Whatever her failings, however dire her official felonies, there can be no reasonable excuse for the continuing and malicious attacks on Professor Norma Reid Birley, until recently vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand.
The latest of these attacks came in the form of an article published in last weekend’s Sunday Times. Written by six members of the Wits University council, the article purported to be buoyant about the future administration of the university: ‘Wits is bruised — but far from beaten” ran its headline. In case this misled readers into believing the article heralded a closing down of the Reid Birley story, the sub-heading read: ‘Few at Wits who knew the full story doubted that Reid Birley has caused her own departure”.
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Pleading that the university ‘welcomes scrutiny” the article was deceitful. In wiping clean the university council’s slate it used the occasion to slag off Reid Birley yet once again. These pathetic and now repetitious aspersions should be preserved as an example of how academia often accommodates the narrowest and most spiteful of minds. Ostensibly an attempt to reassure a public dismayed by the grotesque circus act that has gone on at Wits, the article took prurient delight in a miserable victory. Reading this article you wonder just how long this wretched woman is to be punished. Under Sharia law they stone women to death. But once the victim’s good and dead, they stop. Not so for Wits council members who went on hurling rocks long after that point. Now comes this ritual slobbering over the corpse.
No one who wasn’t there could possibly know just what went on at Wits during Reid Birley’s tenure. Those details have been ‘finessed” (to flaunt a trendy verb used by the six authors) so as to represent the council and the administrative staff of the university not only as innocent casualties of circumstances beyond their control, but as paragons of decency and forbearance. The six authors certainly don’t hold back when it comes to self-idolatry. Their article stews with phrases like ‘those who had tried to deal with her … had done their utmost to act compassionately”; the humid self-pity of: ‘in the agonising days of necessary silence before the facts became known”; and this lulu: ‘the individual acts of integrity, from staff … are a moving testament to the power of events to exact human courage”.
As an act of simple human decency, the Reid Birley affair should have been done with by now. What purpose is served in regurgitating the same accusations again and again? The authors display some bizarre need for revenge, an egregious whining at Reid Birley’s expense and the running of a relentless campaign of spin-doctoring behind which their own contributions to the mess remain blurred. There was a similar if more personal a self-exculpation, conducted in last weekend’s Sunday Independent, by Wits deputy vice-chancellor Richard Pienaar, who rounded off the slobbering with his own sticky little dance on the Reid Birley grave.
The Wits University council is as culpable an accessory in this dismal affair as ever was Reid Birley. Its flawed selection procedures obtain primary blame. This is acknowledged coyly in some truly pukey lines: ‘But Wits has survived it — not unbruised, certainly: no doubt sadder and also wiser” and ‘the university faces these issues in the way it faces all its problems — squarely and publicly”.
The remainder of the article is devoted to grovelling political correctness, expressed in the suffocating prolix of those who see themselves as both the university’s conscience and its reluctant public executioners. To quote again from the article: ‘Wits has not managed (or sought) to finesse the transition from apartheid to rainbow democracy. It has confronted it — uncertainly, beset by moral and ideological crisis, but with an undeniable measure of vigour and honesty”. Are these ‘rainbow” certifications meant to authorise a regular future recycling of vice-chancellors at Wits, or are they just fallout from a passing deodorant commercial?
The article ends off by reflecting on some vague optimisms, described in baffling cant. ‘Managerialism” and ‘collegiality” are among the ‘challenges” now confronting the Wits council. Quite so. Something needs to supplant the bitchiness and vanity. The article goes on to make predictable obeisances to fashionable politics, at the same time as giving what looks suspiciously like advance notice to its white staff members. The authors wonder how a ‘racially unrepresentative” teaching staff can serve a diverse student body. The answer is perhaps a little too obvious. Universities are supposed to engage the best possible teachers, regardless of their skin colour — that is until, of course, rainbowism intervenes, at which stage transracial bum-creeping supercedes.
The six Wits University council members who wrote the article show little pity for the object of their vilifications: they are, alphabetically, Elizabeth Bradley, Edwin Cameron, Derek Cooper, Carole Lewis, Vhonani Mufamadi and Yasmin Sooka.
However inadequate, no future Wits vice-chancellor could possibly puncture the university’s dignity as efficiently as has its current council. No amount of pomp and intellectual posturing can disguise that sorry truth.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby