Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere in the Kalahari Desert, you would have noticed that there is a serious collapse in the leadership of our universities across the country. The leadership crisis is unprecedented in scale (many universities at the same time), scope (not only the usual suspects, the rural disadvantaged university) and in severity (captured institutions, in some cases).
It is a crisis at all levels of higher education authority, including not only the vice-chancellor but chairs of council (University of Cape Town [UCT]), members of parliamentary portfolio committees (see my recent book, Corrupted), union bosses (Unisa, Sefako Makgatho University), student leaders (University of KZN), registrars and premiers (Fort Hare), deans and professors, and so on.
It all feels like a movie title at the moment, Everything Everywhere All at Once, where in a multiversity of madness, our future might as well be entrusted to a time-travelling laundromat manager.
The question often posed to me is, why? How did we get into this rut in university leadership to begin with. I can think of seven key reasons.
One, in the necessary and understandable rush to transform the senior leadership of our universities, we hire the wrong people. And in South African universities at the moment, the gold standard is the black African woman. As the former chair of council (a black man) of one of our eminent universities told me: we told the candidate she was not our first choice. But ... why did you hire her? This of course has nothing to do with race or gender.
Contrast the current leadership mess with one of our eminent university leaders, Prof Sibongile Muthwa at Nelson Mandela University; she combines top-class academic credentials (PhD from the famed School for Oriental and African Studies, University College London, with a MSc from London School of Economics) with excellent personal qualities for university leadership.
Two, in the necessary and important focus on the academic qualifications of the candidate for leadership we forget there is a range of other critical attributes to take into account in the selection of leaders, such as individual temperament, management capacity, team sense, leadership instincts, self-awareness and personal humility.
If you want the co-operation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important — and you do that by being genuine and humble.
— Nelson Mandela
Three, in coming to the leadership of large institutions such as universities, some of our leaders do not know how to make sense of and carry their newfound power. In the Afrikaans universities the vice-chancellor was regarded for years as a close relative of the Almighty and you could hiet-en-gebied (order left and right) across the campus, unless you learnt quickly to rein in your power, especially after 1994. As first-generation black vice-chancellors coming from powerless communities as far as leading large organisations (outside of church or mosque) is concerned, it takes an enormous amount of self-awareness not to wield your new power irresponsibly.
It is worth reminding ourselves of this precious statement by our country’s founding father in an interview with Oprah for “O Magazine” in 2001: “If you want the co-operation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important — and you do that by being genuine and humble.”
Four, in running complex organisations such as universities, new leaders do not always realise that their success depends crucially on the quality and co-operation of their second-tier leadership. Consider the fraught relationship between the vice-chancellor and the registrar at Unisa or the former vice-chancellor and the deputy vice-chancellors at UCT. Regardless of who is at fault, if that relationship between the head of the university and the second layer of expertise is weak or compromised, you will fail as a vice-chancellor, more so when you are the cause of the dysfunction.
Five, in running small or large universities any vice-chancellor’s leadership can be fatally compromised by excessive interference by political forces. This could be in the form of a provincial premier who thinks that the local university, a national entity, is his personal fiefdom and then becomes involved (allegedly) in trying to scam a degree off the institution. Political interference can take many forms, such as seeking to influence tender decisions for personal gain, running your own party candidates for senior positions, or simply acting partially with respect to a particular vice-chancellor by withholding support in a crisis.
Where the vice-chancellor is aligned to the ruling party (nothing wrong with that in principle) but then sees their role as enabling external politics on campus, that corrupt relationship will further undermine independent, academic leadership of a public university.
Six, when a university leader comes to power with a strong and explicit racial or ethnic bias in their leadership choices, then building relationships will be compromised and crisis becomes inevitable. As I told a then new vice-chancellor who asked for advice, and who is known to wear her racial and ethnic alliances on her sleeves, “you must understand that when you lead a South African university (or any organisation for that matter) you lead all our people, not only those who look like you or me”.
Seven, in choosing a university leader it has become more and more important to gain a sense in the selection process of their steering values. What drives the person? Is it personal acclaim and aggrandisement? Is it self-enrichment for a person consumed by material gain, a flashy lifestyle, and the status bestowed? Or is it selfless service to the university community first and, of course, to the broader society? A self-obsessed, narcissistic, materialistic leader will bring down a great university because the focus will not be solely on the academic project but on how that person is seen, loved and admired in the outside world.
Whether it is the president of a country (Jacob Zuma) or the vice-chancellor of a university, never forget that they did not choose themselves. We bear responsibility for our leadership choices and the awful consequences that sometimes follow.
Excerpt from speech to the Cape Town Press Club on 21 June 2023
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