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
