In order to understand the crisis now facing South Africa's universities, one has a choice of starting points. One could focus on the fact that three of them collapsed so badly - financially and administratively - in the last year that they have had to be put under administration (Zululand, Walter Sisulu and Tshwane University of Technology), while a fourth, the Vaal University of Technology, has had an Assessor appointed to monitor the university's state of governance.

Several others are, to put it mildly, in a rocky state. The University of Venda, for example, is probably still the only one where a Vice Chancellor has used both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft to cow student protests.

At the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) management is sensitive about lecturers referring to the strife-ridden institution as "Caput". To be fair, the phrase could be used of many other institutions too.

Alternatively, one could start with the recent statements by the Minister for Higher Education, Blade Nzimande. In April 2011 he announced plans to make all students learn an African language and make their graduation conditional upon their passing it. This could have led to an interesting discussion about which are the leading African languages but, of course, it was hurriedly explained that Afrikaans for some reason didn't count and that was what meant was one of the nine "black" South African tongues. Given that it is the preferred (and often only) language of the Coloured population of the Western and Northern Cape, this is tantamount to a declaration that Coloureds (a) aren't black enough and (b) therefore don't count.

There is also a strange parochialism to this. If you really wish to burden, say, an engineering student with a language qualification and he commits himself to spend his working life in Africa, what would be the leading African languages that he needed? English would clearly be No.1, with French second, Arabic third and either KiSwahili or Portuguese fourth. Given South Africa's urgent skill shortages it simply boggles the mind that one might fail otherwise competent dentists, doctors, engineers or architects because they had, for example, failed their Pedi exam.

Moreover, high schools across the country already report a complete shortage of properly qualified and capable teachers of African languages, so where are all these university-level teachers of these languages to come from?

In January 2012 Nzimande went further by announcing that by 2030 the number of students in tertiary education had to quintuple to 5.5 million, with university students increasing from under 900,000 to 1.5 million. To be fair, any minister who announces what will happen in 18 years time is really just yarning - what he means is "Nobody's given me the money or the go-ahead for this but what I'd like to see, many years after I have quit this post and when some other poor sucker has to deliver on whatever promises I make now, is ------" But it would be sensible to take him seriously: as elevated an authority as Graeme Bloch immediately welcomed his plans as "great". You have been warned.

For there is little doubt that such a plan, in the absence of any plan to improve South African school education, would simply destroy whichever universities still remained afloat at that date. Already universities, even at the upper end of the range, are struggling with the fact that they are admitting legions of ineducable youths, the sad products of lousy schools, who fail, drop out, protest and sometimes riot.

As anyone who has taught in such a situation will know, this also produces an unavoidable and steep drop in standards. Already it is the case that as much as the whole bottom half of university entrants should simply not be in tertiary education at all. But if the further 600,000 underneath even them is to be added to the mix, it is difficult to see how any university will survive. If, after all, they routinely fail 80-90% of their entry, which they're bound to do if they attempt to preserve any standards at all, they will face insurmountable trouble both from students and the government. But if they pass even half of the 1.5 million, they will have ceased to be universities in any meaningful sense. That's quite some catch, that catch-22, as Yossarian would have said.

So, we could start at any of those points, all of them at the macro level. But sometimes it is sensible to zero in at the micro-level. Let us, for example, examine the recently circulated document by the Dean of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Professor Nobuhle Hlongwa, setting out the "Vision for Teaching and Learning" to which academic faculty members are all expected to sign on. The first objective is "We need to produce graduates who should be confident of their degrees and not aspire (sic) other international qualifications, aspire to be Europeans". Difficult to engender such confidence, one imagines, if it is clear that the Dean herself has a shaky grasp of English syntax or grammar.

But Professor Hlongwa has only begun to develop her theme. "Curriculum transformation", she declares, will have a special "emphasis on African knowledge production". The use of language, she says, "is at the centre of curriculum transformation...Knowledge is produced through languages unknown to the African population. This perpetuates exclusion of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS)". We then get the usual obligatory bow to "the African Philosophy of Ubuntu" and the section ends with a series of increasingly ungrammatical sentences such as "Skilling students so that they are more equipped for employment", which has no main verb, subject or predicate.

Already one feels one is some way into a Naipaul novel. But more awaits. Hlongwa's next section is entitled "To deepen excellence in both UG and PG teaching and learning". Dimly, one descries that that must mean under-graduate and post-graduate and that "deepening excellence" is a strange hybrid born, on the one hand, of endless UKZN self-advertisement about "excellence" and the usual SACP rant about "deepening democracy". But how is excellence to be deepened? "Use various computer tools to support teaching and learning of international standards, e.g. Wiki, Glossary, YouTube, Blogs, Hot potato, Mendeley and Twitter. These tools encourage collaboration, communication and need for critical digital literacies." Though not, clearly, ordinary English literacy. At this point one stops aghast. In major universities overseas lecturers battle to stop students wasting their time on Facebook and Twitter and keep emphasising that proper research does NOT mean Wikipedia. Here all these things are being enjoined as part of "learning of international standards (sic)".

Hlongwa's next section is "To revisit the culture of reading in the College so that the percentage of reading in our students will be on par with international norms" but I will spare readers the sheer pain of the thing. The AIKS and pain. Not even Evelyn Waugh in Scoop or Black Mischief invented sentences quite like that.

This is not just a gripe by a native English-speaker. UKZN has a formal 20 year plan to install isiZulu as a co-equal language of instruction and research. Already all administration jobs are effectively closed to non-Zulu speakers. Yet we hear all the time of how keen the government is on being part of BRICS. If you go to Moscow or Delhi or Bejing or Sao Paolo you will find an enormous emphasis on promoting English, including the notion of getting Chinese, Indian, Brazialian and Russian students to do their degrees in English if possible. Because that allows students to access the treasure-house of literature and science that English provides, because world markets work ever more in English, because it is still spreading like wildfire as the international lingua franca.

Yet UKZN already had all that these BRIC universities are aiming at, would even have been in a good position to offer English-language degrees to other BRIC students. And yet it is precisely all that which is being threatened and thrown away.

If you walk back onto that campus, two things strike you. First, the place is absolutely filthy. Electric lights and air conditioners don't work, grime, dirt and vegetation are growing on every surface with shrubs and trees growing out of gutters, roofs  and walls. The place is utterly run down, including the academic faculty who are depressed, nervous, intimidated and desperate to leave. The talk is all of increased work loads, of how people who spoke out like Nathaya Chetty or John Van den Berg have been forced out, how the administration is in chaos - and how the Vice Chancellor, William Makgoba, has awarded himself the highest salary of any university head in South Africa.

The administration of the university seems perilously near to breakdown. On the palm trees of Howard College there are still fading posters about UKZN being "The premier university of African scholarship" but, one realises, the most authentically African phenomenon is the vast gulf of inequality between the Big Man and his vast salary on the one hand, and  the cowering workers on the filthy campus on the other.

To track back a bit, as they say on film. Makgoba was, famously, rejected at Wits after a huge battle. Makgoba talked of the university's "dominant Eurocentrism" and claimed his enemies were "a small inbred elite", but all the evidence is that those who stood up to Makgoba at Wits saved that university from the sort of thing which is going on at UKZN now. In which case, you'd imagine, they should be carried shoulder-high by large cheering crowds wherever they go and anyone who criticised them at the time ought now to be humbly begging their pardon.

Notoriously, Makgoba carried out an all-out assault on the white males who constituted the majority of UKZN's faculty, calling them "baboons" and "banobos" who were badly in need of "treatment and a proper African rehabilitation" (see here). Indeed, only when they ate, talked, sang and danced like Africans did they have any hope of being re-admitted to the human race. This was nothing less than a declaration of a sort of racial war against non-Africans, the next step being a major campaign to uncover alleged racism on the part of distinguished Indian doctors at UKZN's medical school.

Like all the other professional schools at UKZN - engineering, architecture, psychology, accountancy and so on - there is now a real danger of losing recognition by the appropriate professions, without which, of course, these departments cannot continue.

Inevitably this unashamed nativism created a political opportunity for the dying Department of Zulu, which was perishing from a sheer lack of students. Under Makgoba the department grew to become the School of isiZulu Studies, with more staff and resources - but since they had so few students to teach they were obviously available to occupy powerful positions in the administration, which is perhaps how Professor Hlongwa (a professor of isiZulu) became Dean. In effect Makgoba, backed by Nzimande, has written a ticket which empowers such folk.

In theory the objective is a bilingual university. But everyone knows that isiZulu can never be taken seriously as a tertiary level language of instruction and scholarship unless an immense job of translation of complex and difficult texts in every subject is done. And the only people who can possibly do that immense job are, well, people like Professor Hlwonga - and they are much too busy being Deans, so that job is not being done and will not ever be done.

Which doesn't really matter because the real, political point of all this is not actually to achieve anything worthwhile for the Zulu language but to browbeat and bully the non-African faculty, make them feel inadequate and one down and thus willing to genuflect to the new Big Men. Because that is what Big Men want and need.

Of course Professors Makgoba and Hlongwa would have us believe that they are involved in an intellectual project, one which is all about being "an African university" and, indeed, African Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Yes, we are, again, in the land of AIKS and PAINS (Primordial African Indigenous Nonsense Squared). Yet there is no African physics and French physics, there is just physics - and the same applies to every other subject.

It's even true of history and anthropology: to do a good job on South African material you need knowledge of international comparators and the theory gained from those comparisons. The fact that knowledge is not compartmentalized along national or continental lines is such a delusion that it is simply embarrassing to see grown men or women ensnared by it.

The only interesting question is whether this is a conscious delusion (i.e. at heart they know it's nonsense) or whether it's an unconscious delusion (i.e. they really believe it). It is very difficult to think that anyone is really foolish enough to believe it. After all, not only do none of the BRIC nations believe in, say, Russian, Chinese or Indian physics, but nor do even countries like Cuba believe in Cuban physics.

Nor, indeed, do most African countries believe in such nonsense: this is seriously nutty stuff. But if this is a conscious delusion - if it's something they don't really believe but just want to argue for, then that constitutes a crime against this and future generations of black youth, who will have all this AIKS and PAINS rubbish inculcated into them.

One can't help suspecting that this is the case. Think again about the first injunction in Hlongwa's circular: students mustn't even aspire to having international qualifications. What does this say? That black South African students are innately inferior? That they must never aspire to what white, Indian and Coloured kids aspire to (or Russians or Chinese)? Is this not the doctrine of those deeply convinced by apartheid?

Think again of Professor Hlongwa's injunctions where students who aspire to international qualifications are equated with "to be Europeans". Clearly, woe betide any UKZN student who wants to do what William Makgoba did and pursue his/her studies overseas. Indeed, it's worse than that. When Prof. Hlongwa says "to be Europeans", there is not just the casual meaning that if a student goes on to, say, Geneva, they get a Swiss education. As we all know, this harks back quite deliberately to the old apartheid usage of "Europeans" and "non-Europeans", and what Hlwonga is saying is that students who don't follow the prescribed Africa-only course will not only be influenced by foreign models; they will actually be Europeans, which is to say, not only whites but pro-apartheid whites. Or, if black, then sell-outs. Which, in turn, means they will be cast into the outer darkness as lost souls forever.

What is actually going on here was best described by Frank Parkin in his famous Marxism and Class Theory: a Bourgeois Critique. As Parkin showed, not just classes but all groups, many of them far smaller than classes, are capable, following Weber, of operating social closure against any perceived competitors - almost invariably for economic gain. If we are frank, we have all seen examples of this in action.

The classic way, of course, is by professions having professional exams whereby they control the entry of others into their profession and thereby maintain their monopoly position so they can set monopolistic prices for their services. This is why most professions keenly insist that the profession itself will set, mark and control all such exams. In practice they are not only "maintaining standards" but operating social closure against outside others in order to maintain or increase their own privileges.

What Makgoba and Hlongwa are trying to do is to operate social closure against non-Africans - and, already, non-Zulus. They are trying to insist that only "African scholarship", "African research" and AIKS are legitimate. So the aim, transparently, is to exclude and marginalise whites, Indians and Coloureds. Why? Is it revenge? Is there a belief that blacks are inately inferior and cannot stand against competition from talented minorities? But that too would be a crime against black students, who can only gain from interaction with the best students and lecturers that the minority groups can produce.

This is, indeed, just an attempted linguistic/intellectual way of saying what Makgoba did so plainly when he started off by demanding that whites eat, talk, dance and sing like Africans. All he is trying to do is set the bar at such a height that few if any non-Africans can ever jump over it. It goes without saying that this will destroy any proper university and that sort of ridiculous racial parochialism has no future at all in a globalized world.

While many will simply dismiss the likes of Makgoba and Hlongwa as oddballs, it should be seen that Nzimande is playing much the same game. After all, we all know that mother-tongue education at primary level is the key and that anyone who really wants to help African languages will start there and will, above all, do something to ensure there is a proper supply of well-qualified and capable language teachers.

Only racial or language chauvinists could object to that. But what on earth is Nzimande doing suggesting instead that one operate a process of social closure at graduate level, passing only engineers, medics and so on who are proficient in Zulu, Xhosa or Pedi? Such a scheme would quickly throw the entire economy into crisis, causing huge job losses, so what on earth is Nzimande playing at? The answer has a lot more to do with Zulu nationalism than anything to do with workers or Communism.

Nzimande, it should be realised, has simply hitched a ride on Zuma's Zulu caravan. Compared to Kotane, Hani or Slovo, he is a negligible figure. Just how absurd his position is was revealed a week ago when Cosatu moved to its new HQ. The SACP, it turns out, exists only at Cosatu's grace and favour and has to have its HQ in the Cosatu building. But even to move from one building to another was beyond it. Removal expenses would be R140,000 and the SACP couldn't pay that so Vavi had to pass the hat around the unions to pay their moving expenses and on top of that had to launch an appeal for people to donate furniture to them as well so they could run their office.

This is, in other words, a bankrupt organization, quite unable to pay its secretary-general in the style to which he has now become accustomed. There is, indeed, an uncanny parallel to the way in which Nzimande is a rich man with a salary in the millions, a huge car and all manner of perks, presiding over a bankrupt organization and Makgoba, on his enormous salary, presiding over his stricken wreck of a university. This is classic African Big Man stuff - but it also means that Nzimande is almost literally a tinpot politician.

The South African elite resides mainly in Gauteng and Cape Town and is thus generally not much bothered by whatever happens in KwaZulu-Natal. This is a very large mistake. It meant that they did not see the rise of Jacob Zuma coming until it happened and they still have not adjusted to the fact that the country is now effectively run by a Durban elite. For the same reasons it worth paying attention to what is happening at UKZN.

Most of the other universities that are going down the tubes are old Bantustan creations or desperate attempts to imagine that some of the old techs can be turned into universities simply by changing their names. But UKZN was once one of the country's leading liberal English-speaking universities. Moreover, the twin  architects of its destruction - William Makgoba and Blade Nzimande - are both UKZN products themselves. It is a situation that Mary Shelley might have appreciated for, as it turned out, the university was building not one but two Frankensteins who would come back to savage them.

The remarkable thing is that this is being allowed to happen. UKZN is - or was - a major national resource, one of the top South African universities turning out well-educated graduates that the regional and national economies both desperately need. It has already been damaged almost beyond repair and another few years of the current regime will sink it altogether. Why let this happen ? Makgoba was, after all, entirely dispensable at Wits. Why let him ruin UKZN? Nzimande is even more dispensable At any moment that Vavi snaps his fingers, after all, the SACP will simply have to shut up shop.

It would take another essay to explore quite why the Zuma government has thus far allowed Makgoba/Nzimande to do the damage they have to higher education. Doubtless, it is not a key concern for Zuma but one would think that his economics ministers would warn the President that we - and he - cannot afford the catastrophe which is now unfolding.

RW Johnson

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

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