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The Perfect Storm

All waves, no matter how huge, start as rough spots –

cats’ paws – on the surface of the water.

– Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, 1997

The student protests of 2015–2016 caught South Africans by surprise. In a relatively short period of time, the defilement of a campus statue in Cape Town and a complaint about student fee increases in Johannesburg melded into a powerful protest movement that affected almost every one of the 26 public universities in the country. Even during the long, dark days of apartheid, no university had ever experienced this level of student protest in terms of scale, scope, intensity, and, in the course of time, violence.

The African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s ruling party, was caught off guard, resting in an unmerited assurance that it enjoyed political dominance on most campuses through its student affiliates. The government was surprised, given its expanding pro-poor investments in student welfare, particularly through the national bursary aid scheme. Much of the broader community was shocked, in light of the widely accepted understanding of education as the key to personal and social mobility. The universities themselves were caught napping, unprepared for the sudden backlash for which they had neither the resources to meet student demands, the skill to negotiate the new politics, nor the security to protect campus lives and property.

One group was not surprised: the university leaders, variously called rectors (at the Afrikaans-origin universities) or principals (at the English-origin universities) but commonly designated vice-chancellors of their institutions. Over the course of the protests, one after another university leader would say something like, ‘We tried to warn the government for more than a decade that a perfect storm was brewing.’ The ‘perfect storm’ metaphor would be heard again and again above the din of the protests to refer to the twin dangers of the decline in government subsidies and the steady increase in student fees. At some point these two planes would cross each other in foul weather with costly and potentially catastrophic consequences. And they did so with a vengeance in March 2015 and especially in October 2016. Yet even these vice-chancellors could not predict the intensity of the student revolt on their campuses and around the country. A seasoned veteran of campus politics as a student activist, one vice-chancellor would say repeatedly: ‘I was profoundly shocked by what was happening.’ What in the world was going on?

This book attempts to answer three difficult questions about the crisis in South Africa universities in 2015–2016:

•What in fact happened? Neither claims of some incipient political revolution nor an easy dismissal of protests as social pathology answers this question. What at first seems to be the obvious answer – angry students were upset with universities and reacted through peaceful and sometimes violent protests – clearly does not capture the many different faces of the revolt expressed in different ways on diverse campuses with varied consequences. Conclusions made at first glance are often too simple and cannot be read off the headlines in a newspaper or in an instant missive by a 750-word-limit columnist. This unprecedented disruption of public universities needs a clearer and deeper narration organised around an informed understanding of exactly what was taking place.

•Why did it happen? As the protests broke out in earnest, there were thoughtful people who immediately opined that the desecration of the monument honouring Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and its eventual removal from a prominent position on Upper Campus, were not about the statue. Then what was it about? Here was a liberal university that had long ago opened its doors to black students under constant threat from the apartheid government. It had a proud tradition of anti-apartheid protest, freedom lectures, and critical centres for intellectual thought, as well as two black vice-chancellors in recent history. More than one scholar warned that the protests were not about student fee increases per se; rather, they expressed a much larger grievance against a grossly unequal society. Still, why would the liberal universities – including Nelson Mandela’s alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) – become the special targets of such fervent and sustained protest? Or were the protests about these very universities in the first place?

•What does the protest crisis mean for the future of South African universities? The duration and intensity of the protests invariably raised questions about the long-term effects of the crisis on universities. In particular, the recognition of the unmanageability of the crisis in both financial and political terms cast doubt on the sustainability of public institutions. Protests on university campuses are certainly not unusual, but this streak did not seem to end. Countless attempts inside and outside higher education to resolve the impasse ended without success. Hours, days, and even weeks of negotiations would come to an abrupt end when protestors shifted the goalpost at the eleventh hour and disruptions continued, including heavy damage to university property and buildings. No interdict could stem the tide of protests, and no amount of private security or riot police could contain the assault on buildings and the disruption of classes. Eventually students and academics with options began signalling their plans to depart to private universities or institutions overseas. At this juncture we must ask: Under what conditions does the downward slide of public universities become irrevocable? What can we learn from post-independence universities in other African countries? And, most critically, can South African universities survive the present calamity?

An insider view of the crisis

The more reports and opinion pieces on the student protests that I read, the more I realised that what was missing in these many accounts from researchers, journalists, students, and general commentators was an insider’s view of the crisis from the perspective of those charged with leading public universities.1 These university leaders were women and men who had to balance budgets to sustain universities and engage students to ascertain budgetary priorities. Whether they liked it or not, they stood between the government, which required accountability, and the students, who demanded accessibility. These leaders had to ensure living-wage increases for their academics and workers but at the same time engage with students’ demand to insource contract workers, which threatened to collapse personnel budgets. As vice-chancellors, they had to reassure their senates that the academic project would not be compromised even while making adjustments to the academic calendar and examination timetable forced on them by relentless protest actions. They had to convey confidence and assure parents and alumni that their children were safe, and yet bring in added security that made some students feel unsafe. The vice-chancellors were easy targets for those needing a punching bag to alleviate their frustrations with the constant protest actions, campus instability, and the unpredictable teaching and examination schedules that resulted from the chronic disruption. As leaders, vice-chancellors had to reassure their own families about their safety even as the social media raged with abuse and sometimes even death threats against them and their loved ones.

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, following the end of apartheid. The promise of 1994 and the high hopes for democracy were unrealised for the poor. After more than two decades, students came to understand that poverty was still a lived reality for their parents and communities, and that inequality had in fact worsened. The unexpected anger on the streets and on the campuses against ‘the deals Mandela made’ was now being expressed openly among a new generation of youth who rejected with contempt their designation as ‘born frees’.5 They did not feel free, and the vice-chancellor voices explain how that sense of betrayal shows up on campuses even though the broader origins of the crisis lie within the state.

Chapter 5 describes the leaderless revolution, unravelling the mystery of who ‘the students’ or ‘the protestors’ are. The protestors have been depicted in the media as a large, homogeneous, like-minded group of activists fitting comfortably under the conceptual umbrella of ‘the Fallists’. Who do vice-chancellors actually see around them as they negotiate for hours with one group of students, only for that group to be sidelined and replaced by another group, even on the same day of a meeting with management? This chapter explains how small and disparate groups of protestors form, split apart, and re-form in another image, disappearing and reappearing in what has become known as a leaderless movement.

Yet each campus is different, and the combination of student organisations in and out of power would differ from one university to the next, making management of the crisis nearly impossible. This explains why the body selected by students, the SRC, would lose its standing and authority on most campuses as new organisations and new student leaders jostled for position. It would become the most tiring task of the vice-chancellors: negotiating an end to the crisis with small and changing groups of students who had no intention of ending what they had started.

Chapter 6, dealing with the personal costs of crisis leadership, is perhaps the saddest in the book. Here the eleven vice-chancellors open up about the personal stress, fear, disappointment, and anger generated by the crisis. It reveals the human face of leaders and the real distress that they as individuals had to work through every day. It was not only the protesting students that brought grief upon vice-chancellors in these difficult times; it was also some of their staff. And it was not only their personal safety that weighed on the vice-chancellors’ minds, but also that of their families. Behind the required projection of confidence and direction-giving stances in public, the private lives and thoughts of university leaders during periods of crisis are expressed in deeply moving ways. I found these moments very disturbing, for I knew from personal experience how incredibly lonely one could feel in those times of fear and anxiety, even in the presence of supportive staff and loving family members. These personal feelings and anxieties are not known to the general public, nor to those dishing out a relentless battering of the individual vice-chancellors in the media.

Chapter 7 deals with the vexed demand for decolonisation. What does it mean and for whom, and what are its consequences for the academic project of universities? This chapter draws on the anti-colonial literature produced by the heroes of South Africa’s contemporary student protestors, such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Aimé Césaire, but also postcolonial authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who gave meaning to the concept of decolonising the curriculum of African universities. The chapter describes the ways in which protestors and scholars alike speak of the ‘decolonisation of curriculum’, drawing on research about subjugated minorities such as the indigenous communities of North America. The chapter wrestles also with the racial essentialism associated with the decolonisation demanded by black protestors, and the anachronism of old, lived-out binaries such as ‘black–white’ in a globalised, integrated, multimedia world where knowledge no longer ‘belongs’ to race or ethnicity or nation. This is the only chapter with a minimal input of vice-chancellors’ voices, since it is a later addition to the book inspired by persistent queries about the meaning of decolonisation in South Africa’s constitutional democracy.

Chapter 8 takes on the sensitive subject of the welfarisation of South Africa’s universities. As the number of poor students enrolled at universities trebled over a decade, the institutions were starting to sink under the weight of social demands from the new entrants to higher education. Government-funded bursaries were no longer sufficient to finance students’ expenses, and many of the recent new students are among the first to have been raised in welfare-supported families primarily through the government’s child support grant. On entering university, many poor students from communities on welfare brought with them the expectation that they would be cared for beyond tuition fees. They also held the understanding that if the university – in their minds an extension of government services – did not deliver on their needs, then protests, even violent ones, were a perfectly rational strategy for extracting those demands from ‘management’, even when management said they lacked the resources called for.

Chapter 9 examines how social media allowed protests that started at UCT and Wits to accelerate like flames following a petrol trail across the country’s campuses. The new social media communicated in real time a grievance expressed here or an incipient protest under way there. This phenomenon posed a special challenge to university leaders – how to stay ahead of the protest narrative in a context where virtually every student has a mobile phone. Yet it was not only the new social media that sent the university communications offices into scramble mode; it was also the traditional media, which, with few exceptions, took the side of the student protestors even as buildings went up in flames. And in some cases, the local newspaper would make the vice-chancellor the target of sustained personal attacks even as it offered legal and other material support to student leaders.

Chapter 10 asks what the unending campus disruption and instability mean for the future of South African universities. The three forces acting together – underfunding, interference and instability – spell doom for top-quality research institutions. The fragility of the universities, and of the liberal institutions in particular, makes them vulnerable to ongoing violence in the face of a built-in ambivalence towards any form of state or private security on campuses. But there is one last chance of recovery, and the book ends with a few words of hope.