Philippa Garson finds a new mood on the formerly militant Turfloop campus — students are tired of politics; now they just want degrees
WHEN the Students Christian Movement (SCM) came to power in last year’s SRC elections at the University of the North (Turfloop), it seemed that the wheel had turned full circle.
Turfloop was traditionally the country’s “radical university”, the honeypot of activism attracting a permanent buzz of security force attention while educating and providing a political training ground for some of the country’s past and current leading political players — including Cyril Ramaphosa, Matthews Phosa, Terror Lekota, Ngoako Ramatlhodi and the bulk of Northern Province’s government officials. Now it has moved beyond the fiery resistance that made it famous and is experiencing a calm, conservative, heads- down mood on campus.
Many students on the campus these days balk at the word “politics”. They’ve had enough of it, they want degrees and jobs.
Turfloop, in its usual pioneering and paradoxical way (given its geographic isolation from the country’s major urban centres), is articulating a post-liberation mood way ahead of some of the other impoverished universities. This despite the fact that grievances around lack of accommodation, scarce teaching resources and inability to pay fees are as real as ever, if not far more acute than on many other campuses.
Given that Turfloop’s 14 500 students literally cram into residence halls and classrooms designed for a maximum of 6 000 students, that they crouch at the doors of lecture halls for lack of space inside, queue interminably for morning showers and have no entertainment facilities and nowhere else — except Pietersburg, 33km away — to go to, one would imagine Turfloop, with its rough tradition of resistance, would provide a fertile ground for expression of a disillusioned young mass clamouring for a stake in higher education.
Instead, walking quickly from one lecture to another, umbrellas up in the scorching platteland sun, students exude a mood of industrious singlemindedness. And “grievance” is not in the vocabulary of the earnest SCM members who dominate the SRC. Ask them about “transformation” and they stare blankly. Their buzzwords are “discipline”, “academic success” and “economic empowerment”.
Whether students simply grew tired of rumours of corruption among the former SRC, dominated by the South African Students’ Congress, and whether a low poll (10 percent) mitigates against drawing any major conclusions around the SCM’s victory, the fact remains that the voice of Christian moderation and clean-cut “no nonsense” is all-pervasive at “Turf” these days.
Certainly SRC president Shavhani Radzilani, who personifies that process in his own, internal transformation from rural activist- on-the-run to straightlaced law student, attributes the SCM’s success, coupled with the low student poll, to changing times.
“There is a move on campus to concentrate on academic rather than political activities. We have reached another stage in politics. We have gone through a most problematic time, having been ruled by a minority government which this university played an immense role in removing. But now students’ new fight is for academic excellence.”
Vice-chancellor Njabulo Ndebele agrees that Turfloop is articulating a new mood. “I think the country as a whole is moving away from the rhetoric of demand towards the imperatives of delivery and that calls for a different kind of approach, that puts emphasis on the identification of goals, the setting up of tasks, getting people trained to do things rather than simply talking about them. This has probably come quicker to us at Turfloop precisely because the university has gone through and played a major role in the phase of contestation prior to this.”
But Ndebele, who was hauled into the university stadium in September last year to hear students’ grievances against him amid additional chaos caused by striking university service staff, is keenly aware that peace rests on a knife edge on under-resourced, rugged campuses like Turf.
He talks of the “relative” calm at Turfloop which, he says, should not be interpreted as “an absence of radical ideas”, but a “practical search for solutions”.
“The era of talking about transformation, debating it, is past. We are talking of concretising it, of professionalising the university environment and getting the capacity to do the things we’ve set ourselves to do.”
The first stage of transformation, gaining student representation on council and senate, has long since been won. Although not yet legislated, these changes were made long before some other universities even acknowledged the need.
The second, more difficult, stage is about the real transformation of the institution itself, as Ndebele said when he took office nearly three years ago, from a “bush college” into a centre of excellence and regional response to the Northern Province.
That goal is still far off, but Ndebele, who students chastised for “forsaking the university” when he was a candidate for vice- chancellorship at the University of Cape Town last year, is up against a lot.
For all its special place in the country’s history, symbolised by the fact that President Nelson Mandela himself is chancellor, a rather sad sense of isolation pervades the university. Whereas that very isolation once fed and nurtured student resistance, it now exists as a real handicap to its development.
The university struggles to attract senior academic staff to its dusty, out-of-the-way premises, and its uncompetitive salary packages and stressed teaching conditions — with on average one lecturer to 100 students and sometimes 1 000 students in a lecture hall — add yet further deterrents.
A large proportion of its staff are still “old guard” academics, with about 60% of its academic staff black, and all its students “pure black”, as one student put it.
The students, largely rural, are among the country’s poorest and educationally ill- equipped for university, and experience a high failure rate. They are crowded into the arts faculties and under-enrolled in the fields of agriculture, natural sciences, economics and health.
The university has a student debt of R81- million, a backlog in its capital building programmes of R650-million, and needs just about everything: new libraries, classrooms, residences (many students live in caravans and shacks), offices and sports facilities. Added to this, it has two satellite campuses, Giyani (95km away) and QwaQwa (about 600km away), whose problems it must also take on. Recently, QwaQwa has been the scene of unrest, with lecturers and students mobilising against the campus management.
While Turfloop, built in 1959, managed to steer clear of a “homeland” identity, it could not quite escape an ethnic responsibility and was given QwaQwa, built in 1982, to administer — despite the fact that that campus is far closer to the University of the Orange Free State and University of Natal.
While Giyani will continue to fall under Turfloop’s auspices, the future of QwaQwa is to be decided by the National Commission on Higher Education, and Turfloop’s Council, chaired by Minister of Water Affairs Kader Asmal, has put forward four possible options on its future — the most likely being an amalgamation with UOFS.
The busy construction taking place hints at expansion and change: buildings are being painted, a brand new adminisration block, drawing rumbles from some students as a low- level priority for the university, is almost complete, and projects in the pipeline are many: a water and sanitation school, the country’s first, is to open shortly.
Newly appointed executive director of student affairs Nozipho Kwenaite, formerly at the University of the Western Cape, talks of student development programmes and other measures to “address the lack of vibrancy of student life here”. A sports complex is to be built, as well as entertainment facilities and bars, which currently exist in an informal capacity inside the residences. A new residence, more oriented to community living than the featureless, hostel-like blocks with official names like “Madiba Heights” and “Dr Ribeiro” is to be built.
The university has also pioneered a joint educational venture — Edupark — where several tertiary institutions will share resources in Pietersburg and where the university’s new business school will be housed.
Ndebele has born the brunt of student criticism for not being accessible to them, for spending too much time abroad, “issuing circulars” instead of governing, and relying too much on consultants and advisers. Those close to him say he is not afraid to delegate, has rooted out corruption in the administration, and works a 15-hour day.
He is keenly aware of the criticisms. “I need to give myself more time to meet with students and staff in informal ways. I have not been able to do that as often as I would like.” He believes he has an important public affairs role to play, which implies the need for “an administration that can take care of the day- to-day running without the vice-chancellor being there”.
Ndebele has indeed concentrated his energies on laying the foundations for real change in tightening up a formerly incompetent administration, introducing sorely needed financial controls, canvassing funds from abroad and creating links with overseas universities.
Whereas Turfloop was once regarded by the Tertiary Education Fund of South Africa (Tefsa) as the “weakest link” in terms of its handling of financial aid to its students, Ndebele’s efforts in cleaning up its act, hiring consultants and new staff, have been successful. Tefsa executive director Roy Jackson describes the university’s performance as “way above average”, ranking with Wits University and the University of Cape Town.
All eight faculties have produced draft plans to revamp themselves into more democratically run entities with more appropriate, focused curricula. Plans are afoot to develop sorely lacking staff development programmes and student support systems.
As Ndebele, an acclaimed writer of fiction, says: “We have a lot of work to do.” Just how long he will resist the advances of other leading institutions remains to be seen. The vice-chancellorship of Wits University becomes vacant at the end of 1997 and rumours abound that Ndebele is being eyed for the post.
Though emphasising his “constitutional right to apply for jobs wherever I like,” he says he has “not thought about moving. My wish is to do the best possible job here and I still have two-and-a-half years to go.”