What could have been a rational dialogue crumbled into naked hostility and a heavy police presence, writes Xolela Mangcu.
In his 2004 address to the American Sociological Association, For Public Sociology, the distinguished sociologist Michael Burawoy made a point about students that Blade Nzimande and all of our university vice-chancellors would do well to keep in mind in their responses to protests.
Burawoy defined students as “a public that will not disappear before we do… what does it mean to think of them as a public? We do this by engaging their lives, not suspending them – starting from where they are, not where we are”.
He argued that true and proper education was “a dialogue between ourselves and students; between students and their experiences; among students themselves; and finally a dialogue between students and publics beyond the university”.
He suggested that instead of treating students as “empty vessels into which we pour our mature wine”, or “blank slates upon which to inscribe our profound knowledge”, we should look at them as “carriers of a rich lived experience that we elaborate into a deeper self-understanding of the historical and social contexts that have made them who they are”.
Drawing on the writings of C Wright Mills, he suggested that we must turn the “private troubles” of our students – in this case the fees – into public issues.
The decision of the University of Cape Town to bring police onto the campus on October 19 will live in infamy as a monument to its failure to engage our students as a public. That they should have called police hippo vehicles onto our campus on the anniversary of Black Wednesday is the worst tone-deafness on the part of the university administration.
For the uninitiated, Black Wednesday was on October 19, 1977, when the apartheid state imposed the worst crackdown on freedom of expression in the black community by banning all black political organisations, newspapers such as The World, and arresting the likes of Percy Qoboza and Aggrey Klaaste.
Black history matters!
I was a student activist at Wits University during the height of apartheid repression in the 1980s. Not once did the university call on police to come on campus. On the contrary, the university protested with us whenever police invaded campus. It is a cruel irony that I now work for a university that calls the police to campus to deal with students.
There are many answers that black academics at UCT are asking, after the police perpetrated their violence on our students – as South African police are wont to do. And why would they come to campus with an ER emergency unit if they did not anticipate violence on these unarmed students? If you doubt that, then see what happened in Marikana.
The fact of the matter is that our police are not trained to deal with large crowds and, God forbid, a bloody massacre could have happened on the anniversary of Black Wednesday. Without anyone at the university to engage with them, our students had to go on the streets and be abused by police because the university would not engage with them. They sat briefly in jail before being released.
As I said to UCT vice-chancellor Max Price in a university assembly last year: “These are other people’s children.” They are given over to our care. This is not a failure of reason but of the political imagination, for no student, no matter how militant, is beyond the reach of patient and astute leadership.
According to a statement released by the Black Academics Caucus, the police went there baying for blood: “Students offered no resistance and complied with police instructions upon their arrest, but SAPS did not leave immediately after arresting activists. Instead, the police hippo containing activists actually made a U-turn just as it was about to make its exit.
It then returned to the mass of singing students who were left behind, repeatedly driving into the crowd, and came to a standstill for quite some time as singing students gathered around. There was no clear reason why the police turned around.
There are many questions that are being raised even about the legality of that police action. Coming so soon after the Western High Court’s repudiation of the university for illegally suspending activist Chumani Maxwele, this would be yet another slap in their face.
But how long can UCT sustain this reputational damage – much of it self-inflicted – by an inability of its leadership to engage with students?
This authoritarian culture towards students is at the heart of the South African universities. I would urge my fellow professors to take to heart the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ admonition on this score: “Ideally, the relation between the professor and the student involves a Socratic equality of status with a mutual stress on standard, not on authority. The grain of sand remains free and independent next to the cliff. For even the grain of sand is substance.”
The high-handed, jackboot responses may please the animal instincts of those members of the public who are used to dealing with black people by punishing them. But we now live in a constitutional democracy where even protesters must be treated within the confines of the law.
If the police acted ultra vires, then it is very difficult to separate whoever authorised their entry into campus from their vile actions. The University Council must investigate in the same way that the management has not been hesitant to investigate student transgressions.
Since the eruption of the #Rhodes MustFall movement, the university administration seems to think that it will ride out the student protest or simply punish the students into silence.
History tells us that you do not deal with the anger of black students by thinking that you can ride it out or deny them or simply turn a blind eye.
Students may be quiet for a moment, as they have been over the past few months. That may have lulled the university into a false sense of stability, but “like birds in the cornfields” unhappy students will keep reappearing.
And so here are a few proposals.
First, we need an inquiry into the decision to call police on to our campus.
Second, students need to be given more meaningful representation in the governing structures of the university. There is no other institution in which the main constituents have such little say or representation in its governing structures.
Third, our universities are still run along the lines of ancient institutions such as the Senate, as if we are in Rome.
As William Clarke put it in his magisterial book on the history of the research university, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, feudalistic practices such as nepotism still predominate at the universities.
In South African universities these are simply racialised. Max Weber described them as prebendalism, where the personal and the institutional are so intermeshed that no one is able to make a distinction.
Racial prebendalism reigns supreme in the predominantly white universities in South Africa.
Fourth, not long ago this selfsame Senate voted to downgrade race in admissions in favour of economic disadvantage.
Well, if the professors love the poor so much, then they should forgo annual increases and bonuses next year. How about that as a test for liberal hypocrisy?
Finally, perhaps the time has come for Max Price and his team to step down. Throughout this past year I have been asking myself why he could not have intervened in the politically savvy manner that Adam Habib has shown in dealing with similar problems at Wits?
UCT has been vacillating from crisis to crisis without any plan of action. If Price and his team are overwhelmed by the current mix of students and their demands, then they should simply fall on their swords and resign.
Let me hasten to say I have called on presidents – both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma – to resign in the past. I see no reason why I should not issue such a call on the leadership of such a vital institution in our country’s future.
I predicted trouble when the university decided to do away with race in its affirmative action policies.
I appeared in front of the University Council and told them they were playing with fire, that it was dangerous to be swayed by the largely white letters to newspapers in making its decision on such a grave matter, which may well have been the same pressures that led the university to bring the police on to campus. The university has a wider constituency than the letter writers.
I also warned the Council and the vice-chancellor that the instability could ultimately lead to the government intervening to impose an administrator.
Two years later, I don’t think the university has ever been closer to that possibility. The more it resists the leadership change on its own terms, the greater are the chances of such a takeover.
I so wish they had listened to me.
* Mangcu is an associate professor of sociology at UCT.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent
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