The recent reports that the beloved Prof Gregory Kamwendo was possibly killed on the orders of a fellow colleague involved in a PhD-selling syndicate at the University of Zululand are no surprise.
While the trial of the specific suspects is still to happen, what we do know is that Prof Kamwendo was deliberately targeted for assassination, and that was linked to his job at the university.
I, and other concerned academics, have been writing publicly about the deep systemic crises of funding, scholarly malpractice, governance and institutional culture that are affecting the credibility and strength of our university system.
The reality is my writing is hardly as brave as the kind of principled stance that cost Kamwendo his life.
The Minister of Higher Education, Naledi Pandor, wrote a statement on Kamwendo’s killing in which she stated: “It is clear that there are criminals outside and within our university system who will stop at nothing to use our universities for financial gain.
“I want to be clear that we will not allow our universities to be captured. Some of our most vulnerable institutions are under pressure from those who seek to, in various ways, make money from our university system.”
Let me translate elements of this statement for you so that we are clear about who the crisis affects the most – “our most vulnerable institutions” refers to the historically black tertiary institutions, which are today the institutions that carry the greatest numbers of black working class students in the system.
In other words, it is exactly the institutions who hold the dreams and hopes of the poorest of South Africa’s students – that are the ones most likely to experience rampant looting and capture by syndicates.
I have written about this before, where I have argued that black conservatives and reactionaries – not old white professors – pose the gravest threats to the transformation and rehabilitation of higher education today.
I think it is quite obvious to anyone in the academic system that many whites with hostile attitudes have held a grip on the system for a long time – especially within senates and in the bureaucratic bowels of the system.
But as we sit here, more than 20 years after 1994, the majority of our vice-chancellors are black. Many of their senior management are black. The demography of administrators is changing quite rapidly as we see young black men and women coming in as clerks at a various range of levels in the tertiary system.
What seems to not be changing however, are the inherited punitive and patronage driven ways of doing things.
For some reason, black management is quite comfortable in environments where academic freedom is crushed, debate is reined in and patronage dispensed to buy allegiance.
Finally, what is concerning about Pandor’s statement is that she characterised the UniZulu situation as ‘criminality’, as if the system itself is largely ‘OK’, save for a few rotten apples.
No, Minister, it is not the work of a few thugs – it is the very workings of your entire system which is hyper-commercialised and entirely premised on numbers and fund-driven incentivisation.
Many university managers will do anything for their bonuses, even if it means screwing over academics, massaging pass rates and pursuing unnecessary vanity projects masquerading as research projects.
When academics write about these serious problems, they are labelled “badmouths”.
Just imagine the level of academic debate we are dealing with when very serious questions on the status of universities are labelled as “bad mouthing”. It is in this context that greed and powermongering foments.
Minister Pandor needs to urgently review the quality of Masters and Doctoral degrees coming out of all our universities, and she needs to come down and talk to the many harassed, exhausted and scared academics and powerless staff who experience the mess firsthand...