A fine balance

Transcendental meditation does not appear in any government guidelines for handling tertiary mergers, but it seems to work for University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor Ihron Rensburg.

A year after taking the reins at one of South Africa’s largest universities, Rensburg appears unfazed by the complexities of an especially volatile merger. He keeps his balance by spending at least half an hour daily in meditation, which he strongly recommends to colleagues.

Balance is needed. In January 2004, the predominantly white and historically conservative Rand Afrikaans University incorporated Vista University’s wholly black Soweto and East Rand campuses. A year later it merged with the mostly black Technikon Witwatersrand.

The national working group on higher education recommended in 2001 that RAU remain separate, but Cabinet decided differently, sending it into collective shock. RAU’s normally cautious leadership publicly denounced the plan, saying academic standards would plummet.

But the dire predictions have largely failed to materialise, and for this insiders give Rensburg much credit. He has spent his first year engaging staff on what he calls ‘the mixed bag” of inherited cultural, social and academic differences, focusing, he says, on the central question of what a university is. ‘That has begun to gather and unite people around notions of our core business — knowledge production, great teaching, and so on.”

Initially a pharmacist in Port Elizabeth’s New Brighton township, Rensburg has gained extensive experience in negotiating political and educational volatility. At 25, he became general secretary of the National Education Crisis Committee, the United Democratic Front’s education arm.

The year before, in 1985, the ANC had issued a call for South Africa to be made ungovernable. Rensburg recalls that ‘the response from school and university students was that public education must also be made unworkable.

‘The UDF said it was essential to intervene, to encourage a return to school and to engage in debate with the apartheid government — basically about free public schooling.”

There were ‘genuine meetings” with apartheid education officials, he says, ‘but then the carpet was pulled out from under their feet, with a shift from dialogue to a state of emergency whose tactic was: take out the leaders”.

Rensburg was imprisoned several times, for periods ranging from 14 days to three years, which he recalls with a lack of rancour his religious beliefs may partly explain. He is council chair of the Bethesda Methodist Mission in Berea, Johannesburg, and is proud that the church ‘is now very strong, attracting poor people from the inner city and the middle classes”.

His university appointment was controversial, mainly because he was chair of the council responsible for appointing vice-chancellors. He did not resign from the council, merely recusing himself from its deliberations on the post.

He would not act differently now, he insists. ‘It’s water under the bridge, and I’m convinced the council wasn’t influenced by my presence in the background. It was happy there was no conflict of interest.”

Also contentious was the fact that Rensburg is not a professional academic. He has a PhD, from America’s Stanford University, but his CV lists no scholarly publications.

Surprisingly, he does not fiercely defend managerial over academic criteria. ‘If we pursue managerialism as an end, we’ll be able to handle balance sheets and so on, but higher education — the academic enterprise — will lose its soul. We’ll just cut programmes that don’t contribute to the bottom line.”

The balance he advocates was evident in his inaugural lecture in February, when the university awarded him an honorary professorship. The university is not ‘a utilitarian slot machine solely serving the economy through the highly skilled graduates that it helps to produce”, he said, but also not ‘the enchanting ivory tower to which arch-addicts of an ends-only academic freedom retreat from time to time, there to pontificate on the intrusions of the barbarians”.

But Rensburg must take some responsibility for a government that all too often appears to see institutions as ‘utilitarian slot machines” — he was deputy director general in the national education department from 1995 to 2001, a period he describes as ‘the grand period of policymaking”.

Rensburg was one of the chief policy drivers, and while talking enthusiastically about the ‘hopefulness and aspirational nature” of the policy intitiatives, he acknowledges that ‘we perhaps didn’t look at detail enough … Policy announced isn’t policy in practice.”

Detail is now pressing down on one policymaking result — his institution, which has 3 500 staff and 40 000 students spread over five campuses.

Talking of the Soweto and East Rand campuses, he admits: ‘We haven’t yet re-imagined them as new, non-racial campuses of the new South Africa.” Plenty of material here for meditation.