Fort Hare lecturer sacked

A senior academic at the University of Fort Hare has been summarily dismissed following a disciplinary inquiry into criticisms levelled against the university’s management in his lectures, in internal correspondence, at an academic conference and to the media.

Dieter Welz, a senior lecturer in law at the university’s East London campus, received written notification on Tuesday that he had been dismissed with immediate effect. He was told that his request for an appeal hearing against the findings had been rejected.

‘The internal process is now over,” Welz told the Mail & Guardian this week. He will challenge his dismissal.

In January, the dean of law, Patrick Osode, wrote to Welz detailing the charges that would form the basis of a disciplinary inquiry. There were 16 accusations against Welz that amounted to misconduct, Osode wrote.

One of the charges was that during Welz’s lectures on administrative law from August to October last year he described the university’s management as ‘incompetent” and engaged in ‘unplanned financial expenditures”. Osode accused Welz of ‘undermining [Osode] by distributing defamatory material and false material about him to all staff of the law faculty via [an] email message of January 11 2007”.

Another charged him with ‘maligning the university by making unwarranted/unjustifiable and disparaging remarks about the law faculty” during an interview with the Daily Dispatch in November.

Welz told the M&G that three interrelated issues last year had made him a target of the university’s management. One was his criticism of the ‘university’s incompetence on basic service delivery”. These included ‘bungling exam results, timetable problems resulting in venues being unavailable for lectures and overall inadequate resources for students on the East London campus”. He thought it appropriate to raise these problems in his lectures on administrative law.

The second issue related to a formal grievance he laid against a secretary in the law faculty.

The third involved the resignation of his partner, Vocksie Vokwana, in November last year from her position as head of the university’s East London campus. At the time, she had criticised the management’s leadership style.

These issues resulted in the management ‘deciding to go after me”, Welz said. But, Osode said, ‘the suggestion that the disciplinary proceedings were intended to persecute Welz for [Vokwana’s] resignation is worthy only of contempt”.

When the disciplinary hearings began in February, Welz argued that the disciplinary code under which he had been charged came from the University of Fort Hare Act of 1969 — that is, from apartheid legislation that had since been repealed. In his judgement on this point, the presiding officer, Craig Kirchmann, ‘accepted that it would not be permissible to make reference to a document [code] that was no longer of force and effect”.

Kirchmann ruled ‘that it would be permissible to put charges to [Welz] for so long as those charges were not inconsistent with the Labour Relations Act”. As a result, the charges remained essentially as they were first framed, but with references to the apartheid-era code removed.

Testifying for Welz, Simon Delaney, an attorney at the Freedom of Expression Institute, argued that ‘there can be no doubt that the provisions of the [code] are an infringement of Dr Welz’s constitutional right to freedom of expression — The three provisions [under which Welz was charged] cast too wide a net in their attempt to ensure the neutrality and loyalty of the university employees by preventing all employees from publicly commenting in a manner adverse to the administration of their relevant departments, no matter in what capacity such comment is made.”

He argued that ‘the definitions of ‘misconduct’ [in the university code] are moreover vague, overbroad and disproportionate and would not pass the test of legislative certainty even under the pre-Constitutional dispensation. In the circumstances it is submitted that the [code is] unconstitutional and therefore invalid.”

Kirchmann’s judgement records, however, that he ‘invited [Welz] to indicate which of the charges he faced would be offensive in a democratic society” and that Welz ‘was unable to do so. Accordingly, I ruled that the charges stood to be amended by mere deletion of the reference to the particular clauses of the old disciplinary code.”

He found Welz guilty on three of the 16 original counts. Two of these involved misrepresenting aspects of Osode’s work performance via emails to staff and one concerned ‘giving a false/incorrect account” to the media of the university’s handling of Welz’s complaint about the law faculty secretary. He recommended summary dismissal on each of the three counts.