Fat cats ruining tertiary education
From Cape Town to Pretoria, the leadership of South African universities is in complete disarray.
At UCT, a panel investigating governance at the university rushed to release an interim report with this extraordinary announcement about the chair of council: the facts to date “are sufficient to conclude that her continued presence as chair of council poses a serious risk to the university” and that “she cannot be trusted to fulfil her judiciary duty to the university.”
Wow! You would be hard pressed in 100 years’ existence of the South African university to find a sharper public rebuke of the head of governance at any higher education institution.
Before the council could fire its head, per the panel’s astounding finding, the chair resigned in what was clearly a pre-emptive strike; it is better to resign that to have “fired” on your curriculum vitae.
At Unisa on the other side of the country, one of SA’s most astute assessors of the higher education enterprise, Professor Themba Mosia, found that the university was mismanaged and misgoverned to the extent that both management and council, he proposed for consideration, should be relieved of their duties.
What made the headlines though were revelations of profligate expenditure by the vice-chancellor with reports of R8,000 spent on training in the use of an expensive vacuum cleaner for a house with few carpets and a expensive 4x4 being bought for R1.9m when the budget only allowed for R1.2m.
The defence was that you needed a near-R2m luxury vehicle to visit Unisa’s operations in far-flung areas; yes, they treat us as idiots.
Meanwhile, a third South African vice-chancellor (Dan Kgwadi) died on the job at a university that has had more assessors and administrators than most, the Vaal University of Technology.
This is a stressful position that also took the vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University a few years ago (Russell Botman) and before that TB Davie at UCT.
In the meantime, the vicechancellor of the University of Fort Hare is simply trying to stay alive having survived assassination attempts on his life though some of his staff were not as fortunate as they tried to turn off the taps that siphoned off university money to the vultures that drink our institutions dry.
The truth is that the cupboard is bare when it comes to replacement leadership of our universities. Good leaders do not want this job because it can damage your health and sink your reputation in an instant given unrelenting political pressure, campus instabilities and perilous state funding.
Mediocre leaders then rise to fill the gap because they see the opportunity for personal enrichment, ego-enhancement, and public status. There are a few actions we can take to weed out these weak and mediocre leaders in council and management.
An easy step forward is to take away the extravagant financial incentives. It is unthinkable in this day and age that a vice-chancellor gets a furnished house and millionrand luxury vehicle from a university. Most university heads do not get these perks, so this kind of enrichment is unfair on its face.
It is a toxic legacy from our past and must be stopped. UCT and Unisa should sell their fancy residences for vice-chancellors and invest that money in sustainable student funding plans; if there are regulations that prevent such redirection of assets, shut down the perks anyway. The message to aspirant leaders should be simple and straightforward: if you want this job, buy your own house and bring your own car.
Why? These are public institutions funded by the taxpayer. These extravagances are allowed at the same time as students are dropping out because they can’t afford university (I have been counselling some struggling families this week and it is heartbreaking); how do they sleep at night, these fat cats, knowing that they are surrounded by hungry students and those who can’t afford textbooks? At the same time, set a cap on vice-chancellor salaries.
There is a Council on Higher Education report on this scandal of multimillion-rand salaries and perks that has yet to be released. I have more than a sneaking suspicion that the reason this report is being concealed from public view is that the findings are explosive and will put egg on a lot of faces. Among many other reasons, the cap on salaries is important since vice-chancellors are not captains of industry in the private sector but public university leaders.
Another easy and reasonable action would be to abolish fees for attending council meetings. Believe it or not, the Assessor’s report on Unisa found that “council honorarium increased by 26% from 2019 to 2020 and by 28.4% from 2021 to 2022.”
Can you imagine the time taken in university council meetings to debate increases to their own remittances? This is scandalous. It should be an honour to serve on the council of a public university and such a duty should not become a way of putting money into your own pockets. This is why the wrong kinds of leaders, whether as council members or vice-chancellors, rise to the top. Take away the incentive.
These are some of the easy fixes to wayward leadership in the university sector. However, there is also a lot of self-interest that will resist these simple resolutions of a smelly and longstanding scandal in higher education leadership.