When the Stuttgart docked in Cape Town harbour in 1937, the "welcoming committee" awaiting the Auerbach family included students from Stellenbosch University in whose number was a young man named Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. Their intention was not to welcome weary immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe but to spew anti-Semitic hatred at the Jews on board. It was an event that the 14-year-old Franz Auerbach remembered throughout his remarkable life.I met Dr Auerbach through a powerful little book called The Power of Prejudice: An Enquiry into History Textbooks and Syllabuses in the Transvaal High Schools of South Africa. It was unusual to find such a critical account of racism in school books in the 1960s from someone inside the education fraternity at the time. Auerbach must have realised that such a publication would come at great risk and that it could cost him his career; in fact he was charged with misconduct by the Department of Education for his public criticism.I cannot think of a more opportune moment in post-1994 history to invoke the memory and example of Franz Auerbach, known to many as a courageous educator, public intellectual, thoughtful humanist and dedicated humanitarian. His critical writings as well as his public standpoints as an activist speak powerfully to contemporary politics in South Africa.There is turmoil on some of our university campuses. That turmoil has been expressed through the defilement and removal of campus statues, the attacks on staff, the adoration of Hitler, the disruption of university meetings, the occupation of campus buildings and the routine insulting of university staff. The tone of campus protests is angry, aggressive and confrontational.The founding rationale for today's student protests is laudable. Transformation at universities is uneven across campuses and far too slow in most of them. The character and complexion of the professoriate has hardly changed and the student composition at some of the more elite universities reflects the black and white class arrangements from the top private and public schools.I support student activism that focuses sharply on grievances with university transformation. What I do not accept is a culture of protest that, in its destructiveness, mimics broader social protests.We now have a politics of degradation. You do not only protest; you burn, attack, insult, destroy and sometimes even kill those who stand in the way of your personal or group interests. That is the country but it cannot be the campus. A university, after all, produces leaders.Universities fail our youth when we do not create the institutional conditions out of which emerge young people who can channel their anger into a constructive politics that changes campus and community. This is what I call disciplined activism.For this my models are Martin Luther King jnr, Neville Alexander, Fatima Meer and Albert Luthuli. For them, a disciplined activism meant at least the following five things: not demeaning yourself in the process of confronting injustice; not becoming like the oppressor; not using tactics and strategies that alienate the very people you wish to influence; not being caught up in immediate skirmishes without understanding the long-term consequences; and not daring to challenge without building an inter-group solidarity.When people are angry, anything other than a clear stance on the politics of degradation places not only campus but country at further risk of indiscriminate violence and deadly protests. We have seen how quickly ordinary citizens can turn on foreign nationals in bouts of anger ; this should be a warning. We must create an alternative form of protest, one driven not by the politics of degradation but the dignity of protest expressed in the personal credo of Franz Auerbach: "Some people feel a passionate loyalty to a single cause and look upon themselves as belonging to a single human group to the exclusion of all others. I am not one of those. I don't have a single loyalty, or a single group identity. All these strands are in me; together they make up a human being who, I hope, has a harmonious personality perhaps best defined as "a human male named Franz Auerbach, born 1923".Extracts from The Eleventh Auerbach Interfaith Memorial Lecture delivered at Beit Emmanuel Shul, Parktown, Johannesburg, on May 20..