Weekly Mail & Guardian editor Anton Harber, a former Wits student, believes the university administration has been too clever for its own good
The University of the Witwatersrand is providing an early-warning barometer of pressures we can expect in the rest of our society.
The campus has often served this role. In the 1970s, it provided hints of the resurgence of anti-apartheid resistance. In the 1980s, it provided valuable signs of the direction that resistance was taking.
In the 1990s, Wits is the testing ground for the ability of liberal institutions to deal with the swift political change that has happened around it.
Can they establish new codes of behaviour for protests appropriate to the liberal democracy we now live in — allowing protests and boycotts, but stopping the kinds of activities that have become common in the 1990s, such as hostage-taking?
And is the growing racial divide on campus inevitable? Can these things be managed in a way that prevents a deterioration into conflicts with an ugly racial tinge? Does an affirmative action programme have to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many of those involved in it?
The campus conflict is being presented by some as a battle to maintain university standards against demands for democratisation – and by others as an attempt to keep at bay the hordes that do things like trashing the campus.
But both of these are crude characterisations. Wits standards, after all, have had their ups and downs. Anyone who has studied there knows a few professors whose tenure can only be explained by a tradition of affirmative action for Oxford and Cambridge graduates.
And nobody but a tiny, and largely irrelevant, minority is demanding the radical democratisation of the campus. The vast majority of students want to get on with their studies in an atmosphere in which they feel they belong and in an institution that deals with the special needs created by our education system.
What is being demanded is change — and no-one is really arguing against it. The fight is over the nature, degree and timing of this change.
So far, the signs are not good. The administration has been a little too clever for its own good: it is playing a strategic game with student activists, outwitting them and isolating militants, rather than ensuring that the process of change is kept on course and is moving ahead despite the day-to-day disruptions and conflicts.
It is reactive, setting up transformation committees when under pressure, but doing little when the pressure is off.
For example, the administration pulled out of a transformation committee last year because students had insulted Deputy Vice-Chancellor June Sinclair and upset her chances of being named to the Constitutional Court.
But it was short-sighted and foolish. They personalised the issue, broke down a negotiations process that it would have been in their interests to continue, further embittering the situation.
Both sides, in fact, have allowed day-to-day disputes to get in the way of long-term change. There is now a push among at least some of the parties to separate long-term discussions about transformation from those structures that deal with short-term disputes.
Why, one needs to ask, is Vice-Chancellor Robert Charlton unable to mobilise the majority of student and staff against the handful of people who are trashing the campus?
It is because the university leadership has been slow to deal with the fact that it has a major problem — a growing number of alienated black students with little respect for a university leadership more at home in the Rand Club than in student hostels.
This alienation — as more black students have to grapple with educational and financial disadvantage — was predictable. What is striking is how half-heartedly and inadequately the university has dealt with it.
The end result is that most students and staff are almost as contemptuous of the university administration as they are of those who are taking hostages and destroying the campus.
The plain truth is that the university has become a model of poor change management — and this in a place that is filled with experts in labour law, conflict management, dispute resolution and education.
It is also, like so many institutions of this kind, hoist by its own liberal petard. The commitment to due process, fair hearings and freedom of association and expression allows those accused of illegal behaviour — now with little to lose and angrier than ever — to remain on campus and continue their activities.
But most worrying of all is that the conflict inevitably takes on a racial tinge. Black students stand on one side, believing they are the victims of a deeply entrenched institutional racism; white staff feel threatened by affirmative action often implemented crudely and even destructively.
While no-one has praise for the university’s handling of the problems, it must also be said that the administration does not have an easy task. With resources squeezed, and salaries lower than any other university, the staff must look with anger at Afrikaans campuses that were given preferential state funding for years and now have much better financial reserves to cope with.
The university is also having to try to solve national problems in relative isolation. The lack of bursary or loan support for needy students is not a problem that Wits can solve on its own. It is a national problem, and a solution is a matter of government policy and action.
Some progress has been made to develop a rational solution to this issue. The government is making available over R200-m for a scheme that will provide loans to students, and allow 40 percent of this loan to be converted to a bursary after successful graduation.
Wits faces a tough task, made worse by the fact that it is run by academics with limited management skills. Which is why those who trashed the campus last Friday are both thugs and fools. There can be little doubt that people who behave this way are thugs; but they are also fools to have given the administration the opportunity to deflect the issues with a new round of finger- pointing.