It was as predictable as a fight over racial quotas for the Springbok team on the eve of a Rugby World Cup. As I sat with the new vice-chancellor of an old white university, I warned that the storm was coming. Whether he understood or accepted this prediction on one of the calmest campuses in South Africa, I do not know. But here we are saddled with mass protests and campus upheavals from the Cape to Johannesburg, and at least one newspaper finds echoes of the 1976 student uprising.The situation is, I would venture, a little more complicated.First we should distinguish protests at the old Afrikaans universities from upheavals at the old English institutions.At universities like Stellenbosch and the Potchefstroom Campus of North West University, the problem is what I call first-order challenges of transformation. In other words, it is just about getting black students through the gates of these hallowed institutions that were established to advance the cause and culture of Afrikaner nationalism.Until recently, these old Afrikaans campuses were able to claim the right to instruction in Afrikaans as the reason for low enrolments of African students. Slowly and begrudgingly, classes were made available in English, but not without massive resistance over the past two decades from alumni in the community, on campus and inside councils to keep "the identity" of the Afrikaans university intact.One newspaper this week trumpeted the front-page headline, "The struggle for the soul of Maties", the affectionate name for Stellenbosch University as this venerable institution comes under pressure to change.Yet whether intended or not (and I have my own views on that matter), the consequence of Afrikaans-dominant language policies in the undergraduate programmes effectively kept black African students out.At the North West University they have been even more inventive, by creating a so-called federal model for campus management which conveniently keeps black students on the Mafikeng campus and mainly white students on the Potchefstroom campus; you do not need a degree to see through this kind of racial subterfuge.Sadly, these Afrikaans institutions have not been completely honest with the facts. They would include in their transformation numbers the postgraduate student classes, which everywhere are mainly in English, and the coloured student numbers - yet again, as in history, this group is mobilised as a fig leaf for white intransigence - to show growth in black enrolments.The problem for white Afrikaans universities is making peace with the fact that African students are rightly knocking on the doors of learning simply to gain access to public institutions. And when their numbers are few, which they are at present, they are exposed to great risk, as the Luister video shows.As I have said over and over again, in a country shaped by centuries of white supremacy, and with a violent history of trying to push Afrikaans down the throats of black people (Soweto 1976), race will always trump language in the transformation debates. In other words, because of our history the right to access will always take on much more political significance than language rights. The longer leaders of the Afrikaans universities take to accept this simple truth, the more their campuses will be the target of upheavals for years to come.The three English universities in upheaval - Rhodes, UCT and Wits - struggle with second-order challenges of transformation. Having enabled access to black students over the years - also not without a struggle, despite their liberal pretences - the students now rightly demand greater recognition through who teaches them, what is taught, how the past is remembered (symbols such as statues, for example) and how they are made to feel (institutional culture) at universities where they still roam around campus like visitors. This is the heart of transformation, and these universities are only now beginning to realise what anger simmered below the epidermis of the superficial politeness of English culture, and boiled over with #RhodesMustFall.Sadly, riding in the slipstream of these necessary protests for access and recognition are the comtsotsis of the post-apartheid era, students who fling poo, adore Hitler, assault lecturers, attack fellow students, disrupt classes, upend council meetings, and launch anti-white racist tirades to the applause of others. These rogues pose a real danger to the transformation moment on the English campuses, for they eclipse the important student-led drive for change and undermine public sympathy for the protesters and the possibilities of solidarity across lines of race, class and institution.This is the advice I give protesting students who ask: "Always maintain the dignity of protest, for then you can claim the moral high ground in these transformation struggles; this is your moment."..