UCT: the silence of things not being attempted
Wits has chosen “bustle and life,police and protest, over extinction”
Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
The student groups paralysing our higher education system have shown no qualms about their methods: destroying buses, cars, libraries, administrative offices, and works of art, manufacturing petrol bombs, looting sections of Johannesburg, harassing ordinary staff with clubs and threatening the children’s creche at the University of Cape Town. At CPUT, they locked two guards into a burning building, fortunately failing to take their lives.
Because some of its stated objectives overlap with progressive objectives like equality and opportunity, we have forgotten to call this campaign by its true name. The use of violence against civilian institutions is terrorism. For a democracy such disturbances pose particular problems of control consistent with our constitutional values. The problems are so severe that UCT, where I work, is considering cancelling the academic year, a step which will strand tens of thousands of potential graduates, on one side of the pipeline, and many thousands of matriculants on the other.
A cancellation may cost the institution 40% of its annual budget, around a billion rands, and will certainly destroy its viability as a place of higher learning. The university management believes, after many weeks of fruitless negotiation, that it can appease the militant groups. Yet these groups’ demands keep shifting and escalating at the last minute and would not be realisable even in a far more advanced economy. Nor is there any guarantee that a new year will go by without a similar breakdown.
University management argues that it cannot protect the campus and that learning cannot proceed inside a police cordon. These arguments are plausible on the surface, but probably not true, or only partially true. Over time we have seen the judgment and foresight of the university executive proven poor. Barring some unforeseen change of heart on the part of the extremists, management’s tangled reasoning and incoherent strategy will have serious consequences.
In the long view the methods used against the universities represent the new and nearly absolute domination of the illegal sphere over the legal sphere, a process catalysed by the rule of Jacob Zuma. Under these circumstances it takes courage to enforce the law and wisdom to know that sometimes force, in the imperfect hands of the police, is a necessary option.
In its endless deference to fanatical groups UCT turns its back on its own faculty and community, including students, many of them poor, who had hoped for a better future, and parents, who may have saved all their working lives to send their children to university and who may not afford another year of expenses.
There will always be academics who object to the enforcement of the law, often for good reasons. This is not the time for their voices to be paramount. The loss of the year, and likely the institution, will cause lifetimes of deprivation across the province and the country, which will be felt in schools and hospitals, businesses and government. By refusing to bring us back to teach, by refusing to make the difficult and unpopular choice to protect us, the vice chancellor and his team degrade and diminish the hope and talent which our extraordinary students and researchers bring to our campus.
In recent days the University of Witwatersrand has reopened despite reaching no accommodation with protestors. Adam Habib is taking a risk but he is doing so soberly, by the most reliable accounts. His classrooms and laboratories are open. There may be no calm yet at Wits but there is not the sinister silence we have in Rondebosch, which is the silence of things not even being attempted. We have closed down without having the decency to be occupied.
Too many UCT staff accept the silence as the price of doing without the police. At Wits, in a five hundred strong petition started by the great Cathy Burns, academics as different and brilliant as Achille Mbembe and Samantha Vice, Dilip Menon and Isabel Hofmeyr, have backed their vice chancellor, choosing bustle and life, police and protest, over extinction.
Views expressed are not necessarily GroundUp’s.
Next: Metal company accused of hoarding pension deductions
Previous: Khayelitsha residents launch toilet plan
Letters
Dear Editor
Imraan Coovadia 's article has articulated the learned helplessness of the majority of sidelined staff and students at UCT: our reasonable voices have been repeatedly ignored by management, who fruitlessly engage with the strident, shifting demands of the #ShackvilleTRC group. For a recent example of the level of debate watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14&feature=youtu.be .
Many staff and students are deeply depressed and desperately worried for the future of UCT, and South Africa. We need to be heard: it is appalling that an institute of learning will not listen to rational argument and neglects to defend the rights of so many.
We have created Staff/Student petition for UCT to reopen on Monday 17th - the “UCT Staff and Student Petition in Favour of Peaceful Reopening”.
Here’s the link:
https://goo.gl/forms/HMaHGuGXcrExy3Bg1
I urge all concerned UCT staff and students to sign it.
Dear Editor
We must remember that both the protesters and the other students are adults. Lecturers who aid and abet delinquent adults to trample the rights of the students they are contracted to teach are contemptible. They should be outed and their remuneration docked for lectures not given.
The attendance at Wits is now rising as the students increasingly attend despite the threats. They have found their courage in the confidence that Wits will defend their rights (despite mishaps) and that they must do their part and attend. This is a typical case of courage in the leadership results in courage in the followers. This is shown repeatedly throughout history, most recently in Churchill, Kennedy and Yeltsin among others.
The exact reverse is happening at UCT where the students have courage and the leadership none. The spontaneous bravery of the students doing silent protests and enduring vilification is being squandered by the SET at UCT who kowtow to the anarchists, and to the cowards amongst the staff who wheedle about the noise and so on "not being conducive to teaching and learning" despite bravery of individual staff members. These "principled cowards", led by Max Price, are going to destroy that institution.
I write as one who has taught (briefly) at UCT and enjoyed my time there tremendously, and was at Wits as a post-doc and staff member for 20 years.
Dear Editor
Cannot agree more with the comments of Prof Coovadia.
Ultimately we the paying parents have a lot to lose and probably will never recover the costs.
At this point in time I am looking down a very bleak road for the future of our youth, both those matriculating this year with a bright dream to enter university as well as those that are currently at university.
Unfortunately I cannot sign the petition as it is restricted to students and staff but would suggest we start one for fee paying parents too!!
Dear Editor
When UCT leadership abandon their duty to manage the university to the benefit of the enrolled students, current and future, they are effectively destroying a functional national asset. Then they lose any respect and there actions, and the lack thereof, prove them unfit for duty at the university. The Minister of Higher Education then has a duty to replace them in order to protect this national asset in the interest of all South Africans. We need to make peace and build SA, not destroy it or its assets.
Dear Editor
Imraan certainly sums up the sentiment across the larger university community and public - we want the University to open!
Hits the nail on the head when he equates the dominance of a few over the larger community and the acceptance of the route of the illegal instead of good respectable dialog in the spirit of transformation and advancement.
It is safe to say that the current incapacity to reach an acceptable agreement by both the protest group and the University of Cape Town management reverses the gains and the potential gains South Africa has made and can make.
It is a sheer indictment of the abilities of the grouping who stand in these offices!
The predictable gain of this impasse is the certain addition to the growing number of poor people, the unemployment rate, the homeless, the subtraction from the pool of taxpayers, and the list is endless!
The protest action in 2015 cost UCT approximately 200 jobs, with a further number in the balance. These are taxpayers, who incidentally have to fund the state's commitment to fund all sphere's of social development.
How many more taxpayers are we going to lose in 2016?
Dear Editor
Prof. Coovadia is right and good on many points here.
It is only in terms of the reality at ground where his intention may go terribly wrong.
If students return, now, we recapitulate and force an intensification of the inequality for 'protesting' students that has sent many into the ranks in the first place.
From bullets whizzing past the head for the cause of freedom to an exposition on Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'? This is an unrealistic expectation to make on a very large number of students who genuinely believe that what they are fighting for is both possible and just. The end result. A potential fast forward to our very own Red Army Faction.
"Terrorists" do kill. Let us be careful with the use of that word; for many reasons.
It is a difficult situation and the resolution needs to be one that doesn't elevate some at the expense of others and then sends still others to extremes such as we are beginning to witness.
Some time in the sun and some time with family might be the best panacea, just now.
This I know from experience.
Dear Editor
I foresaw doom for UCT when the statue of Rhodes was removed.
Instead of taking a strong and creative stand by commissioning a contemporary work of art, which could be installed near or alongside the old (I wrote a direct letter suggesting this be done), UCT management chose to give in to calls to eradicate a work of art created during another epoch. However painful the facts are that took place during that epoch, we cannot undo them. But we can heal and build on what we learn from those facts. It behoves an educational institution to find ways of doing exactly that.
There followed the passionate destruction of further artworks.
At every turn, UCT management has buckled under destructive passions and failed to counter these with calls to BUILD, to CREATE, to HEAL, and to LIVE UP TO the legacy of our best leaders. This includes living up to our constitution and to punish those who infringe on human rights.
UCT management needs fast to make a list of its core values. What are they?
Judging by management's actions, or the lack of them, those values seem to align with the destroyers of art, history and human rights. Whether this is really the case, or whether it is simply a lack of bravery, remains to be seen.
© 2016 GroundUp. 
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.