Etienne Mureinik, one of the academics at the heart of the campus conflict, asks what has gone wrong with the transformation of Wits University
A rush of words has flowed these last few months to censure Wits for not transforming fast enough. Frighteningly little of it has found it necessary to define `transformation’. Confusion about what transformation is makes it easy to understand contention at Wits as a struggle between those who are for transformation and those who are against. In fact, no significant Wits constituency opposes transformation. The real contest is not for or against transformation, but between two competing visions of
The first vision says that the transition South Africans are undergoing is a democratic revolution. Among the central ideals of that revolution are equality and
Accountability requires all public institutions to put themselves under close review, and ask how well they are serving South Africa’s people. Equality requires them, during that self-scrutiny, to ask themselves whether they truly serve all communities equally. For an institution like Wits, that mainly means asking itself whether it is doing enough to reverse the effects of apartheid education. Wits must ask itself whether its admissions practices do enough to recruit black students with the potential, despite the consequences of deprived schooling, to flourish at university; and whether its teaching methods, academic development facilities and supportive services do enough to realise that potential. It must ask itself, when it seeks to recruit black lecturers, whether it is doing enough to compete with wealthy public and private employers for the talent in the graduate pool severely depleted by the legacy of apartheid. Wits must ask itself whether it is teaching capabilities useful equally to all communities, whether its research contribution benefits the nation as a whole or merely a portion of it, and whether its curricula pay sufficient attention to the experience and cultural contribution of all communities. This kind of transformation generates stronger affirmative action programmes to broaden access to university education, imaginative teaching methods, better student services, high school mentoring schemes, postgraduate fellowship programmes to augment the pool from which black staff can be recruited, community-oriented research, and new courses. In these areas, far from being resistant to change, Wits is often at the frontiers of innovation, and has been for years. The second vision of transformation, although it filches the language of democratic revolution, at heart yearns for a nationalist revolution — the displacement of Afrikaner predominance with African predominance. This vision sees the Nineties as Africans’ answer to the Fifties. In the Fifties, Afrikaner nationalists sought ethnic pre-eminence in almost every public institution in the country — the government itself, the police, the post office, the railways. Contemporary nationalists — a term that can fairly be applied to people with various party affiliations — see the project of social transformation in the same way. So much so that they sometimes lapse into calling the ethnic domination programme of the Fifties `affirmative action’, tacitly invoking it as a model for their own programmes. To the new nationalists, in various political homes, the goal now is nothing so principled as the democratic ideal of making public institutions responsive to all South Africans equally. Their goal is simply to put any institution of importance under African control. The nationalist vision of the transformation of Wits is informed by nothing more subtle than this. To the nationalists, the project is simple — it is immediately to replace large numbers of professors and lecturers and senior executives with Africans. This version of transformation is perhaps epitomised by the student who complained that the Wits deans of faculties were `not yet transformed’. Clearly, what he had in mind was not some gentle form of re-education. It was closer to ethnic cleansing. The new nationalists forget that the pool of candidates from which to recruit black professors, lecturers and executives has been impoverished by the legacy of apartheid education, and recently drained further by well-financed government and private sector affirmative action recruitment drives. And when you remind them, they automatically call you a racist. So the consequence of the new nationalists’ crass race replacement programmes would be ruinous. And none would suffer more from that ruin than the ever increasing proportions of black students, many of whom are admitted under affirmative action programmes, and consequently in great need of close teaching support. But whence the power of this raw nationalist vision of transformation? Any community which hopes for quality education for itself, and its children, has to choose the principled, democratic vision over the educational suicide of the nationalist vision. So what are the political mechanisms which give the nationalist vision so much
The first mechanism is the capacity of nationalist students to command a disproportionate share of the student voice in transformation committees and processes. A nationalist goal is often presented as a `student demand’, but most students plainly do not share it. This disproportionate voice is a consequence partly of abysmal turnouts in student elections, and partly of the political clout that tacit government endorsement gives to nationalist students. Next, the nationalist students generally make common cause with the university workers. Student influence within the student-worker coalition is enhanced by the fact that the workers are led by unions engaged in several labour sectors, and are not focused on the university as intently as students are. Finally, the student nationalists tend to make common cause with black separatist academic and administrative staff members. Under the banner of race solidarity, an alliance emerges in which black staff members bring to bear a perspective determined much more by their racial affiliation than by their identity as teachers, researchers or administrators. The net result of all this is that the current leadership of Wits finds itself negotiating the future of a national research and teaching treasure with a political bloc whose understanding of a university is dominated by the perspective of young nationalists — whose outlook is sharply coloured by their understandable but destructive frustration and anger. This, then, is how the transformation process itself helps give the nationalist vision of transformation so much more currency than is warranted by its self-defeating
Public accountability means that Wits must engage with the communities it serves about its future shape. That requires it to talk to leaders representative of government, of civil society, of the sectors that employ Wits graduates, and so on. Instead, it has been talking mainly to a youth movement, with a youth movement’s understanding of research, of teaching, of the fragility of a university, and of its importance to national reconstruction. None of this means that nationalist students should not have a voice in the process. It means only that their voice should not drown out all others. This conversation must be made more inclusive.