The University of the Western Cape,
generally considered the best of the historically black universities,
begins the new academic year more than usually demoralised. Its rector
Professor Cecil Abrahams is distrusted, academic staff expect another
round of layoffs, and more than one third of the 600 administrative and
service staff — members of the militant National Education, Health and
Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) — have applied for redundancy. In
addition, student debt remains high at R46 million. The attempt to
collect it could well provoke the now customary annual standoff between
management and students. Most ominous of all, student enrolments look
set to fall yet again from around 11 000 to 9 000, with the largest
faculty, arts, being especially badly hit.
Last year began with Abrahams
demonstrating his firm resolve to clear up the financial mess that he
had inherited. He insisted that students settle or reduce their debt
with the university, then running at R63 million. Outraged students
made headlines when they camped out in front of the gates, clashed with
police (see picture above) and closed the institution for several days.
In the end they were forced to pay up or bring their parents to campus
to sign a contract indicating their payment schedule over the year. For
a university that had long avoided conflict by giving in to the most
powerful contenders, this was progress indeed. But by mid-October
Abrahams was the object of an unprecedented vote of censure from the
senate; faculty meetings passed motions of no confidence; academic and
administrative staff associations demanded his resignation. In eight
months he had managed to turn not just the students against him but the
whole of the university community.
Abrahams’ aim could be considered laudable: the need for a tough
cost-cutting strategy. In the face of a mounting deficit, reported to
be around R16 million and a R4 million bank overdraft (student debt
collection had proved less successful than envisaged), management
rejected Nehawu’s annual wage demands. Instead, it offered nothing at
all for 1998 and only 5 per cent for this year. At the same time it
planned to retrench 41 permanent academic staff (out of 420) and to
abolish 50 posts that were vacant.
This was bound to upset the academics who have always felt
understaffed in comparison to their affluent neighbours in Cape Town
and Stellenbosch. The average staff-student ratio is 27:1 but this
varies considerably from department to department. Using a mechanical
formula, management identified departments that were overstaffed and
applied the criterion of last-in-first-out in about half the cases.
Where this would have led to the loss of someone judged valuable to the
university, they leapfrogged to the next person in line. Small arts
departments such as French, German, Arabic, and Hellenistic languages
have born the brunt, but the key English and mathematics departments
have also suffered. If Abrahams had been candid about the critical
situation early on in 1998, it is quite likely that, after an initial
outburst, academics would have seen the need for cost cutting by way of
retrenchments. For reasons unknown he failed to do this. The 41
academics received their retrenchment notices over the last weekend of
September — immediately after the rector had assured specially convened
groups of academics that there would be no retrenchments in 1998. Since
the retrenchments were to take effect from the beginning of 1999, this
was technically true but such a blatant piece of sophistry that it
provoked the academic staff into a rare show of solidarity with
students and Nehawu.
A stormy series of senate meetings led to the vote of censure “in the
strongest terms” on the rector and the appointment of a senate
committee to report into “the crisis of leadership” and financial
condition of the university. Its recommendations led to more
acrimonious senate meetings in November and a public if muted apology
by the rector for his handling of the retrenchment crisis. As this was
going on, a month-long strike by Nehawu closed the library to students
and brought academic life almost to a standstill. At one point strikers
prevented members of the university’s council from driving off the
campus. The police once again made a heavy-handed apppearance. The
students engaged in political theatre of their own as they quarrelled
over the student’s representative council (SRC) and a mass meeting
attempted to eject the incumbents.
The full story of Abrahams’ fall from grace, if not from office,
awaits the candid analysis of his former senior colleagues who have now
left the university — including three vice-rectors who appear to have
found him difficult to work with. Whatever the truth in the rumours of
a certain high-handedness, the rector’s nemesis was all too predictably
a function of the university’s financial position. It was always
unlikely that he would be able to succeed with the odds so clearly
stacked against him.
UWC is still subject to all the problems which apartheid bequeathed
these institutions. An atrocious school system continues to produce
large numbers of poorly educated youth.
Armed with a paper matric pass, they enter institutions such as UWC
with high aspirations but low capacity in crucial areas such as English
language competence and numeracy. They are also often desperately poor
and even the much lower fees are beyond their means, particularly if
combined with residence costs. The education they receive for the most
part is a passable imitation of traditional South African undergraduate
tuition — in other words quite unsuitable for the majority. Facilities
are inadequate, to put it mildly. The library is understocked, poorly
run and user-unfriendly; there is only one walk-in computer lab for
non-science students, which is usually overcrowded. Even the location
conspires against them: UWC remains “in the bush”, without shops and
recreational facilities within walking distance. It is little wonder
that a current of alienation runs throughout the student body, ready to
be ignited by the over-demanding lecturer, the second semester food
crisis at the residences or the annual fees hike. All these factors
have their roots in the past.
UWC opened its doors in 1960 with 162 coloured students, only five of
them women. It was situated in Proteaville (the name never stuck) a
desolate area of Bellville-South, which was envisaged as some kind of
capital for the “Coloured-Nation-In-Becoming”. It was a replica of the
other “bush colleges” established at the same time. A series of
undistinguished Broederbond rectors and a largely Afrikaner staff
presided over students for whom the new institution was an alien
imposition. This autocratic white management ran the place like a high
school and refused to allow the student representative council real
powers. Student numbers grew slowly so the tension inherent in the
situation was not openly manifested until 1970 when a student was
kicked out of a lecture for not wearing a tie. Led by Richard Stevens,
now UWC’s director of public affairs, students symbolically burned a
tie in protest. Three years later, complaints over food escalated into
a full-scale confrontation that stunned the paternalist management. In
1975 the government moved to head off mounting resentment by appointing
the first coloured rector. For the next 18 years, two remarkable and
very different individuals, Richard (Dick) van der Ross and then
Gerhardus Johannes (Jakes) Gerwel, led UWC.
A former high school teacher, head of the Battswood Teachers’ Training
College and graduate of the University of Cape Town, van der Ross was a
man of immense civility and good sense. But just two months after the
Soweto uprising in June 1976 a tidal wave of student protest engulfed
the UWC campus. The new rector’s insistence on the need for an educated
population as well as political change was of limited appeal to the
increasingly radical students. Much later he recalled a student saying
to him “Mr Rector, the difference between you and us is that you think
the revolution will come tomorrow; we say today.” He replied: “let us
talk again after six months.” Disorder for disorder’s sake is no
revolution, he said, and revolution is not necessarily a bloody affair
on the streets. He preached the virtues of hard work, good manners and
humane values to a constituency in which many considered him a
sell-out. However, his undoubted moral courage — he was many times in
the years to come to be seen facing baying student meetings or in the
middle of student-police confrontations — created a grudging student
respect for “Uncle Dick”.
Matric results of new students were on average low, a situation for
which van der Ross did not apologise, stating that UWC was “a
university which opened its doors to all who fulfilled the minimum
qualifications”. Fees were also kept down to enable poorer students to
enter. As he half-humorously liked to put it, UWC stood for “University
of the Working Class”. The list of distinguished South Africans who
graduated from UWC or rose to prominence under his rectorship is a long
one, beginning with Jakes Gerwel and including in the field of social
science Wilmot James, Rhoda Kadalie, Yvonne Muthien and Fred Hendricks.
Although conservative Afrikaners were still numerous among the staff,
van der Ross’s leadership provided the more liberal element among the
white staff and the growing coloured lecturer presence with a rallying
point that liberated the university from its Broederbond past. The
development of most consequence for the institution’s future, however,
was the rapid growth in student numbers. The moderate growth of the
first 20 years now became a series of annual jumps. In 1984 enrolment
increased from 4 885 to 6 125, and by 1990 had reached 12 405. This
trend, aided by the generous admission policies and fee structures,
began under van der Ross and not, as subsequent critics have alleged,
under the radical rectorship of Jakes Gerwel. The latter’s high-profile
stance in favour of People’s Education and the widening of educational
opportunities for the country’s disenfranchised population was a
reflection of more insistent demographic trends which had already
surfaced during van der Ross’s tenure, and which were to be reflected
later at the other black universities.
On his appointment in 1985 Gerwel distinguished himself from his
predecessor in the following words:
“I am from a younger generation with a good dose of marxism as
critical paradigm . . . I come from a generation which says that
politics always plays a role; academe and the university also have a
real role to bring about political change . . . I am becoming rector at
a time when the crisis of authority, the crisis of validity — some
people call it the crisis of legitimacy — of the state and the
government is not any longer just a theoretical construction but is
written in huge letters in every house, every school and the
university.”
His inauguration as rector brought the university establishment more
closely into line with the dominant ethos in student politics. Gerwel
was typical of many other young black South African intellectuals who
came of age as students in the harsh climate of the Black Consciousness
movement, and then moved increasingly closer to the Congress Alliance.
Gone were van der Ross’s sensible if conventional homilies on the need
for education through work. The new rhetoric spoke of non-racism,
non-sexism, democratisation, socialism and accountability to the
oppressed community at large. The university was to be an “intellectual
home of the left” and create the “space” (a favourite Gerwel term) for
the voice of the voiceless, its mission to promote “People’s Education”
in a “People’s University”.
In private a modest person with a quick and self-deprecatory wit,
Gerwel could rise to oratorical heights in his public speeches. His
diffident manner concealed very strong nerves and the combination of
dry humour and assurance could control senate meetings with an
altogether iron hand. He had few scruples about using the university as
a political base: for him, and many others at UWC at the time,
politicisation was a virtue to be imported into the centre of the
institution’s intellectual life. Student militancy was not so much a
problem as a force to be harnessed to the right ends. Incidents of
coercion and student disorder (disruption of classes, intimidation of
students wishing to carry on studying, vandalism of property, looting
of residence food stores and so on) were aberrations induced by the
conditions of apartheid society. For a brief time, UWC and its
diminutive rector seemed to encapsulate the passionate resistance of
the population of the Western Cape to a crumbling white supremacy.
During the 1989 Defiance Campaign, Gerwel and the university’s
chancellor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, were captured in a memorable news
picture stumbling through clouds of tear gas during a protest in
Guguletu township.
But all this came at a price. Despite much warmer relations (at the
ideological level at least) between the management and the students,
instability plagued the university. Boycotts and the nefarious
activities of the student “disruption squads” who enforced boycott
decisions by disrupting classes and attacking students in the library,
remained as much a feature of UWC as under van der Ross. The overriding
imperatives of the struggle led to much rationalisation of the
pervasive incivility and incompetence of both students and staff. To be
progressive was all.
With a self-confessed marxist thinker at its head, outsiders saw UWC
as rife with revolutionary thinking. In 1987 the Reverend Alan
Hendricks, leader of the coloured Labour Party and of the house of
representatives under the 1983 tricameral constitution, called for the
closure of the university on the grounds that all it taught was marxist
dogma. This picture of UWC as a campus steeped in the intricacies of
marxist thought was never valid. Most students (and staff for that
matter) either knew as little about marxist theory as the average South
African or could only summon up the most vulgar marxism imaginable,
expressed in jargon borrowed from the South African Communist Party
(SACP). For a minority, however, this was not true. One of Gerwel’s
undoubted achievements was to recruit a number of very able academics
some of whom were competent analysts of a marxist tinge. Colin Bundy
was only the best-known of these. In addition, although necessarily to
an extent unknown at the time, SACP activists appear to have had
Gerwel’s ear and acted as political advisers. Johnny Issel, one of the
toughest of Cape Flats activists with rumoured links to the underground
Umkhonto we Sizwe, was one example. But the most vociferous marxist
academics and students were a loose coterie with trotskyite sympathies.
Under the austere eye of the philosopher Andrew Nash the weekly meeting
of the marxist theory seminar acted as an intellectual energiser in an
environment where real debate only intermittently flourished.
Ironically, this blooming of marxist rhetoric took place under the
shadow of perestroika. It is truly piquant to read today Johnny Issel’s
1988 speech to the UWC academic staff association regarding the
advanced stage which has been “reached in the continuing struggle
between the two world systems . . . As the capitalist world recedes,
increasing space is won by the socialist world and the nationalist
states.” This sentiment went down well at the time and provided an
atmosphere in which at least some intellectual excitement could be
generated: believers and sceptics clashed in the classroom and at
lunchtime meetings. In retrospect, one grows nostalgic — if only the
same passion about abstruse theorists remained to animate the campus
today.
The haze of People’s Education rhetoric which enshrouded the campus in
the late 1980s could not altogether disguise the more lasting
developments that have placed UWC in its present unenviable
predicament. First, was the massive growth in student numbers and the
strain this placed on the campus. Its legacy remains in overcrowded
lecture halls, demoralised lecturers and alienated students. But
numbers alone have never been the only problem. Nothing illustrates
better the predicament of institutions like UWC more than a glance at
its students’ matric results. In the decade 1984-1994 more than 80 per
cent of new students were entering with a matric aggregate of D or E.
Worse, more than half of this 80 per cent had entered with E
aggregates. The most direct expression of this poor matric performance
is to be found at the level of English-language competence. In 1994 a
lecturer involved in remedial English teaching wrote that “more than 70
per cent of all first year students at UWC do not possess the language
skills needed to help them cope with their studies.” An internal UWC
study in 1995 showed, as one would expect, a strong link between poor
matric peformance and the failure rate at the university. In many
departments less than half of the E aggregate students were passing
their first-year exams and less than 60 per cent of the D aggregates.
But in a climate of outspoken pressure from students and unspoken
pressure by the adminstration to increase the pass rate this situation
had to change. One former Rhodes academic, Les Switzer, described the
shocking “grade inflation” he found at UWC and other South African
universities when he returned after 10 years. Evidence of this latter
trend is all too abundant at UWC. In the faculty of arts, for example,
a pass rate of 58 per cent in 1983 rocketed to 78 per cent in 1992 —
although the matric performance of students in both years was
similar.
Anecdotal evidence from lecturers is replete with stories of student
pressure and the silent conspiracy of many academics to avoid a student
backlash by passing 90 per cent or more of their class while privately
bemoaning the quality of their academic performance. A new colleague in
my department who was naive enough to apply “standards” which he had
brought with him from a background in Britain recently failed 80 per
cent of his students in a large second-year class. The result was a
series of hate notices on his door and a nasty incident when students
crowded into his office and manhandled him.
The contrast with the neighbouring University of Stellenbosch is
stark. Here 80 per cent of students enter with matric aggregates of C
and above. As UWC management never tires of pointing out, the
university is performing a most useful function — for UCT and
Stellenbosch. In taking in the large number of weak students that it
does, it acts as a buffer for its neighbours, shielding them from the
worst effects of the crisis of the educational system. For lecturers at
UWC the standard of education of the average undergraduate (there are
of course many who are fully competent to undergo university education,
though they tend to get swallowed up in the mass) is the main fact of a
depressing daily life.
There seems to be an obvious solution: compel students with low matric
marks to undergo a testing process in which those who are simply not
equipped to cope with the most rudimentary university work are screened
out. However this runs not only against the national goal of higher
education expansion but directly against the self-interest of the
university’s staff. Under the current funding policy half the state
subsidy is calculated on the numbers of students enrolled, thus it pays
a university such as UWC to accept students who are ill-equipped to
pass and who do not pay their fees, rather than to exclude them. The
other half of the subsidy is calculated on the numbers of students who
pass, and is the major reason behind the university’s tacit pressure on
lecturers to pass as many students as possible. Ideally, of course,
students should enrol en masse and pay their fees, a situation which
UWC administrators devoutly desire. Hence the action at the beginning
of 1998. But those senior managers who have to deal with the daily
reality of student life have no such illusions and urge that all be
registered, debt or not, in an extended process which usually drags on
for the whole of the first quarter. The large numbers of students with
an E matric thus continue to enrol, and fail, or what is worse scrape
through with 50 per cent due to lecturers adopting a marking strategy
guaranteeing the least student pressure. Otherwise lecturers face a
trail of students pressing for a fail mark to be upgradeg to a pass.
Anger, aggression, tears, pathos and heart-rending stories of the
enormous bank debt that they have incurred often accompany their
entreaties.
Having accepted large numbers of weak students, the university then
proceeds to do nothing much for them. It is of course debatable that
much could be done for young people whose minds have been ravaged by
the current state of public schools. Lip service is paid to “academic
development”. An Academic Development Centre exists, but scratches only
the surface of a mammoth remedial task — and in the current fiscal
crisis is threatened with sharp staff cutbacks. The history of academic
development at UWC is a saga in itself. In line with its
self-proclaimed “progressive” ethos, the idea of academic development
to address the academic incapacity of the majority of students began to
be debated under Gerwel in the late-1980s, with the usual endless round
of consultations. The outcome was the so-called “infusion” model. Since
it was agreed that at UWC, unlike the neighbouring elite universities,
it was the majority and not just a relatively small minority of
students who came from poor school backgrounds, academic development
was to become not the job of a specialist group but rather was to be
suffused throughout the whole lecturing corps. Every academic, in other
words, was to be his or her own remedial teacher.
Amazingly enough, few voices were raised to point out the folly of
this idea. Anyone acquainted with universities — in South Africa and
elsewhere — knows that lecturing capacity is very unevenly spread among
the ranks of academics. Many brilliant researchers are simply not good
classroom material. And for the mediocre mass, a dramatic upgrading of
teaching skills presupposed by the infusion model was yet another
Utopian idea of that most simple-minded of creeds, People’s Education.
At most universities, given the relative competence of students, this
wide variation in lecturing abilities is not a major problem — students
learn to cope with even the worst of teachers, while at times gaining
inspiration from the best. At UWC, however, it was precisely this
student competence which was, and is, lacking. Needless to say, the
expected infusion of academic development expertise throughout the
staff has failed to materialise; though some gestures are made towards
it in ritualistic fashion.
The second watershed of Gerwel’s period as rector was the demolition
of the previous ethnic base of the student population. Van der Ross
introduced the policy that UWC should become an open university that no
longer abided by its apartheid mission of education for coloured
students. But it was only under Gerwel that rapid growth in the numbers
of African first language students occurred — rising from 400 in 1986
to 4 308 in 1992 (from 5 per cent of the total student population to 34
per cent). Today students with an African first language comprise the
majority of new entrants and the vast majority in faculties such as
arts. This transition from segregation to openness was both inevitable
and desirable, but its consequences were neither foreseen nor
rationally planned for. The most important result is that English
became the de facto language of tuition. Until the late 1980s tuition
was effectively bilingual, especially at first-year level where the
majority Afrikaans-speakers welcomed the chance to study in their home
language. From 1988 the growth in students with an African first
language started a slide to monolingualism and the abandonment of
Afrikaans classes. This may be the major reason for the sharp decline
in the number of coloured students at UWC — by the late 1990s the
numbers of Afrikaans first language students were for the first time
less than those of English speakers.
The impact of growing numbers of African first language students was
felt elsewhere. By 1989 the minority of African students on campus
dominated student politics. An all-African SRC was elected; the
majority of coloured students yielded the field to the newcomers as the
rector and his advisers spoke sternly of the need for “African
leadership” and proclaimed a Year of Non-racism. “Race tension” had
arrived on campus, though its extent was often exaggerated on the
outside. The influx of African students was probably another reason for
the decline in coloured enrolments: research in my department suggests
the existence of mild antipathy between coloured and African, with both
viewing the other as unfairly advantaged. But this racist undercurrent
is not virulent. Interpersonal relationships remain cordial and the
ideal of non-racism sits reasonably comfortably with the majority of
students and staff. It remains one of UWC’s strong points that South
Africans of all backgrounds rub along pretty well in a situation where
white over-representation in the staff is not the hottest issue. Here
UWC is much better placed than institutions such as Wits and UCT.
The third, and in terms of the survival of the institution, the most
ominous trend to emerge under Gerwel was the problem of student debt
and its contribution to the precarious financial position of the
university. Lacking private endowments, living on thin or absent
reserves and catering for a student population from poor backgrounds,
UWC was never financially secure. But it could stagger along on its
subsidy and on the system of bursaries from the house of
representatives to coloured students (for posts such as teachers and
social workers) until the late 1980s. In 1988 Die Burger with its usual
relish for UWC horror stories reported that student debt in that year
had rocketed to R17 million. UWC promptly took the newspaper to the
Media Council for printing a false report. The figure of R17 million
had been the case earlier in the year, but by the time Die Burger
published it the amount had been reduced to R5 million. The Media
Council duly rebuked the paper and UWC rejoiced — too soon alas.
Student debt was indeed becoming a problem and by 1992 had become
unsustainable. A fee increase and an attempt to force student to make
larger payments upfront on pain of exclusion in that year led to a
fierce confrontation that has become practically an annual event. The
lack of financial viability of the former black universities that lies
at the root of campus instability has thus festered throughout the
1990s.
Gerwel’s term of office terminated abruptly with the national
elections of April 1994. Many had thought him a likely candidate for
the new minister of education. Instead, he was summoned to be
director-general in the President’s office, and left almost overnight.
An interregnum between May 1994 and September 1995 saw yet more
instability and disruption, including a memorable hostage-taking by
students of almost the whole university leadership in March 1995 over
the issue of exclusion of students for debt and academic
non-performance. During this debacle vice-rector Colin Bundy was to be
observed pensively smoking a cigarette on the balcony of the admin
building while students refused to allow him and his colleagues to
leave. Police rescued them and the university failed to prosecute the
student culprits.
The candidates for rector had to present public statements of their
vision for the university and all seven “stakeholder” groups (council,
management, academics, Nehawu, SRC, convocation, and alumni) had equal
votes. Professor Abrahams was appointed in late 1995. A nephew of the
well-known exile South African novelist Peter Abrahams, he himself had
left the country after his racial classification shut him out of the
best universities in the country, and rose to a senior administrative
position at Acadia University in Canada. It was clear that he shared
little of Gerwel’s vision of a university of the left, presenting a
largely conventional vision of a university’s role while still
embracing the prevailing rhetoric of democratisation, transparency and
accountability.
He soon pointed out that he had inherited the problems facing UWC and
emerged as a strong if diplomatic critic of his predecessor’s regime.
The campus work ethic left a lot to be desired, he stated early on in
speeches to academics and staff. The campus was unkempt, full of litter
and needed sprucing up. He himself turned out for a Clean Up The Campus
Day when staff and student volunteers went around picking up litter.
The purpose of a university was academic. The slogan “Home of the Left”
was quietly discarded and the new rector produced his own motto: “A
Place of Quality, A Place to Grow”. He also projected the image of a
strong, no-nonsense manager who was willing to tackle the thorny issues
on which his predecessors had failed to take decisive action — such as
student debt.
Though at times complicit in its own predicament, UWC is a victim of
forces way beyond its control. Gerwel’s rhetoric of a People’s
University for a time disguised — even for many staff who should have
known better — the ongoing structural weaknesses of the university’s
position. With the advent of Abrahams and the adoption of a
conventional university ethos, the ever-present gap between rhetoric
and reality has become acutely evident, except to government, it would
seem, which continues to fiddle while campuses are trashed. Few
commissions can have been as disappointing, and as potentially
catastrophic, as the National Commission on Higher Education. Offered
the opportunity to face up to the awful plight of the former bush
colleges, it chose to avert its face from truly radical reform.
Palliatives such as redress funding and rhetorical support for academic
development were contradicted by the recommendation of yet more
expansion, yet more underqualified university students struggling with
unsuitable tuition. And on the hard question of student funding it
opted out altogether, with a wishful gesture towards a national student
bursary fund for which enough money was never available. The idea of
redress funding too has become something of a joke, with 17
institutions to share R27 million.
Over the past five years, the ministry of education’s basic approach
to the former bush colleges has been one of malign neglect that has
seen most of them sink further into a morass of debts, administrative
collapse and general demoralisation. Last month for the first time the
ministry seemed to promise action with the announcement of a summit on
student debt in the tertiary sector — reportedly “a matter of extreme
concern to the minister”.
Sceptics will wonder why it has taken so long for the minister to show
such concern; will the prospect of the general election prompt some
stop-gap aid that treats just the most obvious symptoms of the
deep-seated crisis. For the moment the pretence is made that all the
former bush colleges are true universities. UWC probably comes closest
to that illusory accolade. But it is not going to make it on its
own.