Mirrors of UCT: AW Falconer and TB Davie

Vice Chancellors (VC) as ‘mirrors’ of the history of the University of Cape Town (UCT) - Part 2 Chalk and cheese VCs– Oubaas head master vs ‘principled’ principal AW Falconer and TB Davie

Written by: Timothy Crowe

Arthur Wellesley Falconer (1938-1947)

VC Falconer, another Scottish uitlander, succeeded Beattie. He focused on the consolidation of the extraordinary rapid development of the University over the recent years rather than expanding. Before his appointment as VC, Falconer had been Professor of Internal Medicine (and later Head of Medicine) at UCT since 1920. He established the Division of Medicine within UCT’s new Medical School.

Like Beattie, he was admired as a dedicated teacher, distinguished scientific researcher and superb administrator. His work ethic was dogged, thorough and professional, and he was dedicated to the pursuit of excellence.

It was during the Falconer Era that Nobel Laureates Sir Aaron Klug and Allan Cormack earned their UCT MSc degrees. Also during his tenure, Mzolisa Archibald Campbell ‘AC’ Jordan (poet, novelist, linguist, literary historian and intellectual pioneer of African Studies) was employed (in 1946) as UCT’s first PoC permanent academic lecturer (in Bantu Languages). In 1957, Jordan earned a Ph.D. (entitled “A Phonological and Grammatical Study of Literary Xhosa”) and was the first male PoC to achieve a doctorate at UCT. Furthermore, Falconer supported UCT’s backing of the University of Fort Hare’s application for membership of National Union of South African Students in 1945.

Sadly, Falconer’s manner was brusque and unyielding in terms of policy and principles. Perhaps even more than Beattie, he dealt with indiscipline forcefully. Also, unlike his predecessor, he was lacking in personal warmth and held the ‘soft’ disciplines comprising the Humanities in low regard. During his time as head of the Medical School, he acquired the nickname ‘Oubaas’. After ascending to VC he was referred to as the ‘Head Master’ of UCT. During his ‘reign’, Frances Ames was the first woman to receive an MD degree from UCT and later became Her first female professor.

The major significant positive transformational event during Falconer’s administration was the adoption by the UCT student body of the ‘Status quo Agreement’ which upheld academic racial integration (lectures, academic societies and SRCs) and in tea/rest rooms. However, the Agreement still acknowledged the existence of a social colour-bar on the campus – mainly a prohibition on racially mixed dances, residences and sport. In short, although UCT now explicitly abandoned academic segregation and embraced a liberal, partially racially inclusive understanding of South Africanism, She still was divided racially and culturally. At its peak during the Falconer Era – 1945 - out of a total of close to 4371 students, there were 76 ‘coloureds’, 26 ‘Indians’ and only 5 ‘native’ Africans.

Past Professor of Zoology Lancelot Hogben was on point when he characterized pre-1945 UCT as:

“a second-tier, British-colonial, male-dominated, whites-only athletic institution where intellectual advancement [was] not altogether discouraged”.

Non-racialism in principle AND practice within a “real” and “open” university

Thomas Benjamin Davie (1948-1955)

Pivotal to UCT’s transformation into a “real”, non-racial university committed to maintain an open-door policy towards admitting students and hiring staff without regard to race was the VC-ship of UCT’s first South African-born VC - TB Davie – in Prieska, Cape Province. Previously, Davie had been an eminent Professor of Pathology and Dean of Medicine at the University of Liverpool. He maintained Beattie and Falconer’s tradition of academic excellence and effective administration. But, he inherited an institutionally racist institution with a student population that was dominated by wealthy ‘whites’.

By the time Davie died in 1955, UCT’s student population was 4265 and the percentage of PoC at UCT had doubled. This transformation was achieved despite Davie being plagued by crippling rheumatoid arthritis and associated ailments that ultimately caused his death. Unlike any VC before or since, his passionate commitment to academic freedom and non-racialism led him to consider urging his students to “take up arms” against the oppressive Apartheid government. On this score, had there been a UCT-connected uprising – as there was during the early 1960s – I believe that the most uncompromising ‘baasskap’ Apartheid prime minister, J.G. Strijdom - ‘ably’ assisted by deadly apartheid architect HF Verwoerd - would have crushed it mercilessly.

In a 1950 speech, Davie forcibly ‘nailed’ his and UCT’s academic principles to the ‘mast’ confirming that, like other “open” universities, UCT should be populated by:

“those fitted by ability and training for higher education” … “aiming at the advancement of knowledge by the methods of study and research founded on absolute intellectual integrity and pursued in an atmosphere of academic freedom”.

This should allow “real” universities the autonomy to decide:

1.“who shall teach – determined by fitness and scholarship and experience;

2. what we teach – the truth and not what it is demanded by others for the purposes of sectional, political, religious or ideological dogmas or beliefs;

3. how we teach – not subject to interference aimed at standardization at the expense of originality; and [most importantly];

4. whom we teach – [individuals] intellectually capable and morally worthy to join the great brotherhood which constitutes the wholeness of the university”.

But he was not done. He went on to say that the university community should:

1. “reflect the multi-racial picture of the society it serves;

   • give a lead to the cultural and spiritual development of the different race groups as part of the developments of the community as a whole;

   • aid the state by providing training for and maintaining standards in the learned professions and public services; and

   • serve the community in the true sense of the university, i.e. as a centre for the preservation, the advance, and the dissemination of learning for its own sake and without regard to its usefulness, to all who are academically qualified for admission, irrespective of race, colour, or creed.”

Noteworthy graduates who studied at UCT during the Davie Era were: Denis Goldberg (pioneer anti-apartheid activist, member of uMkhonto we Sizwe and Rivonia trialist), Breyten Breytenbach (author, artist, anti-apartheid “Albino Terrorist”) and “Albie” Sachs (anti-apartheid activist, justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa).

The old ‘Old Boys’ replaced

After World War II and definitely by the mid-1950s, the old ‘Old Boys’ network populated largely by diehard Brits was largely replaced by Afrocentric, generally South African born, academic ‘New Boys’. A good example of a ‘new Old Boy’ was John Hemsworth Osborne Day (HoD 1946–1974). Departmental historian Prof. Alec Brown brilliantly summarizes Day’s career in UCT’s Department of Zoology. In the 1930s he was a research assistant and later lecturer. When the Second World War broke out, he resigned to enlist in the RAF, where he became a decorated Squadron Leader of Bomber Command, nearly losing his life when his bomber was hit by flak. His shattered leg had to be amputated. Day returned to UCT to head the department, assisted by several woman staff members. Most prominent among these was Naomi Millard. She was appointed a museum assistant during the 1930s and, in 1940, became a junior lecturer. Her PhD was awarded in 1942 and, shortly after the end of the War, she was appointed permanent lecturer. Millard was one of the last of a breed of UCT zoologists, being equally at home with vertebrates and invertebrates, with ecology, taxonomy and functional anatomy. She was also an accomplished researcher and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Zoological Society of Southern Africa as well as Fellowship of the Royal Society of South Africa.

Although he remained the classic UCT dictatorial professor, Day was deeply concerned for the welfare of his students. Nothing would make him deviate from a course of action he believed to be correct and he displayed the courage of his convictions on numerous occasions. Just one example: during the apartheid era, UCT students frequently held silent protests regarding poor black basic education and particularly against the law that excluded black matriculants from the University of Cape Town. It was a stand with which Day and most members of staff agreed. In June 1972, riot police with whips and dogs invaded the campus and confronted students holding placards on the steps of the Jameson Hall. Things were beginning to turn nasty when Day arrived on campus from a Council meeting. He made off towards the trouble as quickly as his artificial leg would allow saying “must support my students”. He stood by them fearlessly on the steps. When the police attacked, John, standing rigidly to attention, was bitten by a police dog – but fortunately on his artificial leg! He stayed to help those students who had been beaten and then returned to the department.

Hence, it is fit and proper that the annual TB Davie Memorial Lecture on academic freedom was established by UCT students to commemorate the memory of Davie’s unswerving devotion to his and UCT’s principles.

In the first TB Davie Lecture honouring Davie in 1959, UCT Chancellor Justice Albert van der Sandt Centlivres emphasized Davies’ “fearlessly fighting for” “absolute intellectual freedom”, “intellectual integrity” and taking the unshakable position that “advancement of knowledge” should involve “the untrammelled pursuit of the truth”.

He succinctly summarized Davie:

“He gave his heart and soul to the University.”

Thereafter, although it was still largely a ‘great brotherhood’, UCT began gradual, sustained transformation, in principle, towards inclusivity. With some setbacks, it became a non-racial university founded on absolute intellectual integrity pursued in an atmosphere of academic freedom and excellence, dedicated to the pursuit of truth free of the effects of ‘group identity’ and political, religious or ideological myths, dogmas or beliefs.

‘Contextual’ institutional racism

The pre-Davie ‘dark period’ in UCT’s history notwithstanding, in comparison, the pre-eminent Euro-American universities (e.g. Oxbridge and Ivy League institutions) and two of the other English-medium, South African ‘white’ universities (Rhodes University and the University of Natal ), lagged far behind UCT in matters ‘transformational’. Furthermore, Afrikaans-medium universities (especially the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch) actively colluded academically and financially with segregationist and Apartheid governments, aggressively promoting Volkekunde as ‘standard’ Social Anthropology and racialized genetics. Some of their students even physically assaulted peaceful protestors from the University of the Witwatersrand and UCT. I know of no pre-2015 examples of such thuggish students at UCT (other than members of the excluded ASB) or of any its academics seeking or taking funding from the Apartheid government, except perhaps for medical research.

Indeed, UCT academics and graduates took the lead internationally in resisting Apartheid at the expense of research and their personal safety. This is why UCT became infamous amongst the Apartheid regime as “little Moscow on the hill”, an island of progressive liberalism and academic freedom in a sea of systemic oppression. But this ‘moniker’ was founded primarily on academic principles and not anti-Apartheid praxis. Sadly, the brutally and highly effective implementation of the Apartheid regime’s system of racially restrictive laws ensured that she remained an essentially ‘whites-only’ university until the early 1980s.

Timothy Crowe is an emeritus professor of evolutionary and conservation biology.