How does a university fall apart? Our research points to a simple and consistent finding: when the leadership of an institution violates its own rules with respect to academic governance. This is the single most important threat to the academic standing and reputation of what until now has been the continent’s leading research university. Of course, I am talking about the troubling events at the University of Cape Town over the past few weeks.
Let’s make this simple by asking two questions of the UCT crisis. First, where on earth have you heard of two leading members of council joining a vote on a decision about who should investigate themselves? There are basic rules against that kind of recklessness, including something called conflict of interests. That common rule is embedded in any university’s procedures for academic governance.
Second, in what world does a member of council (the governance body of a higher education institution) launch an attack on a senate (the highest academic authority of a university) for doing its work, for example contemplating senior academic appointments? Here is another rule of academic governance being violated — not staying in your lane. The council is not the senate, the management is not the council, the SRC is not operations.
I hear a lot of mumbling these days among academics across the country that this is the sort of collapse of academic governance one used to see only at the historically disadvantaged institutions where the managerial and leadership capacity to run a university is limited. That if this was a rural black university the minister would already have pounced with an investigation. That what prevents accountability is the race factor — you cannot act or be seen to be acting against black African women.
The council is split down the middle on how to investigate themselves, or rather, how to deflect that investigation to a senate inquiry instead. But as the distinguished law firm, Webber Wentzel, which represents UCT’s Academics Union, wrote in a scathing letter of demand to the university’s council earlier this week: The council chair’s letter on the matter “underscores and perpetuates the bias and conflict of interest in circumstances where a party under investigation is able to select the process and timing of investigation, the identity of the investigator and instruct the investigator. This is contrary to legislation, the common law, the UCT statute and the UCT’s conflict of interest policy.” As simple and disturbing as that.
Race loomed large in the split council decision. Those defending black leadership regardless of the issues at stake, and those concerned about violations of good academic governance. The bitter criticism I encountered on social media had nothing to do with right or wrong but with random insults such as “tell your masters ...” or “he went over to the other side”. It would be easier, I suppose, if I simply joined these ethnic chauvinists or what we used to call tribalists.
How did we reach this point as South Africans that we cannot adjudicate an issue based simply on the principle whether something is right or wrong? Surely senior university people should be mature and insightful enough to make a call on the violation of academic rules, recognising that the failure to do so could put a major institution in a downward spiral of dysfunction? And then that most elementary of leadership blunders on the part of the university authorities: when an alleged lie leaks, don’t deal with the lie, find the leak!
For those paying attention, there is a similar and equally dangerous shift in public values under way that threatens to weaken our constitutional democracy. When former president Jacob Zuma this week praised the July 2021 rioters who brought parts of this country to a standstill, he was asking us to follow a new set of public values — where wrong is right and bad is good. Another example was the KZN strongman taking journalist Karyn Maughan to court for doing her job; she cited Zuma’s doctor’s letter from a court filing once it became public knowledge. Again, not unlike Mr Trump on the other side of the Atlantic upending democratic norms through the cult of personality.
That is what is at stake at UCT. In a way, it is less important who is right or wrong in the ongoing squabbles at this eminent Cape Town university. It is that the academic values that have steered the institution for more than 100 years, through a racist past and into a democratic future, are now under threat.
Why do academic values matter in a university? Because that is our only currency. Academic values guide us in decisions about appointing the best professors, selecting the most talented students, and delivering knowledge to the most marginalised communities around us. And at the heart of the academic values of a university is the relentless search for truth which we uphold, or should uphold, in the governance of higher education institutions.
And when those academic values are sacrificed because of racial calculations (it is better not to rock the boat because black people are in charge) or tribal loyalties (it is important to stand together as black people regardless of right or wrong), then I see no future for this great institution.