  The CHE is the top, independent South African body involved with the development and implementation of a system of quality assurance for higher education. Before that, she was a project manager at the National Research Foundation, a science liaison officer at the Human Sciences Research Council, and a college/university lecturer (1988-1993). She seems to have produced no postgrads. Like the ‘Insider’, she has no NRF rating and a very low h-index, 2.

The Outsider’s research interests are focused on the philosophy and politics of higher education from a broad social theory perspective, drawing on an interdisciplinarity approach, especially with regard to the humanities. From this perspective, she has researched change in higher education as well as on the meanings and possibilities of the notion of transformation, especially at curricular level. Her current work is on higher education curriculum and pedagogy in the context of the call for “decolonisation” of the curriculum. To make her ideas realities, she has successfully secured funding for research projects on higher education from the Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation.  She lists 12 peer-reviewed publications, all as senior author and all on the theory and practice of higher education.

Her academic ‘hero’ seems to be political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Although an admirer of Heidegger, Arendt avoided his extreme views on the nature of being, prioritizing the experiential nature of human life and rejecting traditional political philosophy's conceptual schema.

Has the selection process been racist?

Despite the evidence presented above, the ‘Insider’ and the BAC have accused UCT of hiring a “less qualified” academic because she is ‘white’, and flouting the rules involved with the selection process.
As ‘evidence’ of these nefarious actions, they cite multiple “concessions” by the beleaguered UCT Executive that ”UCT needs to seriously address transformation” and that they, Senate and Council supported the establishment of the IRTC and its Steering Committee. My experience and research, dozens of ‘Messages from the VC’s Desk’ and viewing of IRTC meetings confirm this need. However, even though they have ‘progressively’ conceded to Fallists and the BAC, neither the Chairperson of Council nor VC Price has ever stated/written that UCT is institutionally racist. The IRTC SC has yet to discuss, let alone issue opinions on, institutional racism or decolonization.

Have the Council chairperson, VC Price and his almost certain successor changed their views?
Quite to the contrary, since before 1980, UCT has made massive transformational progress. But, for the current Convocation President [who resolutely maintains that UCT’s racist past “is still present” and is sustained by “invisible violence”], Fallists and their BAC backers, it seems that nothing short of total dismemberment of the university into a still-ill-defined ‘pluriversity’, the implementation of radical Raju-like ‘decolonization’ of its curricula and the ideological or demographic ‘”cleansing” of “whiteness” will suffice.
Will the new ‘hegemony’ implement the BAC’s vision without fully and democratically consulting staff, students and alumni individually and not just dubiously appointed ‘constituency representatives?
Price has decisively refuted accusations that the selection process was “flouted”. I guess he ignored the BAC dictum: “if a White candidate is recommended over an appointable black candidate, then there has to be some stellar attribute which provides a convincing basis for choosing the white candidate over the black candidate/s”.

Lastly if members of the UCT Executive had to qualify as full-professors, VCs Duminy, Luyt and Price should never have been appointed.  But, Duminy and Luyt were, at least, excellent cricketers.

My view on the DVC appointment was that there was no 5-star appointee. The ‘Insider’ is a research specialist and political activist weak on teaching/learning pedagogy and lacking in administrative experience. The ‘Outsider’ has less teaching/supervisory/’coal-face’ interaction with students. Based on their weak research records, I would never have supported either for promotion to full professor. I guess UCT’s Health Sciences Faculty has established new and different criteria from Science. 

Perhaps this was a result of ‘consultation’ with the BAC?