In 1999, Prof Derrick Swartz took an enormous risk when he accepted the position of vice-chancellor at the University of Fort Hare. Ironically, that university enjoyed its golden years during apartheid when it served, as all universities should, as a bastion of principle and intellect where the illicit, cruel and inhumane policy of apartheid was dissected, questioned, rejected and resisted.
Beyond the revolutionary leaders it cultivated, UFH also enjoyed niches of excellence which few other institutions could match, including its phenomenal agricultural teaching and research.
With iron determination, Swartz took UFH through an institutional revolution and dragged it kicking and screaming into the century in which it was expected to function. He reintroduced the idea of a university that should be engaged in teaching, research and community engagement.
He introduced proper procurement and other financial systems which served to disable corruption.
When he left in 2007, the university was certainly not where he would’ve wanted it — but it was on the right trajectory. He took it from a university in financial ruin to one that enjoyed a surplus in the bank. He had established innovative connections with institutions across the world and the university once again enjoyed respect and goodwill.
From the day he left, entropy again took over. The internal decay manifested externally in growing student debt, financial collapse, increasingly tatty buildings, and ruined residences in which students were expected to function and where they were exposed to horrific incidents of sexual and other violence by those who were not even entitled to be there. It slowly devolved into a place of bogus professors, unaccredited courses, fake degrees for the powerful, extreme corruption, intimidation and even assassination.
It is an institution that has forgotten a university’s raison d'être. It has turned its back on its mission of providing a “high quality education of international standard and contributing to the advancement of knowledge that is socially and ethically relevant”.
As an institution it has demonstrated a serious deficit in the areas of principle, accountability, transparency and integrity. It is a place where senior staff doing battle with the corrupt require expensive VIP protection. It is as far from academia as an institution can get.
The current vice-chancellor Prof Sakhela Buhlungu is fighting a mammoth battle with too few allies. It is a battle he can never win if people in government, many of whom enjoyed an education there, don’t step up and help him return the university to those values that animate our constitution and which should be the bedrock on which any university is built. It is time they step up and accept responsibility for an institution they claim to care about.