Andy Duffy
Students and workers at the University of the North (Turfloop) have staged a remarkable coup, barring their academics and management from any role in the appointment of the university’s new vice-chancellor.
Professor Njabulo Ndebele’s five-year tenure expires at the end of this month. A shortlist was presented as a done deal to the university’s senate earlier this week.
The senate, staffed by senior academics and student representatives, would normally play a key role in senior academic and management appointments. It has been told that no academics or management will be allowed to sit in on the selection interviews for Ndebele’s office.
The coup echoes Turfloop’s often turbulent life under the apartheid government – a revolutionary period when the campus turned out radical young leaders such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Mathews Phosa and Patrick Lekota.
Some insiders, however, believe the exceptional power students and workers have now seized leaves the current government little choice but to intervene. Turfloop is thought to be bankrupt, and months from collapse.
One shortlisted academic, Turfloop’s deputy vice-chancellor, Sevit Mashego, has just been sacked as its acting principal.
The university’s Broad Transformation Committee (BTC), which helped compose the shortlist, has replaced him with a lecturer who will run the university until Ndebele’s successor comes in.
A long-running power struggle between some student leaders and management has virtually crippled the campus. The BTC, led by the Student Representative Council (SRC) and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union, believes it must hold sway.
It claims management, led by Ndebele, has stalled transformation and that senior academics – some of whom they have marched off campus – are old guard. Its current proposals include allowing students to stand in elections for faculty heads – positions generally reserved for senior academics.
Ndebele, meanwhile, has relied on his academics and the university’s senate and management to back him up.
The university’s council is supposed to include representatives from the state education, academics and business. It is understood, however, that few parties, apart from the students, attend its meetings.
The procedure the university is following to find Ndebele’s successor suggests the BTC has virtually demolished normal management structures. The senate only discovered who was in the running this week from a general campus memorandum from the council.
Two of the academics shortlisted to succeed Njabulo Ndebele have legal action pending against the university.
The shortlisted candidates – who also include Truth and Reconciliation Commission CEO Biki Minyuku and Turfloop’s dean of management sciences Peter Franks – are to address the campus next Friday.
The council dropped other nominees such as former national education director Itumeleng Mosala (now principal at Technikon North West) and respected University of Zululand academic Herbert Vilakazi at a meeting two weeks ago involving BTC members.
The council has decided that no academics will be allowed to sit in on the interviews, though BTC members will go along as observers. “Council does not seem to envisage any role for the senate in the appointment of the vice-chancellor who, among other things, will be the chairperson of the senate,” registrar Peter Malgas wrote to council chair NP Phaswana earlier this week.
Malgas said it was not clear what process the council was following, and whether it had told the wider campus community. “Transparency and consultation … should be the hallmark of such an appointment process.”
He also questioned the council’s approach to rewriting the university’s act, under which senate was granted most of its one- time authority.
Other documents show that the BTC, sitting in the senate’s chambers one weekend two months ago, was already well at work drafting a new act, using submissions from its constituents.
The council’s shortlist choice is a curious one. The BTC has already judged Mashego incapable of standing in for Ndebele. They also previously opposed Franks’s appointment as a deputy vice-chancellor, apparently on racial grounds, which triggered a still unresolved labour relations battle.
Minyuku is also still suing Turfloop for the retention of his post as registrar. Minyuku left Turfloop without notice in 1996 after 18 months to join the truth commission. He then applied for secondment, which the university refused. Some insiders question Minyuku’s academic credentials.
But the SRC strongly supports Minyuku and has lobbied strenuously for him. The BTC’s documents show Minyuku was the most common name put forward by its constituents.
“He has the management skills and leadership qualities,” says Ishmael Malale, adviser to SRC president Gilbert Kganyago. “He commands absolute university support.”
The fourth name on the shortlist is Professor MO Filani, from a Nigerian university.