As by Fire. Jonathan Jansen
white universities and the historically disadvantaged institutions. Who these vice-chancellors are matters in leadership, especially in times of crisis.
Leadership in times of crisis
Research indicates that a number of factors contribute to a leader’s effectiveness in crisis management. First, a leader’s personality matters.4 In this study, the personalities of the interviewees cover the range, from outspoken media personalities who often appear as talking heads on radio, television, and in print, to quiet, soft-spoken leaders who consciously stay out of the media limelight. Some speak too much, say some of their critics;5 others are not present, and are therefore saying more, claim their opponents. Some are thoughtful and laid-back, even conceding in interviews that ‘I simply do not know’. Others readily offered ‘two or three things’ to virtually any question. Yet across these very different personality types there was, as we will see, a common thread of understanding, of concern, and of genuine fear for the future of universities in South Africa’s fragile democracy.
Experience, of course, also matters in leadership,6 and this is reflected in the interviews with the vice-chancellors. Those with years of experience managing universities either as the principal or in a less senior capacity have encountered student protests and demonstrations before; they are familiar with the repertoires of protest management, from anticipation of the crisis to its immediate containment and the aftermath of the unrest. Newer principals found the crisis situations particularly stressful; while they might have served as senior executives elsewhere, managing unruly protestors was a new challenge that took its toll on them. Experience as a scholar mattered little in a turbulent political environment where reason and logic were not going to win an argument as easily as in the seminar room. And yet none of the principals had ever experienced the intensity and longevity of the 2015–2016 crisis, and it was beginning to wear them all down.
Institutional readiness matters in crisis management.7 Yet none of the university leaders had ever felt it necessary to equip their campuses with the levels of surveillance, equipment, and personnel that the new crisis demanded. Situations had become life-threatening, and the only surprise was that between March 2015 and August 2016 no one had been killed, even as buildings were torched and a petrol bomb was lobbed through one vice-chancellor’s office window.
In September 2016, however, a worker at Wits University was hospitalised and died, apparently after inhaling smoke from a campus fire-extinguisher set off by protestors. The normal security plans, sufficient before 2015, were clearly no longer adequate and, as we shall see, the gap between the pre-crisis state of security and the in-crisis security needs was exploited by the more violent of the student protestors. For the crisis now gripping universities was something very deep, ‘a disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, and its existential core’.8
Organisational ideology also matters in crisis management.9 What and how much a leader can do depends on what environmental conditions allow. UCT, for example, is a liberal university that strongly upholds the right to protest inside an ‘open university’ campus where scholars baulk at the notion of an on-site police presence. The University of Pretoria (UP), by contrast, emerges from a very conservative historical tradition in which certainty and control are primary commitments, and for which security and police are readily summoned onto campus. The older universities are unlike the newer ones, for ‘institutions shaped by history channel and constrain leaders’10 in very different ways.
In the older, former white universities, the polemic of race invariably surfaces in any conflict or protest. By contrast, on the historically black campuses race and ethnicity never feature because it is primary needs that fuel revolt, such as accommodation, transport, and food quality. On some campuses, aggressive student protests are routine and campuses are often closed. In others, the intensity of recent protests is new. And in some universities, the ANC as the ruling party has a firm grip on campus politics and enjoys support all the way up to the governing body; in the former white universities, independence and autonomy from external politics are fundamental commitments. How leaders navigate their universities through these contexts depends very much on complex environmental conditions. Thus effective leadership requires a good dose of strategic knowledge about where the political minefields lie.
Moreover, a university leader’s academic specialty also affects the way he or she leads.11 One vice-chancellor, a medical scientist, described his university at the outset of his tenure as ‘a patient in good health’. Another vice-chancellor, a natural scientist, is bewildered by the lack of order, control, and predictability on his campus. Still another vice-chancellor, a curriculum specialist, sees a knowledge problem: the lack of a deeper, critical education to arm the protestors for thoughtful engagement on the crisis. And yet another vice-chancellor, this one a political scientist, sees the crisis through the competing interests of rival groups, and links what happens on campus to what happens in cabinet, student politics, and party politics. Yet no one disciplinary perspective can fully come to grips with the depth, intensity, and uncertainty of this crisis, as the interviews will reveal.
Beyond these things that matter (personality, experience, preparedness, environment, and academic discipline), all leaders carry similar identities and position themselves in particular ways. How, then, should these leaders be framed? In the business world they would be called CEOs, a tag most vice-chancellors instinctively resist because of their unease with and even criticism of reducing universities to business entities in an age of neoliberalism. If you want to sting a scholarly minded vice-chancellor, tell him or her that a university is nothing more than a corporate organisation in which students are merely clients, where research amounts to maximising subsidy-generating outputs, and in which teaching is nothing more than preparing young people to meet the demands of a market economy. It is for this reason that some universities deliberately frame the principal as ‘the academic leader of the university’, while others, leaning towards the language of the state bureaucracy, are content with ‘the administrative head of the university’. It will become clear from this book that what university leaders actually do is often far removed from the formal duties and responsibilities outlined in the institutional statute required of each higher education institution.
The position and authority of vice-chancellors
But why the focus on the singular leader, the university principal? Surely research and experience show that leadership collectives steer organisations, from schools to companies to government departments. In fact, some of the most exciting advances in leadership studies point to ‘stretched-over leadership’ and ‘distributive leadership’ to make a point that is both empirical (research informed) and normative (desirable).12 No university principal, no matter how confident his or her personality, runs a complex institution alone; that is simply impossible. And yet the focus and target of much of the student protests was against one person, the man or woman in the principal’s office. That is no accident, as I will show later, but a determined strategy to run down the head of the university. It makes sense, therefore, to understand the heart and mind of the chief executive, so to speak, as well as the role of the vice-chancellor in the university as an organisation.
Every vice-chancellor is appointed by and responsible to the council, the highest decision-making body of a South African university. While council is responsible for the governance of the university – such as setting broad policies for the institution – the vice-chancellor is charged with implementing those policies. Perhaps the most important function of a council is the oversight of the finances of the university for which the vice-chancellor is held strictly accountable. For example, council approves the annual budget of a university, and the vice-chancellor and his or her executive team are responsible for the management of that budget within the available resources and constraints of the institution.
The vice-chancellor is also the chairperson of the university senate, which has responsibility for the academic mandate of the institution – such as teaching, research, and curriculum. The chancellor of a university holds a largely ceremonial position and officiates at important functions such as the annual graduation ceremonies.
It is, however, the vice-chancellor alone who carries responsibility for the management of the institution on a day-to-day basis. In the mantra of a healthy university, council governs and management