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
