Background: https://pixabay.com/photos/lecture-hall-auditorium-seats-347316/; book cover: https://shop.wits.ac.za/product/corrupted-by-jansen-j/
Corrupted: A study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities
Jonathan D Jansen
Wits University Press, 2023
SKU: BK517
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In his uncompromising account of corruption and dysfunction in South Africa’s universities, Jonathan Jansen has done a singular service to the country’s higher education system. It is a jeremiad of sorts, of lament and timely judgement, except that Jansen doesn’t get into prophesies about the downfall of the entire system. He wants it reformed and he is clear-eyed about the scale of the task.
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In his uncompromising account of corruption and dysfunction in South Africa’s universities, Jonathan Jansen has done a singular service to the country’s higher education system. It is a jeremiad of sorts, of lament and timely judgement, except that Jansen doesn’t get into prophesies about the downfall of the entire system. He wants it reformed and he is clear-eyed about the scale of the task.
At every turn in the argument, Jansen puts the emphasis where it should be: on the importance of the academic project, or its absence, in too many cases. The book begins with a much-needed, brief overview of the history of South Africa’s universities, how that history casts “long shadows” over the present, and how each university fits into the whole.
If “corrupted” in his title seems like an exaggeration, read the book. It is soul-destroying to see such evidence of institutions that ought to be custodians of the highest standards in civil society being so susceptible to looting, extortion, fraud, bullying, even assassinations. Many of our universities are in the same state as the most beleaguered of our municipalities and state-owned enterprises.
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If “corrupted” in his title seems like an exaggeration, read the book. It is soul-destroying to see such evidence of institutions that ought to be custodians of the highest standards in civil society being so susceptible to looting, extortion, fraud, bullying, even assassinations. Many of our universities are in the same state as the most beleaguered of our municipalities and state-owned enterprises.
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As I write this review, The Sunday Times is headlining a crisis at Fort Hare, where there have been two assassinations (and what looks like a third attempt) aimed at stopping Vice-Chancellor Sakhela Buhlungu’s efforts at stamping out corruption in the university’s vehicle fleet. A short while ago it was UKZN, where some administrative staff in the housing office and student leaders claiming to be acting on behalf of the university ran an extortion racket aimed at private providers of student accommodation. If it’s not corruption, it’s mismanagement: UJ has discovered R300m rand in unallocated national student funding, which thankfully it has paid back to NSFAS, but how much unallocated money remains undiscovered, at UJ or elsewhere? All this is just the current news. It’s been going on for decades.
Jansen’s revelations will be particularly shocking to readers whose point of reference is what he calls the “functional” universities, which tend to be better off, older, with efficient administrations and sadly, historically white. But it is not a simple racial binary. Some of the historically black institutions have done remarkably well in building institutional capacity and integrity (vital qualities that Jansen discusses at some length). UWC is head and shoulders above the rest, although Limpopo and Venda also receive Jansen’s commendation. The mergers of the early 2000s further complicate the picture: North West, Pretoria, and Free State are examples of universities that, by and large, have successfully negotiated mergers between HWUs and HBUs, have resilient administrative systems and strong institutional cultures.
The distinction between “functional” and “dysfunctional” universities (not racially coded) that runs through the book is therefore fairly useful as a way of highlighting what works and what doesn’t, but it is a broad brush that has the effect of downplaying the problems that exist, and have existed for many years, in institutions referred to as “functional.”
For example, the recent crisis at UCT that ended with the resignation of the vice-chancellor was a replay of similar problems experienced at UKZN twenty years ago. In both cases, the problems had to do with leadership and governance. At UKZN, there was a dispute between senate and council after the latter broke with protocols regarding the appointment of a vice-chancellor; at UCT, problems arose over a blurring of the boundary between council and the executive. In both cases, executive leadership became divisive, authoritarian, and unsupported by key bodies involved in governance (including, at UCT, the ombud). The situation at UCT is too recent for comment in the book, but UKZN stands as a cautionary tale. The critical role of council, in particular, does receive Jansen’s attention but only in the context of the so-called dysfunctional universities.
“Corruption” and “chronic dysfunction”, the two key terms of Jansen’s title, as he explains, are not exactly the same thing although they are related and reinforce one another. Chronic dysfunction manifests as slow, systemic meltdown as a result of maladministration. Its most egregious symptoms are endless cycles of protest, often combined with vandalism, and repeated postponements of the academic programme. Neglect of infrastructure is a further symptom and some accounts in the book of the state of student accommodation are truly horrifying. While functional universities experience protests periodically, which can be constructive, destructive, or both (which is arguably the case with #FeesMustFall), in dysfunctional universities there is a state of permanent entropic disruption.
Corruption articulates with chronic dysfunction because those who want to loot the system often have a vested interest in fomenting chaos. A dysfunctional institution enables corruption by providing opportunities to syphon money out of procurement, if necessary through sabotage. Student accommodation, transport, and IT systems are all vulnerable. Endemic chaos increases the chances of councils and their finance committees accommodating apparatchiks who don’t understand the academic project, don’t care about it, or even think it’s an obstacle. Excessively lengthy and fractious council meetings can be the smoke that shows where the fire has started. For the looters, such meetings have the advantage of necessitating more meetings, for which council members are paid. Quite a few problems could be solved if council membership was an unpaid privilege.
The most disturbing passages in Jansen’s book involve allegations about vice-chancellors with huge egos and, in at least one case, equally capacious pockets. The most lurid of these headed up the Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT) and the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). At MUT, where Jansen was sent in as a caretaker administrator, he reports that the vice-chancellor had installed a steel door to his office with a peephole, behind which he barricaded himself against colleagues whom he thought were out to kill him. As a former “warlord” (Jansen’s language) in the ANC/Inkatha conflict of the 1990s, he drove a gold Jaguar in the boot of which he was believed to have kept AK47s. Jansen also discovered allegations that this vice-chancellor was in the habit of phoning the head of his finance division and instructing him to transfer funds into a private account as he drove off to his farm on weekends.
The vice-chancellor at VUT, who came to be known as “Jesus of the Vaal”, was unique, it seems. Jansen recounts that having been suspended for mismanagement, the vice-chancellor in question was given a reprieve by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), upon which he told education reporter David Macfarlane that supportive staff and some students had welcomed him back by strewing their clothes on the ground for him to walk on as he made his way to his office (clearly, he had forgotten what happened to Our Lord a week later). Apparently he required a photo of himself to be hung in offices, built a chapel to which he would wear a golden robe on special occasions, had disciples who offered prayers for him before critical meetings, and declared a Day of the Rector which included a concert and sports tournament.
Around 2003 I attended a lavish book launch given by this vice-chancellor, at which he launched a book that had been published by VUT’s printing unit, presumably without the normal peer review. It was based on a Unisa MA thesis I happened to have read about 15 years earlier. Jansen reveals that this vice-chancellor had originally been appointed to council, then became its chair, then hopped across to senior management. It would seem that the book launch was an exercise in academic authentification.
But such stories are not the heart of Jansen’s book, which is systemic in its focus. It is based on interviews conducted over three years with 109 people who are listed in the acknowledgements and cited in the footnotes. The list of interviewees is a Who’s Who of reputable leaders in higher education over the last twenty years: administrators who came through the ranks, researchers, and specialists in quality assurance. Jansen also uses the reports of assessors and caretaker administrators sent in to investigate or stabilize institutions in crisis (Jansen himself having taken on such roles). Three extensive summaries of these reports complete the data-set.
So while the book reads at times like a journalistic exposé it is in fact a scholarly work in the sociology of education that is self-aware and explicit about its methodology. It proceeds pragmatically, by means of “backward-mapping” – that is, inductively—starting with descriptions of the problems and working backwards to find the diagnoses. Chapters on “the university as a concentrated and exploitable resource,’ on ‘the university as a criminal enterprise”, and on “the micropolitics of corruption” are illuminating, granular accounts of how things can go wrong in the boiler rooms of a university. The book as a whole, but these chapters in particular, should be required reading for every head of department, head of school, deputy dean, dean, deputy vice-chancellor, vice-chancellor, and especially every member of council.
In the book’s handling of social theory there are a few idiosyncrasies. Jansen’s rhetoric works best when he is being contrarian, but he doesn’t want to be associated too strongly with either the Left or with liberalism. In his conclusion he eschews Marxism tout court, saying that its emphases on the history of capitalism and of labour relations are too remote from the problems at hand. But while he rejects “Marxism” Jansen is quite Marxisant, offering his own version of political economy and adopting a combative radicalism in his style.
The “political” in Jansen’s political economy refers to the university system after 1994, especially in the HBUs that had their origin in apartheid’s social engineering (Fort Hare preceded this development, but was cut off at the knees when it found itself in the Ciskei bantustan.) These “new” universities operated like parastatals in the sense that they were instruments of government, not primarily scholarly institutions (despite the terms of the cynically named Extension of University Education Act of 1959). Intellectually weak in their origins, they remained susceptible to new actors also treating them instrumentally, as a means to wealth and status. Hence the ‘economy’ in political economy: the university as a resource for those who know how to turn on the taps. Again and again Jansen illustrates this sad reality. There is the case of the taxi boss who patiently explained to one vice-chancellor of a rural university that because the town where the university was situated had no goldmine, it was the university itself that was the goldmine in question.
However, despite Jansen’s disavowal, bog-standard Marxism would corroborate the analysis. As everyone knows, higher education globally since the end of the Cold War has steadily become more financialised, with books and journal articles regarded as “outputs”, enrolments having to meet quotas set by accountants, and public service playing second fiddle to collaborations with industry. In the UK there is an obsession with “impact”, because officials in the Treasury want to know that they are getting value for money from research funding. There has been some pushback against business management as the right model for higher education, but it persists.
Jansen frames all of this as the neo-liberal university, but what he misses, I suggest, is the hand-in-gloveness, in South Africa, of this version of the university with ethnic nationalism. The neo-liberal university everywhere facilitates regular cycles of restructuring, which it is hoped will bring new enrolments and investments. Bold vision statements are the legitimising instruments of these exercises. In South Africa (as in other postcolonial countries) such processes can be, and have been, re-purposed to suit the sectional interests of a new, nationalistic elite. Marxism has always treated nationalism as an expression of middle-class aspiration under capitalism. Jansen’s university-focused political economy is not very different from this more ample line of argument. He might want to distance himself from the Left but in this respect, the shoe still fits.
Not that such theoretical debate is of much importance in relation to the book’s principled stance and its powerful intervention. What solutions does Jansen offer to the dual crisis of corruption and chronic dysfunction in South Africa’s universities? The difficulty is that solutions will have to involve wholesale ethical renewal, which is the least likely outcome of almost any kind of intervention. But on the principle that ’n vis vrot van die kop af (“a fish rots from the head down”) Jansen makes characteristically pragmatic proposals that, in all universities, would address the question of leadership: pay attention to the composition of councils; they should not be unwieldy in size; they should not be heavily politicised; they should consist of people who have relevant skills and experience; appointees should be people who have obvious integrity; they should understand the university’s core functions and obligations, especially the centrality of the academic project, etc. What the mechanism is by which council members are chosen remains a debating point.
I would add, in conclusion, that councils might also consist of people who have the key qualities that Jansen’s book has, namely honesty, candour, even the ability to take genuine delight, as Jansen clearly does, in speaking the truth regardless of the consequences. There isn’t a shred of spin in anything Jansen says in Corrupted. While many readers will be shocked by the story he tells, they are just as likely to breathe a sigh of relief because, despite its abundant use, no amount of spin has ever made an iota of difference to the well-being of any university.
Kommentaar
This is indeed a fascinating book to read. I read it in one sitting.