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
