The three candidates for the vice- chancellorship made their presentations to capacity crowds. Andy Duffy reports
WITS University stretched the principle of transparency to almost painful lengths this week.
Searching for a successor to vice-chancellor Robert Charlton, the university put three candidates through public presentations and a grilling by students and a 28-strong selection committee.
For the three – Deputy Vice-Chancellor June Sinclair, University of the North Vice- Chancellor Njabulo Ndebele and Sam Nolutshungu, political science professor at the University of Rochester in the United States – it has probably been the most gruelling time of their careers.
The stakes are high. Wits remains at the forefront of tertiary education, but it is suffering from a decline in funding, demoralised staff and students, and claims that it has done little to align itself with the transformation supposedly sweeping across South Africa. The latter issue is blowing up, inflated by groups such as the South African Students’ Congress (Sasco).
To land Charlton’s job, the candidate must secure 60% of the vote from the selection committee, which represents all elements of the university. The decision will be taken on Sunday.
In the end, ability could only, at best, equal political acceptability as the deciding factor. Sinclair offers a business plan, Nolutshungu offers philosophy and bonhomie, and Ndebele offers a commitment to forcing Wits to shed its links with the past.
It is doubtful whether the majority of Wits students were aware they were supposed to be making history. Several couldn’t name the candidates, others didn’t care.
Among the more in touch, Sinclair was seen as a vote for trouble. “She will lead the institution into havoc,” one said. Ndebele was favoured; Nolutshungu was a curiosity. The three candidates, who gave their presentations this week, did little to upset such views.
Sinclair opened, addressing several hundred students, academics and other interested parties crammed into Wits’s Great Hall.
She still suffers from the decision she and the Senate took three years ago to call the Internal Stability Unit (ISU) on to the campus. That alone, for many, is sufficient to rule her out.
Select committee chairman Judge Fikile Bam called on the audience to hear her out. What they heard was Sinclair playing to her strengths: a detailed grasp of the university’s funding problems – which she ran through at length.
“The position is untenable,” she said. “The entire enterprise is being depleted to the point where there can be no further cuts without jeopardising quality.” Sinclair rocked from one foot to the other as she spoke.
The challenge was to address the funding problems and meet the aspirations of the previously dispossessed.
“Achieving that goal will not be easy and no individual will do it. It demands teamwork and it’s up to you to decide whether you want to climb that mountain.”
On paper, such words might seem inspiring. Sinclair’s audience did not appear inspired. The tenuous rapport was strained further when Sinclair linked high academic standards to good behaviour.
Question time contained few surprises. Doubts about her academic credentials were raised (to enthusiastic applause), and her personality. “You argue effectively but it’s not apparent you are able to meet people’s concerns, not by defeating them but by incorporating them,” one student said.
“Are you not an unfortunate personality for a time that needs a leader and not an administrator?”
Sinclair replied: “I display qualities of leadership, compassion and a degree of tolerance that would test anyone.
“My legal training teaches me to argue forensically – in men that is an asset.” The feminist point was made often.
Occasionally, select committee members Helen Suzman and Professor Charles van Onselen caught themselves applauding Sinclair; other committee members shook their heads.
Sinclair’s pay-off line stemmed from the question that had to come.
A Socialist Worker representative brought up the 1993 ISU incident. “Is that your idea of trust, compromise and co-operative governance?”
“I’m delighted to have the opportunity to put the questioner right,” a primed Sinclair responded. The decision was not hers alone, she said: “We had to protect our members against a campaign of violence.” At that point, even journalists were applauding.
“The apartheid police shot at me like they shot at you.” The applause faded to laughter. “I had no other police force to call.”
If Sinclair’s approach was substance over style, Nolutshungu took the opposite tack. He started with a joke: “I’ll talk a little bit about me, a little bit about my talk, and then I’ll talk,” and kept them coming. “I don’t think anyone,” he added, defending his absence from South Africa, “would ever say to our dear president `Look, wallowing at Robben Island for 27 years is poor preparation for running the country.'”
Smooth delivery did not disguise a lack of content. Nolutshungu offered the disclaimer: “I don’t want to be tempted to make a campaign speech.” His arguments instead were intellectually based. Given the opposition, this may have been a mistake.
The pitch began with a description of the irrelevance of the Gold Standard (which was scrapped during the World War I) before Nolutshungu went into the philosophy of autonomy. “A university,” he added, “is nothing if not for all of its members … It’s a sense of community that makes possible a plausible claim to autonomy.”
Occasionally Nolutshungu was interrupted by spurts of applause – it was not always possible to work out why.
There was no further enlightenment through audience questions. Nolutshungu either questioned the question, declined to comment in a round-about manner, or offered non- promises.
“A perception has been created at the campus and abroad,” one student offered, “that the university is in a state of decay … that it is floundering around in a state of rudderless apathy. What would you do, not in flowery philosophical language but in concrete language, to turn this university around?” The question, Nolutshungu’s first, drew enthusiastic audience response.
`The question is too gloomy,” Nolutshungu answered. “I don’t think there’s a general perception that everyone’s down-tools, morose and tearful.” This too drew applause.
“I’ll see what the problems are with the heads of departments and see what they think can be done.” This didn’t draw applause.
Ndebele gave many in the audience what they wanted to hear. Transformation underpinned his speech from start to finish. It was “sterile” to “preach excellence, high standards and bureaucratic efficiency without giving evidence that a new, creative, innovative order is in the making.”
Wits had thrived because it had been a “designated white institution … it owes its achievements to the special legitimising opportunities afforded by a repressive state as well as to the agonies of conscience which nurtured its value systems. Its greatest challenge is to release itself from this bind.”
Wits was living on its past achievements, he said, to growing applause. rather than thinking about what it could achieve. In its current form, Wits’s value as a national resource was questionable.
More than 90% of the speech was spent castigating Wits’s failure to get on with the transformation programme. Ndebele concluded his vision of a reinvented Wits by mentioning new partnerships with the public and private sectors and cost-effective processes.
Whether the presentations changed opinions is doubtful. Maybe the biggest surprise was that the three each played to a capacity crowd For its part, Sasco says it will accept the decision of the selection committee – provided, of course,the winner transforms the campus.