They've carted Cecil John away but on the plinth in place of that grumpy-looking statue is now an ogre of aspect more gloomy and menacing. It has no proper name, cannot have "poo" flung at it and is too ephemeral for a crane to lift.We're talking of "lack of transformation", an issue that smoulders on South Africa's university campuses and gets not only exhibitionist undergraduates hot under the collar but wise old professors too.Council for Higher Education statistics show that only 18% of the country's 4073 professors are black. Few universities have effective transformation strategies with proper funding and political will. This makes it hard for black boffins to break into the white-dominated scholarly "networks". This is manifestly true, but it isn't the only contributory factor.Another knotty issue is talented, but poorly paid, black academics being sucked into the maw that is the public service. It's a money trap. Why slog at shaping young minds for a pittance when you can do half the work for double or triple the money? The government argues it, too, needs talent (it certainly does) but we know the sharp minds whisked away from lecture rooms will not be used effectively by muddled-headed ministers and officials.Many voices demand "forced" transformation - simply banning the appointment of white profs. But, of course, that path runs into the obstacle of "compromise between equity and excellence", as Professor Jonathan Jansen puts it, adding that: "If we lose that battle, it's over."So it's vital to keep black talent in the halls of learning. Easier said than done.Thanks to catastrophic management, the schooling system is dysfunctional, so we simply do not have sufficient numbers of properly prepared candidates being fed into the university machine to ensure a healthy flow of bright young things emerging from the other end. The appalling varsity drop-out rate is testament to that.A spin-off effect of bad schools is that academics - many of whom themselves have overcome educational system depredations - who might have become professors emigrate to ensure a decent education for their children.So, a purely practical approach would be to start at the bottom by fixing the schools.Perhaps all those graduates and former lecturers shuffling paper in Pretoria could be put to work on improving the rubbish education strategy we've had thus far...