He first experienced a city at the age of 19, learned to speak English at 22, and went abroad (and saw TV) for the first time at 23. Now, at the age of 55, Chris Brink is poised to vacate the vice-chancellorship of Stellenbosch University and take up the equivalent position at Newcastle University in north-east England.
South African academe has been buzzing with speculation since Brink announced his decision last month. Did the ”heat and emotion” — Brink’s phrase — generated by the language debate at Stellenbosch eventually impose too great a toll on him? And, if so, what does this suggest about South Africa’s ability and willingness to cultivate and retain high-quality tertiary leaders?
Brink’s trajectory has propelled him from a small-town Afrikaner upbringing in Upington to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan academic career spanning several countries. He is a logician by training, with a formidable academic record. After completing a BSc in maths and computer science at Rand Afrikaans University in 1972, he moved to Rhodes, where in three years he completed a first-class BSc (Honours) in maths, an MSc, also in maths, and an MA in philosophy. His master’s degrees were awarded with distinction.
He completed his PhD in algebraic logic at Cambridge University in 1978; and, 14 years later, notched up another doctorate, an interdisciplinary DPhil from RAU. He has held lecturing posts at Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town, and was for three years provice-chancellor at the University of Wollongong in Australia, before taking up Stellenbosch’s top post in 2002.
Brink told the Mail & Guardian: ”I grew up without idols, without conscious role models, and without academic mentors. The main recollection I have is a slow and cumulative process of learning to figure things out for myself.”
Such flinty self-sufficiency would soon be pressed into service as Stellenbosch vice-chancellor. At the heart of the storm that broke shortly after he took office was the university’s newly adopted policy of teaching in both Afrikaans and English.
For conservatives, this held the threat that Afrikaans would be swamped and marginalised: Stellenbosch’s mission, in this view, was to preserve and strengthen an Afrikaner identity under siege since 1994.
Brink gave one measure of the heat generated when he noted in his annual report last year that between 2002 and 2005 Die Burger published more than 200 letters on Stellenbosch, the ”majority of them expressing a negative view of whatever was happening at the university”.
Given the flames of emotive rhetoric, Brink’s skills as a logician proved invaluable. In May he wrote to the senate objecting to proposals by the university’s convocation that both Afrikaans and English proficiency be compulsory for all students and staff.
The proposals amounted, Brink wrote, to forcing non-Afrikaners to learn Afrikaans. If adopted, ”the academic business of the university, as well as our shape and size, would be put at risk in a number of ways”.
He coolly outlined seven major consequences — including ”thousands of postgraduate students disappearing from our campus”, the withdrawal of top academics and several undergraduate programmes, and the loss of international accreditations, such as those enjoyed by the university’s business school.
”The probability,” he concluded, ”is that we would shrink to an institution offering not much more than undergraduate teaching in a limited number of standard disciplines, and a few ad hoc postgraduate and research initiatives”. Faced with this prospect of near annihilation, the senate voted against the proposals in June.
Now Brink suggests some reasons for the heat of the language debate — ”idealism, concerns about language loss, language activism, fear of loss of identity, ignorance of the realities of higher education, and simply clinging to the emotional safety blanket of a romanticised Stellenbosch image”.
Yet he refuses to fuel speculation that the storm took too great a toll: ”There is no single reason why I decided to move on.” He concedes that there is ”a connection between my decision and the language debate”, but insists it was no more significant than other factors — including the feeling that ”I have done my bit” in putting Stellenbosch on a path of growing academic achievement, and that the university now needs a ”consolidator”.
He is under no illusion that the issue of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch has been settled, however — ”it will still be with us five years, 10 years, a generation from now”.
And where will Brink and his family be? The Newcastle appointment is open-ended, ”until I choose to retire … The odds are we’ll be back some time. Besides, we plan to keep our house in Stellenbosch.”