Nothing sinister about paucity of black professors at UCT

University limited by the small pool to choose from,

PROFESSOR Xolela Mangcu, one of the University of Cape Town’s significant public intellectuals, attacks its new admissions policy by extrapolating from some shocking statistics on the paucity of black academic staff at the institution (“Ripping the veil off UCT’s whiter shades of pale”, July 6).

There is no disagreement between us on the lamentable lack of demographic transformation among senior academic staff.

Yet Mangcu does not make any argument that connects the one with the other, and if I had space I would demonstrate that the factors underlying the staff demographic profile are quite distinct from the student profile and have no bearing on the admissions policy.

Nevertheless, it is very much in the public interest to understand the challenges of employment equity in academia.

Although Mangcu presented the employment statistics as if they were exposés, they are not revelations to the university leadership. These data are our own research; we publicise and submit them in annual reports; we agonise about how to address the problems and, contrary to Mangcu’s dismay that his colleagues do not speak out against inequality, thousands of hours are spent by them in various forums tackling the problem.

Mangcu implies that the reason for such embarrassingly low numbers of black professors is racism at UCT, referring to the discrimination against black academics in the 1950s and 1960s as evidence. Yes, there was racism in many aspects of university life. But it is a tendentious rewriting of history to deny UCT’s many challenges to the apartheid system, its reputation with the security police as “Moscow on the Hill”, and its successful manipulation of the notorious ministerial permit system to admit black students to the university when they were denied access to whitesonly universities.

Thus it is a superficial argument that simply blames historic endemic racism at UCT as the root cause of failed transformation, particularly given much greater degrees of racism and collusion with apartheid at most other universities and technikons.

Here is UCT’s analysis of the problem. It generally takes more than 20 years from getting a PhD to becoming a professor.

The pool of South African black academics available for appointment to professorship today is a proportion of the pool of black PhD graduates in 1994.

Given our history, this was a small pool. Few in that small pool chose academic careers over offers from the new government, civil service and big companies, which were all desperate to recruit highly skilled black professionals. This is not a UCT problem — it is a national university sector problem.

Mangcu makes much of UCT having no African women professors (although we had one in 2012). If we exclude the University of South Africa (Unisa) — which accounts for about 30% of all students nationally with staff primarily involved in distance education — there are 28 African women professors in the whole country. Spread across 22 universities, it comes as no surprise that 17 have either none or only one.

Regarding the total numbers of African professors, they are low all round. Only eight universities have more than UCT.

The relative size of universities is also a factor. The universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Johannesburg, North West and Pretoria are about twice the size of UCT with twice as many staff. Only three out of 23 universities, including Unisa, have more coloured professors than UCT.

Clearly this is a national problem that we must tackle together without mud-slinging.

What are we doing for employment equity at UCT?

We are not lowering the standard for appointment as or promotion to professor for nonwhites. This would reinforce racial stereotypes and set transformation back. It is the exposure to black professors who are in every way as distinguished as their white colleagues that changes mindsets — black and white alike.

We nevertheless have a strenuous employment equity policy. At professorial level, this may lead to selecting a black applicant who meets the appointment criteria over a stronger white one. At junior levels, this leads to consideration of potential, not just achievement, with a commitment to developing that potential. The criteria for each job are reviewed to see if we can appoint someone at a lower level than professor if there are no eligible black candidates. But, often, policies may not be implemented as planned.

In view of this, I commissioned a review of all professor and associate professor selection processes over the past three years to see whether any black candidates were overlooked. Once completed, we will share these results with the national transformation oversight committee because we believe the challenges are sector-wide.

When we encounter a candidate from the designated groups for whom we do not have a post, we have a special fund to employ that candidate to provide a development opportunity for competing in future.

We are also aware of the importance of retaining black staff. All staff who resign are interviewed to establish whether UCT could have done something to retain them.

These anonymous interviews are collated and reported to the university transformation advisory committee and to council.

We have special programmes to accelerate academic careers. Normally, progressing up the ranks from junior lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer, associate professor to professor may take five years for each stage.

For example, over 10 years, 600 academics have been through the emerging researchers programme, which helps to kick-start their research with training, supervision and mentors and provides research grants without requiring a track record.

We remain frustrated at the slow progress, but foresee a future with a majority of academic staff being black — as is already the case with nonacademic staff (72% black).

Price is vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town