CHAPTER SIX “PULLED UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS” –
THE UNIVERSITY OF FORT HARE
6.1 INTRODUCTION
The University of Fort Hare has an illustrious history of struggle against the apartheid regime and was the seat of learning of famous world leaders and Nobel Laureates, like former President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, amongst others. Nestled in the rural town of Alice in the Eastern Cape, near the foothills of the Amatola Mountains, Fort Hare, as it is commonly known, is the oldest black university in South Africa, having been established in 1916. The campus consist of old, historic stone buildings having been designed by renowned architect Sir Herbert Baker, who designed many important national buildings and monuments during the period. Throughout the decades, Fort Hare has been the incubator for resistance and dissent against the repressive apartheid regime, gave rise to a black intellectualism that led the struggle for the freedom the country now enjoys. The university currently houses the archives of the liberation movements, including structures such as the African National Congress, the Pan African Congress, Azanian People’s Organization and the Black Conscious movement of Steve Biko (I: Thandi).
Notwithstanding its illustrious history, Fort Hare has had its share of the adversity that characterised most HBUs in the 1980s and 1990s, namely, mismanagement, huge debt, student unrest and allegations of corruption. In 1999, a damning report commissioned by the Minister of Education claimed that Fort Hare was “very dysfunctional” and recommended that the university be “shut down if its budget is not balanced within three years” (Vergani, 1999, p. 1). In March, 2000, a charismatic and visionary Vice Chancellor was appointed who, together with his team, performed what appeared to be nearly impossible in 1999. Within a mere two years, Fort Hare was “Pulled back from the brink by the boot straps,” to use the phrase commonly attributed to the Vice Chancellor, Derrick Swartz (I: Thandi). The 90 million rands overdraft has been reduced to approximately 43 million rands over a three-year period (DoF). Student debt recovery, which was at 16 % when the new administration took over in 2000, rose to 92 % in 2004 (I: DoF). A concerted effort has been made to appoint staff of high caliber who has contributed to raising the research profile of the university (I: Fatuh; Gumbi; Nyazi). In early 2004, the East London campus of Rhodes University was incorporated into Fort Hare as part of the restructuring of the higher education sector in the Eastern Cape.
6.2 RESEARCH CULTURE
Given the apartheid history of Fort Hare, it comes as no surprise that nearly all participants in the study opined that research was never a strong point for the university , citing historical factors as the reason (I: Fatuh; Henry; Otto; Sipho; Thandi). As noted, the apartheid regime never intended the HBUs to become generators of knowledge, and thus they functioned mainly as undergraduate universities (I: Thandi). Their focus was on teaching limited to areas such as theology, agriculture and education amongst others. The participants painted a dismal picture of the university prior to the change in management in early 2000. According to the participants, there have been serious attempts to build the research profile of Fort Hare since 2000. When Fatuh, a foreign academic came to Fort Hare in 1997, the institution was undergoing major administrative and managerial challenges. The two main constraints in respect of research that he encountered were: 1) the absence of a research culture and, 2) a lack of funding for research (I: Fatuh). All other constraints related to research, appear to have emanated from these two, he claimed.
Dirk, a senior academic who has been with the institution for 25 years, contended that while a few academics in his faculty of agricultural and environmental sciences engaged in research over the years, Fort Hare has “never been a research university” and its “research profile was anything but healthy.” Others like Miso, Gumbi, Nyazi and Thembi expressed similar views. Gumbi, for example, stated that there was an absence of a research culture, no equipment or chemicals in the laboratories and no money to purchase these or to conduct research (I: Gumbi). In order to understand this historical absence of a research culture at Fort Hare, it is necessary to take a sojourn into history.
According to Thandi, the librarian, Fort Hare never had a good library to support research because of its predominantly teaching focus with little academic engagement in research. She observed that after the promulgation of the Separate Universities Act in 1959, there had been a huge exodus of academics from Fort Hare.36 This recurred when the town of Alice and its university, Fort Hare, were incorporated into the Ciskei homeland in 1976, and again after the 1994 democratic elections, when academics left the institution to serve in the new democratic government (I: Thandi). 37 Thandi asserted that Fort Hare was “deliberately run down during the apartheid years” and by the Ciskei government thereafter, who did not tolerate research that infringed on their policies. She described an incident where the homeland government expelled a professor of agriculture because he had published research that contradicted the homeland’s capacity to honour its agricultural policy of providing “two meals a day” for the people.
Furthermore, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after Alice became part of the Ciskei homeland, white academics left the town to settle in neighbouring Fort Beaufort, a mere 20 km outside Alice but within the borders of South Africa. This led to the demise of Alice as a small university town, which, in turn, affected its ability to attract business and development. As a result, Alice today is a spectre of a town with little infrastructure, as well as a lack of good schools and shopping facilities. The majority of academic and other staff commute to Fort Hare from King Williams Town (60 km), East London (120 km) and Grahamstown (120 km). Thandi explained that it was not by choice that she resided in King Williams Town where her children could attend school. She contended that a lack of appropriate accommodation and infrastructure was part of the reason why Fort Hare had such difficulty in attracting the calibre of academics that would develop research at the institution (I: Thandi). Academic Zukov, for example, explained that it was difficult to find the time for research not only because of the heavy teaching load but also because three hours a day was spent commuting from East London to Alice and back.
Senior manager, Henry, indicated that the Vice Chancellor had made several appeals to the local government to upgrade the town’s facilities, in particular, the road infrastructure leading to the university. Reference to this problem by the Vice Chancellor, in a public speech in March 2004, reveals not only that these appeals have not yet been heeded by the local government, but that it has become a matter of serious concern to the university as it carves out its new role as an institution of higher learning in a democratic South Africa.
The views of academics and postgraduates confirmed Thandi’s contention that the academic environment during the apartheid years was not conducive to research. Academic Miso explained that when he arrived at the institution in 1997, “the university faced it’s own institutional challenges… most of the time has been used, for the last four years… (to) respond to all the internal challenges… (and) serious financial problems that threatened its existence.” He evinced that the uncertainty that existing at the time prevented him from engaging in research projects and his “research productivity was compromised… the work was difficult to do because even the support system was not there… the library, the research laboratories, funds.” Miso claimed, however, that things improved with the change in management:
Things started looking up actually some time in 2001… they were stabilized and there were controls put in place… So, I’ll say it is only now that Fort Hare is coming up to meet its internal challenges and it’s now, I think, in a better position to join the mainstream of other South African institutions – to respond to national challenges.
Zukov, who came to the university in 1994, claimed that in 1995 the university was in serious trouble and “decay”. He stated that “there was no funding at all” and the NRF had turned down funding requests stating that Fort Hare did not have the infrastructure to undertake research. Zukov contended, “There are some changes now… the situation is slightly improved. This year the budget is decent.” He is supervising two masters and two doctoral students. From a student perspective, Mbuyo, a newly appointed junior academic who had been a student at the university during its troubled times in the 90s, claimed that the recent changes have been drastic. According to Mbuyo, whereas there was much student unrest then, students were more work focussed and accountable now, and there has been a change in student-staff relationships from confrontational to professional. All the participants indicated that, despite the historical problems, the efforts of the new management since 2000 have improved the research culture at Fort Hare. Thandi noted that there was a backlog of attention to physical infrastructure across the university, which made it difficult for management to focus solely on prioritizing research. The funding arrangements, discussed further below, make it difficult for Fort Hare to honour its commitment to research. It is difficult to establish what funds are allocated to research because a special foundation, the Fort Hare Foundation, has been established for the channelling of external funding for teaching, research and capacity building and the administration and operation of the funded projects (I: Otto). Otto explained that Fort Hare generates funds from consultancy practices such as training and capacity building projects, for example, the project to build capacity among public servants through the Public Finance Service agency, a 100 million rands project run by the Fort Hare Institute. However, not much income was generated from patents or commercial research activities (I: Otto).
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