Concluding a torrid meeting on Wednesday, the Unisa council voted overwhelmingly that the university would not pay the legal costs its chairperson McCaps Motimele incurred in defending charges of sexual harassment and defamation brought by former Unisa Professor Margaret Orr, well-placed sources say. And it voted unanimously that Motimele should resign from the council.
“Unisa has made a moral point and the council has taken a moral stand,” a senior academic told the Mail & Guardian.
“This can only be good,” another said. “There’s a general mood of optimism and confidence.”
The M&G understands that 16 members of the council voted that Unisa should pay neither Motimele’s legal costs nor the R150000 Orr accepted to settle the case, two members voted for payment, and there were a number of abstentions. The same sources say not a single council member voted in favour of Motimele remaining as chairperson of the council.
Sexual harassment and racist slurs created an intolerable working environment, Orr testified in the Johannesburg High Court on August 2. The court heard that her ordeal began in January 2000 at a council bosberaad, and that Orr’s attempts at reaching an internal resolution failed. A Unisa commission of enquiry failed to get off the ground, Orr testified.
Orr began 2000 as a full professor, a member of the senate, council and Institutional Forum, chairperson of Unisa’s Academic and Professional Staff Association, and the coordinator of the Job Evaluation and Performance Appraisal Project, the court heard. By the end of the year she had tendered her resignation from the university, leaving at the end of February last year after more than 20 years’ service.
This week’s council decision “will provide pause for thought for any institution where a similar complaint of harassment is made”, Orr told the M&G this week. “Institutions will have to deal swiftly and with great moral decisiveness.”
Unisa has been living on “a moral bombsite” for the two-and-a-half years the case has dragged on, Orr says, and the council has brought that to a welcome end.
“But why didn’t they do it two-and-a-half years ago? There were so many opportunities before now to resolve this.”
Motimele responded to the council’s decision in a press statement, saying that “[the decision] completely flies in the face of an agreement I made with the university”, and that he would soon take legal advice on the matter.
“I knew when I took office that I would have to make sacrifices. I did not realise how great the sacrifice would be or the lengths to which those opposed to transformation would go to undermine me.”
A senior academic told the M&G that the council’s decision “gives us hope for the healthy future governance of the university. There’s an enormous test now for [vice-chancellor] Barney Pityana to take Unisa forward. If the council’s decision shows an about-turn in governance practice here, then we have cause for optimism.”
He said the whole episode raises questions the government needs to face about the current model of university councils, 60% of whose members must, by law, be outsiders.
“This works well at some universities, but at others the outsiders take over. Councils are meant to be advisory, not to govern.”