UCT hits Apartheid for a six
Stuart John Saunders (1981-1996)
Credentials and conditions
Stuart Saunders was an outstanding UCT medical graduate and developed into a highly respected AND outstanding physician/educator/researcher/administrator/residence warden and peacemaker. He earned the last ‘title’ during Apartheid states of emergency, internal violence and an international academic boycott, literally placing himself in the line of fire to keep security police off campus and protect students and staff. Most importantly for UCT as an institution of international stature, Saunders steered Her out of the Apartheid Era without falling off the path towards excellence in education and research. All of this was done at enormous personal cost and without compromising his principles and human decency. A telling ‘condition’ in his letter of appointment as VC was to: “have a special responsibility for maintaining a standard of conduct and discipline, questions of academic policy and the smooth administration of the university and its residences, and its management”.
For those genuinely interested in UCT’s history his memoir Vice-chancellor on a tightrope: A personal account of climactic years in South Africa is a must-read.
Entering the arena
In 1977, VC Luyt ‘head-hunted’ Saunders as his deputy principal for planning (DPP) to help put Daviean non-racial principles into practice. Saunders achieved this while catapulting UCT to the world stage in terms of research excellence by manipulating the ‘Old Boy’ network and development/promotion of the National Research Foundation’s (NRF) Researcher Rating System. Key amongst these efforts was expanding Luyt’s efforts in fostering UCT’s world-first Centre for African Studies and establishing its AC Jordan Chair. These endeavours were largely funded personally by Chancellor Harry Oppenheimer and ‘Rhodes-derived’ mining companies.
Service delivery
Let’s count some of the ‘ways’ Saunders led UCT towards non-racialism while “maintaining standards” and developing excellence.
During his stint as DPP, Saunders took the unprecedented decision to publicly resign from the Medical Association of South Africa to protest its handling of the brutal assault and murder of Steve Biko. Saunders’ first major ‘executive act’ as VC was to defy the Group Area Act by opening UCT’s student residences to all ‘races’. He dropped the title “professor” and reverted to his highest professional title “doctor” because a VC “professes nothing”. “A vice-chancellor has a great deal of power, but only as much power as he or she can achieve through actions which result in him/her getting the confidence of the various sections of the university.” “The UCT Council ‘professes’ policy, except for matters academic which are the concern of UCT’s Senate.”
Saunders also raised funds to accommodate PoC-students who were academically eligible for support. He broke morally and financially fertile ground by supporting the genesis of the Gay and Lesbian Association and massively developing the UCT Fund Inc. (launched by Davie to help provide financial support for PoC-students). Furthermore, unlike his predecessors, Saunders met openly with all banned members of UCT’s Community and made representations on their behalf to the Minister of ‘Justice’. When their banning orders expired, they were not renewed. He summarily fired an Apartheid spy [not Danie Fourie!] within his administration. He expanded Luyt’s elitist strategy on academic development, making it available to ALL who were eligible academically and promoted transformational approaches to teaching to foster UCT’s cultural diversity. He aggressively expanded Luyt’s policy of finding loopholes in the Apartheid educational permit system. He implemented a no-tolerance policy vis-à-vis sexual harassment. When UCT medical grad and anti-Apartheid activist Neil Aggett died while being tortured in detention, Saunders led within UCT, nationally and internationally to expose reprehensible actions by Apartheid ‘security’ legislation/personnel. When the Government threatened to cut UCT’s subsidy if Her community did not stop protesting, he took the state to the Supreme Court and won. In 1989, while Mandela was still in prison, Saunders chaired a committee at UCT comprising all segments of the University and the African National Congress (ANC) that supported presenting him with an honorary doctorate in law. I could go on and on.
With regard to academic staffing, Saunders initiated ‘decolonization’ at UCT by aggressively pursuing the affirmative recruitment of PoC-staff. His procedures in doing this were not uncontentious. One such recruitment in the Faculty of Science resulted in an unsuccessful challenge in the labour court by a disgruntled ‘white’ contract staff member who alleged that he had been victimised by ‘affirmative-action’ procedures. The two talented PoC appointees went on to have highly successful careers at UCT.
Achieving this transformation required Saunders keeping his administrative finger on the pulse. He chaired, with great care, every selection committee for every professorship in every faculty. Unlike his predecessors and some of his successors, Saunders visited ‘his’ departments annually and chose his senior supporting DVC executive wisely. All were world-class researchers AND educators. He met with them weekly, encouraged them to continue their research and debate with him and each other during his “Monty Python” meetings.
With regard to ‘decent behaviour’, Saunders took decisive action. When residents of Smuts Hall invaded Fuller Hall and urinated on a tree in its courtyard, he called out the entire Smuts Hall population to account for their disgraceful behaviour. He forced them, one-by-one, to admit or deny charges of public indecency. In the end, many admitted guilt, were fined and such incidents never recurred. In the early 1990s, when students colluded with striking workers who had kidnapped and assaulted uncooperative colleagues and attempted to barricade UCT, Saunders honoured his letter of appointment and expelled 16 of the most egregious offenders.
All of this was achieved within long-standing institutional structures: Council, Senate and Senate-sanctioned committees, Faculties and the SRC. Saunders firmly held to the view that:
”The governance of the university must remain the ultimate responsibility of the council for all matters except those strictly academic matters which are the responsibility of senate and where council would be unwise to interfere. Any parallel which usurps those powers can only undermine the university and ultimately destroy it.” My emphasis.
Noteworthy graduates who studied at UCT during the Saunders Era are: Mark Shuttleworth (billionaire entrepreneur and sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution), Bongani Mawethu Mayosi (cardiologist and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine) and Heather Zar (paediatric pulmonologist and Chair Department of Paediatrics).
The Saunders ‘downside’
Saunders’ major strategic academic error was allowing ‘Core’ academics to avoid taking responsibility for the opportunity of educating large and increasing numbers of first-year PoC undergraduate students. During the 1980s, Saunders relegated the education of almost exclusively ‘black’, ‘Bantu-Educated’students at UCT (104 in 1981, 350 in 1986, >7000 in 2017) to a centrally-recruited-developed-controlled, often separately taught (even from the Faculty/School of Education!), Academic Support/Development Programmes (ASP/ADP). The initial funding for ASP came from a personal donation from Chancellor Oppenheimer.
The rationale, history and success of ASP are recorded in a 2005 publication by ASP personnel. A key feature of the ASP policies was that UCT’s traditional approaches/curriculum structures were taken as a given reference point. Maintaining the status quo was generally equated with maintaining ‘standards’. Policies of the time determined that there should be clear limits on how long students would be given academic support, and that support tutorials and coursework outside the established curriculum could not be counted as credits towards a qualification and had to be externally funded. The ideal around which the ASP was designed envisaged admitting exceptionally talented PoC students who, with material and some initial academic support, would be able in a short time to overcome the disadvantaging effects of their educational and social backgrounds and ‘come up to speed’ with the traditional student body. While there certainly were, and have continued to be, some students like this, this idealistic model proved to be “grossly inadequate”.
Once ‘academic support’ ceased, ‘ASPers’ joined the rest of the undergrads and encountered the full brunt of UCT’s “swim or sink” educational ethos. Consequently, their academic progress plummeted, and attrition rates and often financial indebtedness became extremely high. Hence, large numbers of PoC matriculants who came to UCT with great expectations were, from day 1, “marginalized” from normal undergraduate programmes. Once they were re-integrated, many could not cope academically/socially, subsequently dropped out, failed to complete their studies in requisite time or ‘graduated’ poorly equipped for careers in the ‘real world’. Few of the successful bachelor grads were well-equipped to, let alone interested in, pursuing UCT’s much more challenging, and not well-funded, more highly competitive (even adversarial), ‘swim-or-sink’ post-grad programmes. Many sought careers that allowed them to improve the socio-economic status of their families and communities.
This is one of the key reasons why there are so few PoC professors at Fallist UCT four decades after the implementation of ASP.
Another strategic academic error was Saunders’ capitulation to politically motivated students who illegally violated academic freedom during the Conor Cruise O’Brien ‘Affair’. O’Brien had challenged the efficacy of the Academic Boycott that Saunders had agreed was: “the negation of everything that the university holds dear”.
Finally, there is the appointment of the first AC Jordan professor.
Mamdani Affair ‘Foreplay’
Saunders’ last faux pas were supporting the appointment of Mahmood Mamdani as the inaugural AC Jordan Professor and subsequently appointing him as Director of UCT’s Centre for African Studies (CAS). This is not to say that Mamdani was the ‘wrong’ choice. He was/is an internationally-acclaimed scholar of colonial and post-colonial African history and university decolonization. But, there were at least three ‘problems’ relating to Mamdani’s appointment. First, a central and pervasive thesis in Mamdani’s thinking is that imperial, decentralized despotism predisposed post-colonial failure in liberated Africa. In short, he maintains that colonial rule employed authoritarian, direct rule in urban areas and perverted tribal local authority, and this strategy continues to have profound and insidious effects long after independence. This allows post-colonial governments to blame their failures on long-gone empires and ‘past-is-present’, invisible racists.
Second, much-maligned Archie Mafeje had also coveted the Jordan Chair. During 30 years in exile, Mafeje’s scholarship had crystalized and matured, covering topics such as democracy, development, academic freedom, urban/rural government and land and agrarian issues. To ‘repair’ the ‘damage’ more than a decade earlier, Saunders-led UCT offered Mafeje a one-year contract position at senior lecturer-level. Mafeje dismissed this offer as even more demeaning than his treatment during the “Mafeje Affair”. With regard to the Jordan Chair, some members of the selection committee felt that Mafeje was in poor health and/or possibly past his academic ‘prime’. Mamdani was at his academic peak. In the end, Mafeje was not even interviewed and irrevocably severed his ties with UCT.
The third problem/challenge was that the CAS was woefully understaffed and ‘short’ on postgraduate students. Had Saunders used his ‘Old Boy’ wizardry to find the funds necessary to appoint both of these eminent scholars, it could have been a major kick-start to curriculum decolonization and high-quality Afro-relevancy in History and the Social Sciences at UCT. This could have accelerated laying the path for an understaffed CAS to attract more staff, students and funds necessary to reach critical academic ‘mass’ and become a centre of academic excellence and a force in community development. It would also have been fascinating to observe Mafeje and Mamdani in debate when they disagreed.
Saunders’ bottom line
In the end, Saunders left an institutionally largely non-racialized UCT. Like VC Davie, he was a principled-principal who led by example and followed through on his promises. He preferred collegial relations within the University rather than managerialism. During the Saunders Era, UCT’s student population grew from about 10 000 to about 15 000. During that time, the population of ‘white’ students dropped and that of ‘African’ PoC (especially women) increased from less than 300 to nearly 3 500.
If T.B. Davie gave heart and soul to UCT:
Saunders gave her a spine and muscles.
