As by Fire. Jonathan Jansen
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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 leader of the university hostage, or occupy a major administration 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,