When Professor Chris Brink left as vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Stellenbosch last year, South Africa lost one of the last of the scholar-leaders to head a national university. The scholar-leader, still the prize appointment in leading research universities in much of the world, has been displaced by the manager-politician.
The scholar-leader is one who has progressed through the ranks of the academy, leading as head of department or dean or academic vice- rector; it is a person who has established a formidable track-record of personal scholarship evidenced in superior research ratings, ground-breaking scholarly books and leadership of learned societies in the rest of the world. It is a person who by force of scholarly example and credibility of academic work has won the trust of those who constitute the heart of the university — the academics and scholars.
The manager-leader may or may not have come through the ranks of the academy. It could be a businessman, a politician, a former activist, a populist, a racial or ethnic preference, or even an equity candidate within a senior academic position who has not achieved the kind of scholarly credentials of the scholar-leader. It is a person whose profile is attractive to the new and flat constituency-based model that governs the university — students, trade unions, business leaders, political appointees and community representatives. In this array of new governors, the academic voice becomes simply one of many decision-makers, and not the most important one in an academy appointment.
What is important in this change of preference from scholar-leader to political manager is that it reveals a fundamental shift in academic values in the post-1994 university. The political manager is appointed to keep the lid on things, to hold constituencies together, to manage precarious bottom-lines, to ensure that things “tick over” managerially. And an astute political manager can do this. What is lost, though, is the academic drive, the academic understanding, the academic leadership and the academic instincts that keep universities what they are — the intellectual centres of research in a competitive and global knowledge economy. The system-wide effects of this shift in values, especially when the academic pedigree of the South African university is already fragile, are nothing short of disastrous.
This fundamental tussle over the nature of university leadership in the 21st century — the distinguished scholar with managerial and leadership qualities versus the corporate manager with some academic insights and sensitivities — is, of course, not a South African distinction. Some well-known universities in other parts of the world are forced to engage the same debates as the tide of managerialism overwhelms the academic estate.
Still, the leading universities value academic capital in their leadership more than they do corporate or political values, understanding that traditional managerial and administrative competences are easily recruited and best accommodated at second- and third-tier leadership appointments, where technical talent is drawn from the external worlds of business, accounting, auditing and human resource management. But for such institutions the heart of the enterprise is, at its core, academic and scholarly, for this is what distinguishes great universities from other kinds of social organisation.
What bedevils this global debate even further in South Africa is that such high-profile positions in public universities are not immune to unsettled political accounts that flow over from the days of struggle. In other words, like the senior civil servants in government departments or the senior leadership of the national broadcaster, universities are still places where, in several cases, the vice-chancellor appointment is an unspoken reward for political service in the struggle or political recognition for official loyalty. The unseeming haste with which senior personalities in the ruling party are appointed by eager-to-please vice-chancellors to become university chancellors is one of the more distasteful but illustrative of such trends in higher education appointments.
Within this intense politics in the post-1994 university is the stubborn persistence of race as an overriding factor in institutional leadership, even when the academic pedigree or academic substance of the leader is embarrassingly weak or completely absent. The appointment of vice-chancellors without PhDs (including some who have failed to progress to and beyond a credible master’s degree) even though they have long academic careers must represent one of the lowest points in the recent history of the South African university.
It is inconceivable, for example, how such an appointment would have any credibility at all in urging a senate of senior professors to raise the level of research performance when such a leader has no idea what this entails, and might have failed in this enterprise herself. This is not an argument against race as one consideration in leadership appointments especially in white universities; it is, rather, an argument against academic incompetence as the trade-off in choosing institutional leadership.
It is easy to develop empathy for a new system of governance and decision-making in which academics no longer hold sole propriety with respect to the choice of university leader. It is a reasonable argument that a flat structure allows for broad stakeholder participation in which everyone has a say about who the university leader will be, including business interests from the outside and union interests from the inside. Surely student participation in decisionÂ-making was a fundamental commitment of the democratic struggle? But what if the social system which allows for such broad-based sharing of key decisions is academically immature? What if that social system still places greater value on the ethnic origins of the candidate than his ability to lead a complex institution? What if that social system chooses university leaders because they will protect the status quo rather than lead the vital transformation of higher learning? What if that social system values political expedience above the academic estate?
All universities enjoy external and non- academic representation in the structures and decision-making of that body. But not all universities collapse such representation into an academic free-for-all where the voice of students carries the same weight as the voice of business peopleÂ, as the voice of workers, and as the voice of academics. One prominent South African university has written into its regulations the fact that no leader can be chosen to head the institution unless two-thirds of the senate approves that the name of such a person “goes forward” to council, the final decision-making body. What this university is in fact doing is to ensure not that the academic voice rules alone, but that such voice has a strong and determining influence in what kind of leader is chosen to head that institution.
In a serious research university, this kind of weighting could make the difference between extending a highly competitive academic institution or reducing an institution to a narrowly managerial corporate entity. The scholar-leader understands experientially that what distinguishes a university from a canning factory or a bank or a government department is the academic estate — that hard-won knowledge capital that translates into and benefits from advanced teaching, that attracts and retains the best scholars, that becomes a magnet for massive research funding, that draws the most promising students from across the world and that, as a consequence, establishes international reputation among institutional peers.
The academic estate is something to be jealously guarded. It is the prized possession of a nation. It is something that must be bequeathed to future generations of scholars and students. It should be vigorously defended against the vagaries of markets, the immediatism of student demand, and the tantrums of the powerful. And this estate must be entrusted to leaders who understand deeply that without it, we are nothing more than social, cultural and intellectual paupers at the tip of an already desperate continent.
Jonathan Jansen was until recently dean of education at the University of Pretoria