As by Fire. Jonathan Jansen
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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 vice-chancellor the target of sustained personal attacks even as it offered 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.
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