Management has failed dismally, and the time has come for academics to show up, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Johannesburg - As a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s, I took a class with distinguished organisational and planning theorist Donald Schon.
Together with Chris Argyris, his colleague at Harvard, Schon wrote an article in which they made a distinction between single-loop learning (surface appearances) and double-loop learning (underlying causes).
They described how a company persisted in putting on the market a product that lower- and mid-level managers knew was bound to be a failure. The lower-level managers were afraid to tell the middle managers of the problem with the product and the latter were afraid of telling the higher echelons.
Six years and a $100 million (R1.6m) later, the company finally ditched the product but only after calling in outside consultants who told the top leadership what they did not want to hear. Sometimes that might mean telling them it is time for them to go.
A decade earlier, the historian Richard Hofstader had made a similar distinction between what he called “the meaning in the situation” and “the meaning of the situation as a whole”. Hofstader suggested that while “the meaning in the situation” provided practical intelligence to solve immediate problems, intellect generated new meanings and values.
Yet another scholar Abe Zaleznick similarly distinguished between ”managers” and “leaders” in organisations. While managers focus on practical strategies, leaders ask counter-intuitive questions that might lead to a process of “creative destructive”.
The more I watch the crises on our campuses the more I see single-loop learning, not double-loop learning, “meaning in the situation” instead “meaning of the situation as a whole” approaches; managers not leaders.
UCT has been going in and out of courts over single-loop questions, such as whether to give students a venue. A double-loop solution might have been to give the students such a venue and support them in designing a new academic programme. Yes, that is how new disciplines sometimes come into existence.
I am also told there has been greater peace at those universities that have not brought in any private security or police. The reason is simple - police and private security almost always aggravate already volatile situations. No one can credibly convince me that a shack erected in protest against lack of accommodation was such a risk to the university that it warranted violent intervention by private security.
Protest is by definition a process of disruption of the normal order. Democrats respond to it with patience, authoritarians with violence.
It is not good enough for UCT vice-chancellor Max Price to tell us there are only 6 000 beds for 27 000 students. The man has been at the helm of the university for half a dozen years. Surely he cannot tell us he did not foresee the shortages. It is also not enough for Price to say 75 percent of those 6 000 beds are occupied by black students.
If we go by the university’s exaggerated claim 50 percent of its students are black, that means UCT has 4 500 beds for 13 500 black students. Even if we take the more realistic figure of 30 percent, there would still be thousands of black students without accommodation.
Even more shocking are revelations that the university was offered accommodation several years ago but turned it down. Every time there is “load shedding” we criticise the government for having ignored early warnings of power shortages. Price and his leadership team should be held to the same standard. The buck stops with them, not with students.
The accommodation problem is just one time bomb waiting to explode at UCT. Mark my words, the problem of senior white professors who order their black colleagues around and abuse black students is another. These academics cynically use academic autonomy and academic freedom to shield their racist abuses.
But academic autonomy does not come before the constitution. The government does not have to push a bill through Parliament to correct the malpractices within the universities - that would be a real danger to autonomy. However, universities have to abide by the constitution.To the extent that they perform a public function in terms of legislation, they are considered “organs of state” in terms of section 239 of the constitution.
All organs of state are subject to the jurisdiction of the public protector - who is not part of the government. Universities must be protected from the government for sure, but they cannot be protected from the constitution and those bodies with the mandate to enforce its provisions.
I abhor violence. But I abhor racism just as much. The problem we have in this country, and at UCT in particular, is those who abhor violence are louder than those who abhor racism. We need to have some balance if we are all going to have credibility with our students.
Suffice to say expecting victims of racism to sit meekly while being abused is not only blind to our own recent history but is to ask for too much. Condemnation of students is a single-loop response to a double-loop problem. Don’t get me wrong, my grand-uncle George Pemba was one of this country’s greatest artists. Art is as close to my heart as it is to any other art-loving South African. But I prefer understanding to condemnation.
It is in that double-loop quest for understanding that we courageously come face to face with the elephant in the room - a relentless, enervating, institutionalised racism at our universities aimed at black professors and students alike. We ignore it at our peril.
Accommodation of black students has always been a sore point for “white” universities. Instead of defying the apartheid government, Wits University warehoused us in segregated, township dormitories in the 1980s.
In their book, Blacks at Harvard, Werner Sollors and colleagues say: “Despite their privileged positions, however, blacks at Harvard did not escape the humiliating stigma of the colour bar inside and outside of their famous campus.” Harvard’s first black PhD, WEB du Bois, put it this way: “...sometimes the shadow of insult fell: being mistaken constantly for a servant; being turned away from barber shops on account of colour; knowing better than even to ask white families who rented lodgings to white students whether they would be willing to rent the same lodgings to blacks”.
The distinguished African American scholar, Cornel West, was falsely accused of bunking class and Henry Louis Gates was arrested for breaking into his own house. Their status did not protect them from racist stereotypes. The same applies to black professors in South Africa, if my own experiences are anything to go by.
For too long the situation at UCT has been allowed to be a running battle between students and management. But it is clear that management has failed dismally, and the time has come for academics to show up. To be credible, their intervention must go to the heart of the problem - racism and the violence it begets on our campuses.
We need to listen more closely to the experience of our students. We need think tanks to devise a new institutional architecture that places academics, workers, administrators and students at the centre of a new governance model. In short, we need leadership.
Nothing short of that will suffice, I’m afraid.
* Xolela Mangcu is associate professor at UCT’s Sociology Department.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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