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The Leader and the Crisis

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget

that the initial objective was to drain the swamp.

– Popular saying among consultants and crisis managers

It was about 2:30 am, on 23 February 2016, when the buzzer on my WhatsApp signalled that a group message had been received. I woke up with a start, and anxiously reached for my cellphone on the bedside cabinet. This must be serious. The seven members of my senior leadership team, as well as the head of campus security, the director of communications, and the dean of students, would instantly and simultaneously receive notice of a crisis via the WhatsApp texting service. The emergency could be anything – a residence roof collapsing, a student suicide, a foiled kidnapping attempt, or a spontaneous protest action under way. We all had our assigned roles: information gathering (as in ‘establish the facts as soon as possible’), personal counselling, monitoring, facilities protection, external and internal communication, hospital transfers, police notification, and media management. When any one of us notified the group of an emergency situation, the management machinery kicked into action as regular updates filtered through this handy messaging system. But this was half past two in the morning, which could mean only one thing. Something extremely serious had just happened.

We were in the middle of a horrible week at the University of the Free State (UFS). Without warning, a small group of students and outsourced workers had disrupted a rugby game in progress. After some of the spectators pleaded with them to leave the field so that the game could continue, a larger group of those in the stands ran onto the rugby field and attacked the protestors. The confrontation spread across the campus as right-wing whites from outside the university joined the fray, while black protestors, some of them non-students, attacked university property and threatened white and non-protesting students and staff. None of us on the university management team slept much that week as we tried to contain the retaliatory violence. Nerves were constantly on edge, and at that time we simply did not have the security resources in place to deal with this paroxysm of violence. In this context, a WhatsApp message in the dead of the night was not a good sign at all.

I seldom panic, and staff or students throwing tantrums in my office are asked to leave and come back when they’re ready to talk. Staying calm is something I learnt from my father; in the worst of situations, even at the death of his youngest child, he would enter a zone of placidity and call the family to prayer. That humble man – the one-time laundry driver, fruit-and-veg hawker, messenger, and missionary – taught me how to remain calm in a crisis. But for the first time in years, I panicked as I reached for my cellphone. The first question that ran through my mind was, ‘Are the children safe?’ By ‘children’, I mean the more than 30 000 students on our three campuses, for whose safety and security I found myself taking personal responsibility. There was no difference in the level of concern I had for my own daughter, who studies on the main campus, from that for the sons and daughters of any other parent – and for good reason.

When a parent brings a child to the university’s Open Day (recruitment) and eventually to Welcoming Day (registration), I would often be confronted by a mother and father with their first-year student in tow. In the Afrikaans-speaking community in particular, there would be an unspoken ‘handing over’ of the new undergraduate fresh from high school. The parents’ feelings are reminiscent of the sentiment expressed in ‘Juffrou, ek bring jou my kind’ (Teacher, I bring you my child), a warm and charming recollection of many teachers and principals on receiving a new learner in traditional public schools.

I would come to understand that the principle of in loco parentis still applied for many parents even when they bring their children, now budding adults, to a university campus. The words on their minds might very well be, ‘I am bringing you my child and you are responsible for him or her as if you were the parent.’ Of course, there is ample room here for debate on the social meanings and cultural appropriateness of such understandings of a young adult entering higher education, but nonetheless I assumed that caretaker responsibility for all students regardless of any personal misgivings about being a parent of sorts to other people’s children.

The message was from the head of security. A small group of protestors, possibly including a few non-students, was on the move around the campus trying to outwit campus security. A package looking like a petrol bomb was found at the door of one of the lecture halls; a small fire had started but was quickly extinguished. Everything was under control, said the security chief, and they were ‘keeping a close eye’ on the mobile group. More updates would follow if necessary, and there would be a full debriefing with management in the morning.

By now I was sweating, and that 2:30 am electronic message had just confirmed a decision I had made earlier. It was time for me to leave the university.

With this 2016 academic year I was approaching the end of seven wonderful years of an effective ten-year contract as UFS vice-chancellor and rector, but I had told my senior colleagues and the chairman of the council that I had no intention of staying for the two full terms. It is my long-held belief that in a high-intensity leadership assignment such as a university principal on divided campuses in an angry country, you work flat out to transform the organisation and then you leave so that others can continue the work. Seven years of working eighteen hours a day, weekends included, was enough. I had even placed a tweet to that effect in my 2012 book Letters to My Children: ‘If you stay in the same job for longer than seven years, you lack imagination.’1 Now it was crystal clear that the time had come for me to move on.

As I put the phone back on the table, I looked towards the other side of the bed. There was a good chance my wife was awake, but she would not show it. Grace and my children carried the brunt of the stress and tension I brought home, even though I hardly spoke about campus crises so as not to alarm them. But they would hear about it elsewhere – at the hairdresser’s, or in the shopping mall, or from the lamppost where newspapers jockeyed for headline space – and what they heard was always half the truth and sensationalised with suggestions of impending doom.

That was another reason why the decision to leave was confirmed at that early hour. Yes, it was a time of crisis as increasingly intense and then violent protests spread across the campuses of South Africa’s 26 public universities, including UFS. But this was not going to stop anytime soon, and so whether I left in 2016 or in 2019, there would still be crises to manage. For every analyst of higher education knew that what had started in 2015 as a national uprising of students had also launched a new normal – chronic and system-wide instability and disruption in South Africa’s higher education system.

I recall now that as I left my farewell dinner at UFS, a colleague stepped from the shadows, grabbed my arm, and said this: ‘Boss, thank you for leaving in the upright position.’ I gave him a knowing hug. He was the brother-in-law of Russel Botman, the beleaguered principal of the University of Stellenbosch who faced criticism and controversy in his efforts to transform the institution, and who said farewell to the university in a funeral casket.2

A wide-angled view of the crisis

What does a campus crisis look like from the office of the university principal? When students take the leader of the university hostage, or occupy a major administration building for days on end, or burst into a council meeting and prevent the governors of the university from leaving, or set fire to university property, what does the head of the university experience? What is it like for university leaders when crises such as these become endemic, paralysing institutional functions and setting off alarm bells among parents, donors, alumni, faculty, the general student body, prospective students, and the public even as the media demand official responses against tight publishing deadlines?

Much of what has been written and debated in the media tells the story of the campus protests from the perspective of students agitated about fees, or through the voices of workers concerned about outsourcing, or the lament of staff decrying low salaries and unacceptable working conditions. When yet another protest rocks a university campus, the media rush dutifully to the scene, often on an invitation sent prior to a routine march or a spectacular event, to record the complaints, condemnation, and concerns of students in particular. Aided and abetted by new communication technologies, the media often prod spectators from a distance for assistance on the scene of a protest or a burning building: ‘Were you there? Please send us your stories and photos.’

The public has rightly heard student voices, which were often very compelling, distressed, and anger-filled, but the reporting has been partial, one-sided, and sometimes dangerously misleading. The news also carried heart-rending stories of outsourced workers demanding an end to their exclusion from the benefits of tenure, pension, and other rights that accrue to those directly employed by the university. And there have been regular features in the media on academic and administrative staff who, in the considerations of annual salary increases, would complain bitterly about below-inflation increases in their compensation. These voices of students, workers, and academics remain critical in the democratic space. But what about those who stand between declining revenues from the state and incessant demands for ‘more’ from students, staff, and workers?

In other words, what would a fuller account of the 2015–2016 crisis look like if it included the voices of senior university leaders? What do these university principals witness from their offices in the main administration building? Are they, as activist student leaders often portray, self-serving bureaucrats operating as mere state functionaries, extensions of an oppressive ‘system’ who themselves need to fall? Is it the case that they do not ‘listen’ to students and workers, thereby sparking disruption and destruction as a last resort of frustrated protestors? Are they effective in their leadership or ‘utterly powerless … subject only to the gravitational pull of history’?3 And how do the leaders themselves view the causes of the crisis and the future of the South African university?

My sample of university principals includes men and women, white and black, single and married, new and experienced, scientists and humanities scholars, rural and urban university leaders, executives in charge of relatively well-resourced universities as well as those running institutions which for many years have merely survived from one salary payout to the next, and not a few activists from the anti-apartheid days. This diversity is limited, of course. Most principals are men. Several universities, the poorer ones, have been in crises of instability long before the period under consideration (2015–2016). And while all universities in South Africa struggle with budgetary pressures, their capacities for managing crises, in financial terms, vary between the better-endowed former white universities and the historically disadvantaged institutions. Who these vice-chancellors are matters in leadership, especially in times of crisis.

Leadership in times of crisis

Research indicates that a number of factors contribute to a leader’s effectiveness in crisis management. First, a leader’s personality matters.4 In this study, the personalities of the interviewees cover the range, from outspoken media personalities who often appear as talking heads on radio, television, and in print, to quiet, soft-spoken leaders who consciously stay out of the media limelight. Some speak too much, say some of their critics;5 others are not present, and are therefore saying more, claim their opponents. Some are thoughtful and laid-back, even conceding in interviews that ‘I simply do not know’. Others readily offered ‘two or three things’ to virtually any question. Yet across these very different personality types there was, as we will see, a common thread of understanding, of concern, and of genuine fear for the future of universities in South Africa’s fragile democracy.

Experience, of course, also matters in leadership,6 and this is reflected in the interviews with the vice-chancellors. Those with years of experience managing universities either as the principal or in a less senior capacity have encountered student protests and demonstrations before; they are familiar with the repertoires of protest management, from anticipation of the crisis to its immediate containment and the aftermath of the unrest. Newer principals found the crisis situations particularly stressful; while they might have served as senior executives elsewhere, managing unruly protestors was a new challenge that took its toll on them. Experience as a scholar mattered little in a turbulent political environment where reason and logic were not going to win an argument as easily as in the seminar room. And yet none of the principals had ever experienced the intensity and longevity of the 2015–2016 crisis, and it was beginning to wear them all down.

Institutional readiness matters in crisis management.7 Yet none of the university leaders had ever felt it necessary to equip their campuses with the levels of surveillance, equipment, and personnel that the new crisis demanded. Situations had become life-threatening, and the only surprise was that between March 2015 and August 2016 no one had been killed, even as buildings were torched and a petrol bomb was lobbed through one vice-chancellor’s office window.

In September 2016, however, a worker at Wits University was hospitalised and died, apparently after inhaling smoke from a campus fire-extinguisher set off by protestors. The normal security plans, sufficient before 2015, were clearly no longer adequate and, as we shall see, the gap between the pre-crisis state of security and the in-crisis security needs was exploited by the more violent of the student protestors. For the crisis now gripping universities was something very deep, ‘a disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, and its existential core’.8

Organisational ideology also matters in crisis management.9 What and how much a leader can do depends on what environmental conditions allow. UCT, for example, is a liberal university that strongly upholds the right to protest inside an ‘open university’ campus where scholars baulk at the notion of an on-site police presence. The University of Pretoria (UP), by contrast, emerges from a very conservative historical tradition in which certainty and control are primary commitments, and for which security and police are readily summoned onto campus. The older universities are unlike the newer ones, for ‘institutions shaped by history channel and constrain leaders’10 in very different ways.

In the older, former white universities, the polemic of race invariably surfaces in any conflict or protest. By contrast, on the historically black campuses race and ethnicity never feature because it is primary needs that fuel revolt, such as accommodation, transport, and food quality. On some campuses, aggressive student protests are routine and campuses are often closed. In others, the intensity of recent protests is new. And in some universities, the ANC as the ruling party has a firm grip on campus politics and enjoys support all the way up to the governing body; in the former white universities, independence and autonomy from external politics are fundamental commitments. How leaders navigate their universities through these contexts depends very much on complex environmental conditions. Thus effective leadership requires a good dose of strategic knowledge about where the political minefields lie.

Moreover, a university leader’s academic specialty also affects the way he or she leads.11 One vice-chancellor, a medical scientist, described his university at the outset of his tenure as ‘a patient in good health’. Another vice-chancellor, a natural scientist, is bewildered by the lack of order, control, and predictability on his campus. Still another vice-chancellor, a curriculum specialist, sees a knowledge problem: the lack of a deeper, critical education to arm the protestors for thoughtful engagement on the crisis. And yet another vice-chancellor, this one a political scientist, sees the crisis through the competing interests of rival groups, and links what happens on campus to what happens in cabinet, student politics, and party politics. Yet no one disciplinary perspective can fully come to grips with the depth, intensity, and uncertainty of this crisis, as the interviews will reveal.

Beyond these things that matter (personality, experience, preparedness, environment, and academic discipline), all leaders carry similar identities and position themselves in particular ways. How, then, should these leaders be framed? In the business world they would be called CEOs, a tag most vice-chancellors instinctively resist because of their unease with and even criticism of reducing universities to business entities in an age of neoliberalism. If you want to sting a scholarly minded vice-chancellor, tell him or her that a university is nothing more than a corporate organisation in which students are merely clients, where research amounts to maximising subsidy-generating outputs, and in which teaching is nothing more than preparing young people to meet the demands of a market economy. It is for this reason that some universities deliberately frame the principal as ‘the academic leader of the university’, while others, leaning towards the language of the state bureaucracy, are content with ‘the administrative head of the university’. It will become clear from this book that what university leaders actually do is often far removed from the formal duties and responsibilities outlined in the institutional statute required of each higher education institution.

The position and authority of vice-chancellors

But why the focus on the singular leader, the university principal? Surely research and experience show that leadership collectives steer organisations, from schools to companies to government departments. In fact, some of the most exciting advances in leadership studies point to ‘stretched-over leadership’ and ‘distributive leadership’ to make a point that is both empirical (research informed) and normative (desirable).12 No university principal, no matter how confident his or her personality, runs a complex institution alone; that is simply impossible. And yet the focus and target of much of the student protests was against one person, the man or woman in the principal’s office. That is no accident, as I will show later, but a determined strategy to run down the head of the university. It makes sense, therefore, to understand the heart and mind of the chief executive, so to speak, as well as the role of the vice-chancellor in the university as an organisation.

Every vice-chancellor is appointed by and responsible to the council, the highest decision-making body of a South African university. While council is responsible for the governance of the university – such as setting broad policies for the institution – the vice-chancellor is charged with implementing those policies. Perhaps the most important function of a council is the oversight of the finances of the university for which the vice-chancellor is held strictly accountable. For example, council approves the annual budget of a university, and the vice-chancellor and his or her executive team are responsible for the management of that budget within the available resources and constraints of the institution.

The vice-chancellor is also the chairperson of the university senate, which has responsibility for the academic mandate of the institution – such as teaching, research, and curriculum. The chancellor of a university holds a largely ceremonial position and officiates at important functions such as the annual graduation ceremonies.

It is, however, the vice-chancellor alone who carries responsibility for the management of the institution on a day-to-day basis. In the mantra of a healthy university, council governs and management manages the institution. When either of those two functions interferes with the mandate of the other, there is always trouble. What this means is that in the course of a major crisis, a vice-chancellor would inform the council through its chairperson, and even consult when necessary, but is expected to make the critical management decisions as head of the university. On the other hand, if the financial demands of student protestors means going outside the budget parameters set by council, a vice-chancellor can only proceed with the approval of the governing body.

Thus, the running of a university is left to the vice-chancellor and the executive team. In American-speak, the buck stops with the university principal. And as I know from hard experience, when everyone else has left, you are alone, in your office or your home, contemplating the meaning of a difficult day or week of crisis, and planning how to respond to the multiple stakeholders who call the university head to find out what exactly is going on, and going wrong. There is merit, therefore, in a closer, detailed examination of what exactly happens in the lives of university leaders who, in critical moments, are solitary figures alone with their ambitions and emotions inside the turbulence of a never-ending crisis.

Yet what exactly is the positional advantage of the university leader in relation to student protests? In the words of one of the principals interviewed, student leaders speak for students, unions for workers, academic staff associations for lecturers, but who speaks for the university? This is a crucial point. The university leader in a crisis has that job of defending the university – to his bosses, the council, about accountability for operations; to alumni fretting about what is happening to their cherished institution; to major and minor donors concerned about their investments; to government worried about the effective management of the university; to parents concerned about the safety of their children and the costly disruption of their education; to the senate for the integrity of the disrupted academic programme; and to employers of degreed students who constantly complain about the lack of ‘oven-ready’ graduates coming out of universities.

This is complex terrain. For example, not all alumni are the same, and this is more markedly so in the former white universities. There are those more conservative alumni who remember a pristine, white, settled (sic) institution which carried their values, and demand that it stays that way even if some black students are accommodated. But there are others who support the protests and demand a deeper ‘transformation’ that they were denied as students. Then there are the politicians, constantly seeking advantage from a crisis. When a crisis hits, they descend like vultures on the principal’s office. The more radical parties align with the students and put pressure on the university leader. The more liberal parties seek to counter the dominant or more radical parties, and will attack or defend the principal depending on the position taken relative to the ruling party. The more conservative politicians want immediate action taken against revolting staff or students and a restoration of ‘law and order’ at any costs.

In the midst of this noise, the university principal has to remain composed and reasonable, adjusting the main message for varying emphasis from one constituency to the next. The leader should, above all else, be visible.13 His or her face should convey calm and restraint, and yet also empathy and resolve, for ‘in a crisis, everybody watches what you do’.14 This brings enormous pressure to bear on the leader and, whatever happens, he or she has to come across in the media as stable and informed. The leadership task is almost impossible – keeping all the constituencies more or less on board throughout the crisis, even as the media take a position for or against the leader depending on which media house is concerned with the crisis. In other words, the principal speaks for the university as a whole.

What makes the task of the university principal most unenviable is that he or she sits between the impending crisis of diminishing state funding and uncertain revenues from student income. Put bluntly, the government says it has no money and the students insist they will not pay any increases in tuition. Here’s the problem: South Africa is not a well-endowed nation with large numbers of private funders, wealthy families, established trusts, and flourishing foundations which together can pour billions of dollars into higher education (as in the US, for example). If the money does not come from government, it has to come from either tuition or what the locals call third-stream (non-state and non-student sources) income.

Third-stream income is extremely limited in South Africa, except in the case of those few universities that can leverage professional schools such as engineering or nursing to deliver short courses or consultancies to bring in millions of rands in additional income. But even those sources of funding are dependent on the state of the economy, fluctuate wildly from one financial cycle to the next, and hardly provide for the historically black universities at all. The only other viable source is tuition fees, which, for most universities, come not directly from students but through loans and grants made by the government’s massively funded if poorly administered National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). So if the tap of tuition fees is shut off, that crisis lands on the vice-chancellor’s desk, with very damaging consequences.

What, then, does the university principal do? His responsibility, in cold terms, is to keep the lights on. To maintain ageing buildings and facilities, knowing that the failure to do so on schedule will multiply the costs, and risk, in future years. To upgrade and secure computers and software in all the student laboratories. To increase staff remuneration every year or lose talented academics. To pay rates and taxes to the same government that reports, regularly, that there is no money. To fund, out of institutional budgets, the additional costs of more and more students who need funding but cannot find those resources within NSFAS because of the problem of adequacy. That is, while NSFAS funding has increased dramatically, it is still not enough for the growing numbers of students in general, and especially for students without any resources to access and succeed within higher education.

And the responsibilities of the vice-chancellor continue. To fund crises such as when the municipal water taps run dry, as in the small, dilapidated city of Grahamstown, which houses one of the nation’s prestige institutions, Rhodes University. To finance new student demands, such as the additional accommodation, after-hours transport, study locks on campus, extended library hours, and many others. To fund development programmes that increase student graduation rates and staff research performance, since these two sources of revenue, from the subsidy, can make or break an already fragile budget. To keep some funds in reserve to be able to prevent poaching of top scholars, especially black and women academics, by other universities, and to attract new talent into the academy. To create opportunities for international partnerships and exchange for staff and students. To secure the holdings of the library, and update journals and books purchased mainly from overseas and against a declining currency. To improve the security of the campuses and residences against the infiltration of crime and criminal networks onto the relatively resource-rich and self-contained environment called the university.

Every year the seasoned university principal sees the money declining and the demands accumulating and getting more serious, even violent – and the campus crisis is compounded. One year of no fee increases, according to the misinformed decree from the president in 2015, placed almost every university on the edge of collapse. And still the demands increase. The students do not want to pay a fee increase; in fact, they want no fees at all. Outsourced workers want to be made part of the staff establishment immediately – an arrangement that will sink any university if done recklessly. And in the meantime, the cost of everything escalates, from library books to computer software to electricity accounts. Something has to give. As usual in such a stalemate, retrenchments might be the only option. Yet, when institutions resort to offering early retirement to academics, the best ones leave, secure in the knowledge that they can be hired elsewhere. At this point, the university principal starts to panic as the academic future and financial sustainability of the institution begin to look very, very bleak.

The problem is, nobody wants to listen to the university principal. He or she is at once the recalcitrant bureaucrat that stands in the way of the revolution, according to the protesting students, and the only remaining bulwark against institutional collapse, according to those who know from close quarters what is at risk. The pressure is unrelenting and begins to take a toll on the university leader. A populist would succumb to every demand, with the result that the university has to apply to the government for overdraft facilities from the banks or, in utter desperation, pay salaries out of NSFAS funding intended for student fees. Most university principals are not populists, as this book will show, and they understand all too well the fate of post-independence African universities elsewhere under these conditions of incessant demands and declining revenue streams.

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.