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.
Chapter 1
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
