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
