There is a story told by Chris Brink, former vice-chancellor of the University of Stellenbosch, that on the occasion of his inauguration a member of the institution’s alumni told him, in no uncertain terms, that the university was not his to lead.
Apparently he was simply a symbol, a token in an institution much older and wiser than any of his attempts to change it.
It’s little wonder that after years of battling the Stellenbosch status quo, he headed for the relative peace of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. As others have discovered, after a year’s internship as a GP at Baragwanath, employment at the Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies, is a walk in the park, so to speak.
Now I would imagine that whoever gave him this little piece of advice was either a council member or an influential member of the community. In fact, I can see a more formalised version of this scenario played out across institutions in our country. In the underbelly of the Bremner building at the University of Cape Town, I’m sure that vice-chancellor Max Price went through the same grisly rite of passage, vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen an equally horrific experience in the dank bowels of a disused University of Free State residence. In these dark reveries I picture a kind of Dan Brown Illuminati dressed in robes and hoods and swearing in the incumbent vice-chancellor to the life of servitude in the name of the greater good.
And that greater good? Simply do nothing. Or, whatever you do, don’t rock the boat. A successful tenure at an institution amounts to being at the right book launches, presiding and pontificating, while ensuring that the dark forces of the council get on with the job at hand. Which, ironically, is also to do as little as possible.
Surely this is a crazy business model?
After the collapse of so many of the best, most innovative Âcompanies in the world during the recession, the only universities that are struggling as a direct result of the economic meltdown are those that invested in Iceland, which was perceived as a risk haven.
General Motors began its life in 1908 and was the third-largest global vehicle dealer by 2008. In July of this year it was renamed the Motors Liquidation Company with — as the name suggests — very little chance of paying off its numerous debtors. The same can be said for Lehman Brothers and the other banks that went under.
Although the United States and UK universities are bitching about diminished government income, it remains true that universities (globally) got off lightly. The reason for this is that universities have astute business plans.
On every entrepreneurial website there are articles and interviews with gurus who proclaim that opportunism is the only flight from this recession. “Take a chance, don’t be risk-averse,” they claim, whereas the opposite is probably more true.
The University of Bologna commenced business in 1088. It is still running today. That should be an object lesson for an enterprise that strives for longevity. We are talking about the difference between an organisation that has lasted 100 years and one that has kept its head above water for a thousand.
So, when it came to pass that the universities in South Africa were to be merged in a series of arranged marriages, one shouldn’t be surprised that not only did they survive this enforced cohabitation, they also prospered from it. That fact alone should make you reconsider the wisdom of the university business plan.
You take 36 institutions, reduce them to 23, change the names and hope for the best. You throw a little bit of money in, but not enough, you demand more access and then less access and then more access for students and hope for anything.
You change the Higher Education Act four times, you bully, you demand and all in the name of transformation.
And what do you get? The short answer is a sector in which nothing has changed. That the education department has recently published a ministerial report on (the lack of) transformation, that the vice-chancellors have put together a task team on the same subject and that collectively there is still no sense that the system has changed or can change is indicative of a modus operandi that will, in the end, defeat not only justice but the collective might of the ANC.
As Dante’s Belacqua would have said: “There can be no judgment if there is no outcome.”
This one goes out to the main men, the councils and the Âvice-chancellors — Big Up Homies, Big Up.