WITS: The Early Years

Bruce Murray

Description

WITS: The Early Years explores the struggle to establish a university in Johannesburg and the often dramatic and contested history of Wits University up to 1939.

WITS: The Early Years is a history of the University up to 1939. First established in 1922, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg developed out of the South African School of Mines in Kimberley circa 1896. Examining the historical foundations, the struggle to establish a university in Johannesburg, and the progress of the University in the two decades prior to World War II, historian Bruce Murray captures the quality and texture of life in the early years of Wits University and the personalities who enlivened it and contributed to its growth.



Particular attention is given to the wider issues and the challenges which faced Wits in its formative years. The book examines the role Wits came to occupy as a major centre of liberal thought and criticism in South Africa, its contribution to the development of the professions of the country, the relationship of its research to the wider society, and its attempts to grapple with a range of peculiarly South African problems, such as the admission of black students to the University and the relations of English- and Afrikaans-speaking white students within it. This edition of WITS: The Early Years is republished in the University’s centenary year with a preface by Keith Breckenridge.

Foreword by D.J. du Plessis

Foreword by Keith Breckenridge

Acknowledgements

Abbreviation

Part I: Prelude to a University

Chapter 1 False Start: Milner, Beit, and Smuts

Chapter 2 From School of Mines to University

Part II: The New University

Chapter 3 A Turbulent Beginning

Chapter 4 Administration, Finance, and Buildings

Chapter 5 Arts and Science

Chapter 6 The Professional Faculties

Part III: Raikes: The First Decade

Chapter 7 Depression and Recovery

Chapter 8 Ascendancy of the Professions

Part IV: Students and Special Issues

Chapter 9 Questions of Discrimination

Chapter 10 Student Life

A Note on Sources

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• EDUCATION
• Histoire
• Johannesburgo
• África
• History of education
• University of the Witwatersrand
• General officer
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa
• Johannesburg

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776148110
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

WITS
THE EARLY YEARS
Wits Press RE/PRESENTS
Wits University Press celebrates its centenary in 2022. Since its inception, the Press has been curating and publishing innovative research that informs debate to drive impactful change in society. Drawing on an extensive backlist dating from 1922, Wits Press Re/Presents is a new series that makes important research accessible to readers once again. While much of the content demonstrates its historical provenance, it remains of interest to researchers and students, and is re-published in e-book and print-on-demand formats.
WITS
THE EARLY YEARS
A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, JOHANNESBURG, AND ITS PRECURSORS 1896 – 1939
BRUCE K. MURRAY
Foreword by Keith Breckenridge
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Bruce Murray 1982
Foreword © Keith Breckenridge 2022
Published edition © Wits University Press 2022
First published 1982
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12022088080
978-1-77614-808-0 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-809-7 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-810-3 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-811-0 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover image: Wits in 1937, courtesy of Wits Central Records and Archives
To
Robert, Margaret
and
my friends and colleagues at
WITS
CONTENTS
Foreword to this edition by Keith Breckenridge
Foreword by D.J. du Plessis
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Part I: Prelude to a University
1 . False Start: Milner, Beit, and Smuts
2 . From School of Mines to University
Part II: The New University
3 . A Turbulent Beginning
4 . Administration, Finance, and Buildings
5 . Arts and Science
6 . The Professional Faculties
Part III: Raikes: The First Decade
7 . Depression and Recovery
8 . Ascendancy of the Professions
Part IV: Students and Special Issues
9 . Questions of Discrimination
10 . Student Life
A Note on Sources
Index
FOREWORD
B ruce Murray may be the least celebrated of the many important South African historians of the 1980s. One reason for this neglect is that his research specialisation – drawn from his mid-1960s theses at the University of Kansas – was on Lloyd George’s famous 1909 Budget. The first People’s Budget increased land and income taxes to fund the Liberal Party’s new pension, health and employment schemes and it set the fiscal lines of class conflict in modern Britain. It also triggered a revolt in the Lords, led by Alfred Milner, the former Imperial Proconsul in southern Africa, which hastened the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Labour Party. These long-term political consequences were more, as Murray shows, an accidental consequence of George’s fiery rhetoric than of a deliberate plan to lift the poor and fleece the middle class. Yet all of these questions around the fair distribution of tax and welfare remain powerful and unresolved in British politics, leading scholars back to the 1909 reforms and to Bruce Murray’s work. Sadly, their links to imperial, and especially South African, politics, have largely been forgotten, as much here as they have been in Britain.
In the republication of the history of Wits, two volumes of which were written by Murray, readers have an opportunity to explore the often dramatic and contested story of this university, and his two volumes, Murray’s distinctive style as writer. Perhaps to make up for the neglect of his excellent work on Lloyd George, Murray produced an intimate, almost scandalous intellectual history of the institution that served as his home for practically half a century. The first volume – this book – was published in 1982 (shortly after the modest and careful prose of the People’s Budget ), and the second almost a generation later, in 1997. Both share the skilled archival historian’s interest in the high drama and low stakes of personalised emotional conflicts. Murray was always, without being nasty about it, a serious institutional and scholarly gossip, irresistibly attracted to the small-beer political conflicts within departments and levels of the university, and between the different South African institutions. This interest in the personal character of scholarly conflicts, combined with his elegant and engaging writing style, give both books an engaging quality that most readers would not expect from a history – and especially from an institutional history.
This book is an expanded family history of the university, with the personal conflicts and political disagreements foregrounded in Murray’s narrative. Perhaps inevitably for a university struggling to establish itself as a serious and well-regarded centre of higher education in the middle of a wild and disorderly mining city, these disagreements turned, very often, on the private and political problems of its academic staff. The university’s first gifted and radical historian, W.M. Macmillan, was forced into resignation by the principal in 1933 because of an extra-marital affair. Margaret Ballinger, another brave and charismatic liberal lecturer in the department, was forced into retirement two years later after marrying her activist husband. My favourite example of the gentle, continuous scandal that defines the history of my university comes in his discussion, in the second volume, of the Economics Department’s ‘unanimous’ decision to fail Charles Feinstein’s Honours dissertation as suitable only ‘for Moscow University’. Feinstein would go on to become the most celebrated and influential economic historian of modern Britain. Many former Wits students will feel some sympathy for him, I suspect.
This first volume of the history of the University takes this story from the early years of the twentieth century, when Milner and his most ambitious followers began to consider the establishment of a university in Johannesburg, to the outbreak of World War II. In this short period the institution grew from being little more than a shack into a prodigious engine of globally influential professionalisation. One of the remarkable features of this transformation was its organisation around the education of a new generation of Jewish professionals. Throughout these years the university’s overall student body was nearly one-third Jewish, while the Medical School enrolment – to the state’s chagrin – was close to half, the vast majority of whom came from working class families in the city’s retailing economy. The great achievement of the institution in this period, as Murray shows, was its success in fostering a ‘large Jewish professional class on the Rand’. Less obvious, but as important, was the parallel transformation of the city’s white Afrikaans-speaking families, whose children made up nearly a quarter of the student body by the 1930s.
If Wits’s first generation was unmistakably a product of the city’s poorest white families’ boot-straps determination to access professional education (often delivered chaotically by the university), it was also deeply controversial and contested. Murray’s book is structured by six of these conflicts, which ran through the period from 1900 to 1940. The first, and unarguably the most long-lasting, was the bitter conflict between the city’s white electorate and the Smuts government, over its suitability as the site for a university. The second, strongly connected to the first problem, was the institution’s raison d’être as an instrument for the educational advancement of white people, in competition with the initially better-educated black residents of the city. Race was at the core of the university’s intellectual project from the outset, and the third theme, perhaps inevitably, was that the sciences of race and of race relations had profound effects on the kinds of teaching and research it professed. A fourth problematic, also alive and well into the present, was the persistent requirement to deliver tertiary education without proportionate resources. Making a globally respectable university on the smell of an oil rag was required in part because the university’s endowment had been usurped by the more arcadian campuses in Pretoria and Cape Town, but also because of the provincial constraints on competent lecturers, the demographic pressures from the city, and families’ demands for professionalisation. Murray’s careful examination of the drivers of success, and failure, in this earlier period, of sustained austerity is particularly interesting and instructive in the modern era, as Wits finds itself competing with hundreds of Anglophone universities overseas fuelled by hedge-fund endowments. The fifth theme that drives this history is an uneven story of local scholarly competence and achievement. Murray does a truly remarkable job in examining the strengths and failures, and eccentricities, of the disciplines at Wits, from Afrikaans poetry to physics. It is not a simple story: what we might call the development of the university seems to have emerged from outside, from the wider politics, its students’ families, and the regional economy. The final theme – which encapsulates these individual threads of academic labour within the disciplines and the faculties – draws out the contrasting economic moments of the 1920s (where the country faced a post-war and post-pandemic crisis not unlike our own) with the post-1932 mining boom that ushered into being the city’s (and the university’s) golden age. These last two themes are developed through the book, and cannot easily be summarised. But let me turn, briefly, to some instances of the first four to give the reader a sense of the flavour and stakes of Murray’s history.
To begin with, consider the problem of the city’s