THE PUZZLE

In July 2021, a major South African newspaper ran the headline ‘Is the Vaal University of Technology an Institution Bewitched?’ It was a strange question to ask of a modern institution, a premier site of higher learning. Yet a mere few weeks earlier, one of the country's most distinguished academics seemed puzzled during an interview about the campus citizens of another dysfunctional institution: ‘If you were a Zulu, they’d tell you that you can't understand these people, they’ve been bewitched.’ This former vice-chancellor and administrator of universities had seen his fair share of institutional implosion. ‘Bewitched’, in this context, expresses the frustration experienced when we struggle to explain why a university has a high turnover of vice-chancellors, why university councils regularly collapse, and why there is constant campus turmoil or shutdowns because of conflicts, protests and disruptions.

Such chronic dysfunction sometimes attracts the attention of the political head of higher education in government (now the minister of higher education and training), who will often dispatch an assessor to an institution to report on the situation. The assessor's report usually triggers the appointment of an administrator to take over key functions of the university and establish some semblance of order. When, despite ministerial intervention, the university falls back into dysfunction, some do indeed wonder whether the institution is under some spell.

There is no shortage of polemical writings on corruption and mismanagement in these dysfunctional universities. These tend to be exaggerated, self-aggrandising accounts of institutional malfunction, in which the evidence is slim, one-sided or nonexistent. Three book-length publications of note are Nithaya Chetty and Christopher Merrett's The Struggle for the Soul of a South African University (concerning the University of KwaZulu-Natal), Aubrey Mokadi's A Portrait of Governance in Higher Education (about the Vaal University of Technology), and Nhlanhla Maake's Barbarism in Higher Education (documenting the author's travails at the Vaal Triangle campus of what was then Potchefstroom University).

There also exist at least three reviews of assessor reports that seek to extract key findings of value. These are straightforward summaries and extrapolations rather than empirical or theoretical treatments of the subject beyond what was already known. One of these was commissioned by the Council on Higher Education and titled Institutional Governance in the Higher Education System in South Africa.