Why Stellenbosch’s Wilgenhof residence should be closed

After a pleasant dinner on Tuesday with good friends, who also happen to be very influential South Africans, one of them pulled me aside on the slow walk to our cars and asked urgently: “What is going on at Stellenbosch University?”

For a long time I have said very little on the saga that is Wilgenhof, the 123-year-old men’s residence found in a panel investigation to be a place where “absolute power [was] wielded by white men without consequence” and observed “the use of such power with impunity to coerce, oppress, to victimise, to humiliate”.

Stories of frightening abuse emerged from former residents and dark rooms where racist paraphernalia including Klan-like costumes were “discovered”, thereby heightening the emotional valences around a decision about what to do with Wilgenhof.

In my time at the University of the Free State, I had my fair share of troubles with what seemed to be white Afrikaans existential angst about the closing of white male residences which had operated with impunity for decades.

The most notorious case of course was the Reitz residence, where four white male students had racially abused five black workers who cleaned their rooms.

But there were other instances of revolt against university management, and one was the decision to rename Huis JBM Hertzog as Beyers Naude Residence, another Afrikaner but one whose life and work represented kindness, decency and inclusion.

Extreme pushback was inevitable and in one case a student secretly recorded a talk by my dean of students, an energetic argument for change at a house meeting of the rez, and the Afrikaans papers did their headline reporting with glee.

But we transformed the residences anyway.

What makes Wilgenhof a sticky process is not the recommendation to close the residence.

It was a series of missteps that played right into the hands of some very powerful alumni, white men with deep pockets and an enviable Rolodex of top lawyers.

And the most important of those missteps is also the most common to be found in dysfunctional universities as I reported in my book, Corrupted: when the chief office bearers of a university do not stay in their lanes.

The crisis that then unfolded at Stellenbosch was not only foreseeable, it was also completely avoidable.

There are three office-bearers at fault here.

The chancellor should never have been involved in the Wilgenhof deliberations at all. It is not his job.

Put simply, his assignment is to show up at graduations, cap our students and, by sheer weight of personal accomplishment as a former judge of our highest court, make us all feel good about ourselves.

Nothing else.

That the judge was a former resident of Wilgenhof should have been added caution not to comment on or be involved in the process.

A governance purist would argue that the vice-chancellor should not have shared information about Wilgenhof with the chancellor at any stage to protect both of them in the event of any slippage on the road to closing the residence.

I agree, but it is not unusual for a vice-chancellor to quietly seek wisdom from or share ideas with a chancellor; all heads of universities do that.

In this case, it did not turn out well since the chancellor went public and accused the vice-chancellor of altering the panel report before it went to council, the highest decision-making body of a university.

Where the panel report recommended closure of the residence, it also held out the possibility of an alternative resolution that transformed the residence without shutting it down.

And then there is the council chair who apparently did not inform the governance body of the altered report in which the alternate resolution was removed or repositioned in the final report.

This too was a mistake and when “management interference” came to Afrikaans media attention, all hell broke lose, with one important consequence: a principled decision to close was now challenged in both courts (law, and public opinion) thereby overshadowing the reason for the recommendation in the first place — a troubled, violent space with racist birthmarks that humiliated generations of young men in the course of pursuing higher education.

Readers from outside the world of Afrikaans universities and residences would no doubt be stumped by a simple question: why can’t the Wilgenhof men “see” the dangers and delusions of a troubled rez?

In part it is because of indoctrination where over decades what was offensive became normalised.

And in part because Wilgenhof offers respite from a decent, democratising world on the outside of campus, a closed-off space where racial and class privilege can still operate unmoored from any accountability.

That is why the council should close Wilgenhof and not be distracted by the sideshows that came with unfortunate missteps in governance and management.