Carrying on the conversation

New Fort Hare vice-chancellor Mvuyo Tom is under no illusions about the challenges he faces at the country’s oldest historically black university. And he knows he will have to confront at least one of them as soon as he takes over in January.

‘Like other black institutions, Fort Hare has been dealing with its disadvantaged history, and immediately next year we’ll be facing the task of ensuring we have necessary funding,” he tells the Mail & Guardian. ‘The bulk of our students are from poor communities, and mostly they can’t pay fees on time: they tend to do so late in the year to ensure they get their exam results.”

Alongside that tremor of anxiety is how the public service strike, and the consequent loss of teaching time at schools, will impact on matric results, Tom says. If the results are worse than in previous years this could severely affect enrolment levels at Fort Hare (and, indeed, other universities).

Fort Hare now has about 8 000 students and more than 800 staff. ‘But our enrolment plan, agreed with the national education department, is to increase to 10 000 by 2010.”

Tom takes over at a time when Fort Hare has been at the receiving end of serial instalments of bad publicity, centred on academic complaints about authoritarian management and disciplinary cases involving staff criticisms of management. Allegedly shoddy administration has also come under fire, most recently in August, when two senior academics were suspended pending an investigation into student complaints about marking of mid-year exam papers.

Tom is no stranger to managing under difficult conditions, however. A medical doctor by training, he spent two years as senior official in the Eastern Cape’s health and welfare department and six years as director general in the same province. In the latter capacity he was responsible for, among other things, the transformation of provincial administration.

On relations between Fort Hare management and staff, he said he would continue the ‘Iincobo” process begun by outgoing vice-chancellor Derrick Swartz. The word means ‘conversations”, and refers to management’s open-door policy which allows any employee to air complaints. ‘The aim is to humanise management and administration,” he says, ‘to treat people as people, and to encourage freedom of speech and debate.”

But finances will remain an enduring problem. ‘We have R150-million over three years from the education department for new buildings at the East London campus, but we estimate that there and at the Alice campus we need about R1-billion altogether.”