It was chaos at Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s (CPUT) District 6 campus last week with protesting students setting fire to buildings and property, and stoning police officers and vehicles.
On Thursday 11 May, officers of the Public Order Police unit, together with Metro Police and the City’s Law Enforcement officers, utilised offensive measures, including C3 tear gas and rubber bullets, to subdue violent protesting at the campus in Hanover Street.
This followed another incident of violent student protests on Wednesday night (11 May) which saw buildings and cars torched at the tertiary institution’s Bellville campus.
Violent incidents like these have become commonplace at many of South Africa’s 26 public universities.
This and other thorny issues shackling tertiary learning in South Africa were tackled during an “In Conversation” session with Prof Jonathan Jansen and Prof Anwar Mall.
Chronic dysfunction
Titled “Why universities are not exempt from corruption”, the session examined the ways in which some South African universities remain in a state of chronic dysfunction.
Hosted by the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centre for Extra Mural Studies on Wednesday 3 May, the discussion was based on Jansen’s most recent book, Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction In South African Universities.
In the book, Jansen explores the root causes of chronic instability in a sample of universities following investigatory reports and interviews with more than 100 university managers and government officials.
Mall, who is a medical biochemist and an Emeritus Professor of Surgical Research at UCT, opened the session by describing Corrupted as one of the most uncomfortable reads of his life.
“It reads like a crime novel. I actually at times had to stop and remind myself that I was reading something about higher education in this country,” said Mall.
Turn to chapter seven of the book, titled “The University as a Criminal Enterprise”, and you will see exactly what Mall is talking about. Interweaving real-life crime – such as the assassination of Prof Gregory Kamwendo, the dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Zululand, in 2018 – Jansen shows what happens when lecturers, taxi operators, chairs and members of university councils or even vice-chancellors go rogue.
At the heart of this dysfunction, Jansen finds, is “an intense and sometimes deadly competition for resources, especially campuses located in impoverished communities”.
But it is not all doom and gloom. In the last chapter titled “Rethinking and Rebuilding Dysfunctional South African Universities”, Jansen suggests how the tide of corruption can be stemmed by “depoliticising university councils and appointing academics, managers and leaders of integrity with the ability to govern these fragile institutions”.
Excesses of protests
When touching on the subject of student protests during the session, Jansen said that they were part and parcel of what made universities great; that it was one of the ways that students learned.
But, he said, it was important to say these are the conditions within which to protest.
Jansen said while protests were good, universities made the mistake of not knowing how to respond to the excesses of protests.
“Which puts universities in a very dangerous position, because a university is not for the students of your age or mine, the universities are here for our grandchildren.”
Arsenal used by corrupt
Linking it back to the book, Jansen said one of the reasons there were student protests in the dysfunctional universities was because it was part of the arsenal used by corrupt people to keep the university system unstable.
“The more you can keep it unstable, the more you can break down the rules. The more you can break down the rules, the more you can get access to resources. So student protests aren’t always innocent, they aren’t always disconnected from the questions of functionality.”
He said that this was important to realise.
“Because there are too many people in universities, regardless of the ideological position, who think that it is wrong in principle to speak up against protests. If the protest starts to threaten human lives or undermine what a university is there for… Remember, the number of students protesting is a very small percentage of the overall student body.
“So how does one in leadership keep that balance between encouraging this really vital element of democracy on the one hand and at the same time insisting that there are very minimal rules for protesting beyond which you begin to threaten the idea of a university.”
Jansen said in the context of his book, the big issue was how did these institutions or governments become compromised to serve purposes other than what they were originally established for. Explaining what he meant with “depoliticising university councils”, Jansen said you couldn’t really depoliticise anything in South Africa
“My point was that the primary purpose for leadership appointments cannot be politics. The primary purpose is what skills set do you bring to the running of the university. Do we have enough auditors, do we have enough legal people including, do we have enough political representation? But if the political representation is the only thing that you consider, you are down the shoot, let me tell you, in no time.
“Take this university (UCT). This university makes more money from funding for research outside of the university than it gets from the state subsidy. The place has changed. Universities have changed. You are looking at a R90 billion enterprise in South Africa and, therefore, you need people who know how to manage universities, period. That is what I mean with depoliticising. You don’t get that right with politics.”
