Act now to save Rhodes brand

High Street leads directly to the majestic gates of Rhodes University.

It is also a disaster zone.

You can do serious damage to your car if you hit one of the many potholes on this treacherous thoroughfare.

But keep your eyes on the remaining tar because at any point a young hustler with a dirty green luminous vest will jump in front of your moving vehicle to offer obvious parking on either side of the potholed street.

The shops look dilapidated and the drooping trees are starved of water.

Along the broken sidewalks, students with neatly groomed hair and smart clothing take firm but cautious strides to and from the gates of The University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR).

No seriously, there has been some major name-changing on the cards in this small Eastern Cape city of Makhanda (a great Xhosa warrior), even though all the boards into and out of the place still spell Grahamstown.

So, too, the name of the university was up for grabs during the student protests of 2015/2016.

Once the Rhodes statue at UCT fell, the obvious next candidate for change was the institution named after that rather ample embodiment of empire, Cecil John Rhodes.

Would the energised Rhodents (the playfully suggestive name for RU students) match the courage of their Cape Town counterparts and force senate and council to rename this elite university?

Perhaps expectantly, activist students would introduce themselves on political platforms as coming from the university with the interim name.

To university watchers, the name change was never really on the cards for a simple reason – Rhodes University is a brand.

No student wants to obtain a degree from the University of Makhanda or something presumptuous like the University of the Eastern Cape given other institutions in the region.

Every employer would have doubts about the origins and quality of the graduate from a university with a lesser name.

Rhodes, on the other hand, is the name associated with some of the world’s accomplished scientists (Tebello Nyokong), novelists (Wilbur Smith), bankers (Sim Tshabalala), teachers (William Smith), film producers (Alice Krige), and activists (Chris Hani).

It is the brand that gave SA the most distinguished journalism school on the continent.

Rhodes sends its students across the world where they flourish in the worlds of high finance, law, media and education.

It is one thing toppling a statue in Cape Town, but a completely different proposition changing your brand name. However radical students might appear during protests, they are actually quite conservative when it comes to the status of a degree and the prospects of employment.

Tongue-in-cheek, one academic quipped that the settled name of the institution might well be “The University now appropriately called Rhodes”.

Ouch.

That said, a small, elite university surrounded by a decaying municipality with potholed roads and erratic water supply is not going to be left unaffected by the tragedy of Makana municipality.

In small college towns like Makhanda, Stellenbosch and Bloemfontein, the university sustains the local economy.

Thousands of students buy food, clothing, furniture and entertainment in the surrounding areas.

They bring in millions a year through the leasing of private accommodation.

When parents visit from out of town, whether for orientation, graduation or simply to see their children, the local businesses flourish.

By its own estimation, Rhodes contributes about 60% of the GDP of Makhanda and in 2017 paid over more than R40.9m to the local municipality.

Impressive, and yet for Makhanda the future does not look bright.

The more the municipality fails to deliver basic services, like a reliable water supply, the more the university has to dig into its own limited resources (more than R6m in one year) to find alternative water sources. This is not sustainable.

This elite university of 8,300 students looks seriously run down.

Leaking municipal pipes and poor maintenance means that several student residences operate without water.

The campus itself will require many millions of rands for a major facelift.

There are dangerously visible cracks on some of the outside walls. Catering on campus is sparse. The grass is dead brown and the seats in a major lecture hall are still the basic wooden-desk structures from earlier decades.

In short, the campus is beginning to look like the city, and this spells danger for future enrolments at this accomplished university.

In elite education institutions, prestige is largely measured by what you project through your physical facilities and technological infrastructure.

The middle classes can be brutal – they choose schools and universities based on what they see and not only on stories about a glorious past.

If not impressed, they take their money elsewhere, to the benefit of other elite universities.

SA needs a world-class university outside of the large metropoles of Cape Town and Johannesburg.

It is vital that the national government, municipalities, the private sector, the university and surrounding communities urgently and collectively compose a major revitalisation plan for such an important national asset.

Such an intervention will have to include a heavy hand from the national government in sorting out the incessant infighting within the Makana municipality, which has a direct bearing on the chaotic management of the city and the campus.

If not, this prized institution will quickly become UTWOCR – The University that was once called Rhodes.