South African higher education could face a leadership crisis with the opening of four vice-chancellor positions from the end of the year and a struggle to fill them with high-quality appointments.
This comes at a time when institutions are battling to find suitable leaders and managers. The search is under way for four new viceÂchancellors to head the University of Cape Town (UCT), Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), the University of Fort Hare and the University of Venda (Univen).
UCT’s Professor Njabulo Ndebele, NMMU’s Dr Rolf Stumpf and Fort Hare’s Professor Derrick Swartz will not be renewing their contracts. Stumpf and Swartz will leave at the end of the year, while Ndebele will leave next year. At Univen, the position of viceÂchancellor has been vacant since January 2006, following Professor Muxe Nkondo’s departure.
Dr Jim Leatt, acting vice-chancellor of Univen since August 2005, said the council would decide on Friday, June 8 whether to extend the mandate and search for a suitable candidate outside South Africa. Leatt said there was a “leadership crisis” in higher education.
“I know of three to four institutions that struggled to appoint deputy vice-chancellors. There is a dearth of leadership in the sector, which is a function of the skills crisis. Good people are snapped up by the government and the private sector. Higher education is no different. We are all struggling to appoint the right people,” Leatt said.
Institutions use headhunting agencies to search abroad, but the appointment of foreigners has been unsuccessful, with appointees often leaving shortly after taking up positions.
The most public case is the departure of Professor Norma Reid Birley from the University of the Witwatersrand not even halfway into her viceÂchancellor’s term. Furthermore, American Professor Timothy Reagan left the university less than a year after being appointed dean of humanities. And Indian national Professor Mukul Gupta left in April last year, five months into his term as director of the Wits Business School, incurring costs.
Whether institutions select South Africans or foreigners, the appointments could produce a different — new and younger — generation of leaders at South African higher education institutions. However, in recent years leaders have been “recycled”, moving from one institution to the next as positions open up.
Appointments into the current vacancies could bring even greater racial and particularly gender diversity to the top positions, which have undergone transformation following recent selections.
Newcomers include Professor Russel Botman (Stellenbosch University), Professor Irene Moutlana (Vaal University of Technology) and Professor Roy du Pré, who has been offered the job at the Durban University of Technology, but the terms are being negotiated.
Dr Beverley Thaver, convener of the master’s in higher education at the University of the Western Cape, says: “Importantly, the appointments of VCs is beginning to reflect the diversity of our democracy and the political transformation process.”
But, says Thaver, one should note that as individuals they are entering a domain in which the traditional professorial power base continues to control and direct the form that the knowledge project assumes in South Africa. She says several of the institutions’ structures (such as selection committees and senates) continue to function with mandates that are not aligned always with the democratic imperative.
Thaver says it “would be interesting to see how they navigate their way around the different degrees of authority. I suppose a key challenge is their ability to mobilise inside institutions in such a way that enables a shift from symbolic to more substantive changes in the academy.”
University councils can, however, prejudice appointments: there are controversies about processes that were followed in some recent appointments, including the writing of advertisements to include or exclude certain candidates deliberately.
Dr Ihron Rensburg, vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, entered the race for the position late, while he was the interim chairÂperson of the council (after the merger between RAU and Technikon Witwatersrand). At Walter Sisulu University Professor Marcus Balintulo, who was the interim vice-chancellor at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, was appointed last year despite being older than the university’s retirement age of 60.
Similarly, there are concerns about internal conflicts and outside political pressure to prevent or encourage certain appointments. Apparently there is pressure from the Eastern Cape provincial legislature on Fort Hare to appoint a current deputy vice-chancellor, who had close links to the provincial government, before leaving under a cloud, to the position of vice-chancellor.
Outgoing vice-chancellor at Fort Hare Swartz is rumoured to be earmarked as the successor of Stumpf at NMMU. But Swartz says that rumours have been doing the rounds for the past two years and he continually receives offers of leadership positions from institutions. He says he has taken no decision on his future career.