WITS: The 'Open' Years

Bruce Murray

Description

This book looks at the history of Wits University during and after World War II and its defense to maintain its ‘open’ status to admit students of all races.

This, the second volume of the history of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) by historian Bruce Murray, has as its central theme the process by which Wits became an ‘open’ university admitting students of all races, the compromises this process entailed, and the defence the University mounted to preserve its ‘open’ status in the face of the challenges posed by the Nationalist Government.



The University’s institutional autonomy is highlighted by Yunus Ballim in his preface to the centenary edition of WITS: The ‘Open’ Years. He writes: ‘The emerging posture of a university willing to rise in defence of academic freedom was important because this was to become infused into the institutional culture of Wits.’



The book looks at the University’s role in South Africa’s war effort, its contribution to the education of ex-volunteers after the war, its leading role in training job-seeking professionals required by a rapidly expanding economy, and the rise of research and postgraduate study. WITS: The ‘Open’ Years paints a vivid picture of student life through their political activities, the flourishing of a student intelligentsia, the heyday of the Remember and Give (Rag) parade, rugby intervarsity, and the stunning success of Wits sportsmen and women.

Foreword by Yunus Ballim

Foreword by R.W. Charlton, Vice-Chancellor and Principal

Preface and Acknowledgements

Part I: World War II and the Ex-Volunteers

Chapter 1 Wits at War

Chapter 2 Raikes and the ‘Open University’ 1939–48

Chapter 3 Wits and the Ex-Volunteers

Chapter 4 World War II, the Ex-Volunteers and Student Politics

Part II: Wits in the Post-War Era 1945–1959

Chapter 5 Raikes, Student Politics and the Coming of Apartheid

Chapter 6 Profile of Wits

Chapter 7 Professional Faculties

Chapter 8 Arts and Science

Chapter 9 Defending the ‘Open University’

Chapter 10 End of an Era

Part III: Student Life

Chapter 11 Student Life in the 1950s – A.W. Stadler

Chapter 12 Wits Sport 1939–1959 – Jonty Winch

Notes

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: 9781776148158
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

WITS
THE ‘OPEN’ 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 ‘OPEN’ YEARS
A History of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 1939–1959
BRUCE K. MURRAY
Foreword by Yunus Ballim
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Bruce K. Murray 1997
Chapter 11 © A.W. Stadler 1997
Chapter 12 © Jonty Winch 1997
Foreword © Yunus Ballim 2022
Published edition © Wits University Press 2022
First published 1997
https://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12022088127
978-1-77614-812-7 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-813-4 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-814-1 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-815-8 (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: The march from Wits University to the City Hall, 22 May 1957, courtesy of Wits Central Records and Archives
IN MEMORY OF
My friend and colleague David Webster and my brother Robert Murray
CONTENTS
FOREWORD TO THIS EDITION BY YUNUS BALLIM
FOREWORD BY R.W. CHARLTON, VICE-CHANCELLOR AND PRINCIPAL
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I: WORLD WAR II AND THE EX-VOLUNTEERS
1 Wits at War
2 Raikes and the ‘Open University’ 1939–48
3 Wits and the Ex-Volunteers
4 World War II, the Ex-Volunteers and Student Politics
PART II: WITS IN THE POST-WAR ERA 1945–1959
5 Raikes, Student Politics and the Coming of Apartheid
6 Profile of Wits
7 Professional Faculties
8 Arts and Science
9 Defending the ‘Open University’
10 End of an Era
PART III: STUDENT LIFE
11 Student Life in the 1950s A.W. Stadler
12 Wits Sport 1939–1959 Jonty Winch
NOTES
INDEX
FOREWORD
He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation … to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear … which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. 1
A university that persists in its ambition to sustain an engaged relationship with its community, as Wits does, must in its turn be shaped by the same currents that move that community. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this important book by Professor Bruce Murray is his ability to capture the vapours of the social, political and academic moods that at the time were shaping South Africa as a country, Johannesburg as a city and the University of the Witwatersrand as a social institution. The period covered by Murray’s book and the events that he so carefully describes and interprets have had a profound influence on the University’s development and its institutional identity. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the World War II years and the recovery period thereafter produced the bulk of the threads that continue to weave the wondrous tapestry of the Wits that we know today, in all of its core functions as a university in South Africa: transmission of knowledge through teaching; development of new knowledge and understanding through research; custodianship of knowledge through its libraries and archives; and engagement with its broad community, on whose behalf it often speaks.
I write this introductory note in the year of Wits’s first centenary. My personal association with the University has spanned 45 years, initially as a student and later as a staff member (barring six years in the civil engineering industry). I arrived as a first-year engineering student in 1977, suitably provisioned with one of the outcomes of the 1959 Extension of Universities Act: a letter of permission to attend a white university, handed to me by an official at a nondescript government office in Pretoria (I was a late applicant and had to make this application personally). The subject line of the letter read: ‘Consent to attend a university in terms of Section 31 of Act 45, 1959’. I have no idea what the criteria were for approval; the interview consisted of one question asked in Afrikaans and I think it helped that I answered in equally fluent Afrikaans. Blindfolded fortune can indeed be fickle.
During my undergraduate years, the race question still dominated political imaginations at Wits, and the opinions of white staff and students ranged from the strongly left-leaning across to openly spoken views, particularly from a few academic staff members, that black students did not belong or did not hold the intellectual capacity to get a degree from Wits – the Janus-faced character of Wits to which Murray often refers in the book. In the world outside, the national political developments during the period of Murray’s review, and particularly the 1961 ‘watershed’ moment for the Nationalist Party, had produced a very different landscape of South African politics. The apartheid government was far more strident in its approach, far more convinced of its own rectitude, and far more confident of its ability to manage the relationship between power and violence in the service of a white and mainly Afrikaner community. But another watershed occurred in this decade: the student protests of 1976. This event would coalesce the many streams of local and international anti-apartheid activities to test the stridency and confidence of the apartheid government, cause it to totter by the late 1980s and to topple by 1994. In all these later developments, troubling and joyous, it is not difficult to recognise the fingerprints of Wits, its staff and its students, persisting in Murray’s characterisation of Wits as a socially engaged university.
The many internal debates, disagreements and arguments between different sectors of the Wits community that Murray chooses to highlight all point to a relatively young university struggling with the foundational principles of what it means to be a university. How should Wits be teaching, and how should it respond to high failure rates? What should be the policy on admissions and what are the limits of flexibility in the extent of ‘preparedness’ of students admitted? What research should Wits focus upon and how should the institution support staff to be more engaged in research activities? Should it be accepted that the university is a microcosm of its society or should it try to be a microcosm of what society could be like? These are difficult questions, and much of Murray’s book can be read as a review of the serious formative engagements with these and related matters. Of course, the questions are never settled, and in later years they would find expression in debates on matters such as engineering departments carrying out research for the apartheid military forces, access for students from financially needy homes, and decolonisation of the curriculum – the everyday stuff of a good university.
With this book, Murray also provides interesting perspectives on the development of Johannesburg as a city at the time of an anastomosing stream of migrancy that was driven by the spatial logic of gold mining and the making of the economic capital of the region. Located on the edge of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg is not naturally suitable for large-scale human habitation and water supply would long dominate questions of the expansion of the city. But the streams of local and international migrants that continued to arrive after the war years brought a rich variety of intellectual tradition and expectation, giving a special character to the city as well as finding exciting expression on the Wits campus. The political and social haunts where students found their stimulation and their refuge, the growing settlements of black people and their need for higher education opportunities in the city and the increasingly hardening demand of the white population for ‘social segregation’ all found loud expression in the debates at Wits. It is here that Wits students found opportunities for seeing the world through the eyes of ‘the other’, and for those with sufficiently receptive and courageous minds to temper their opinions and to leave as graduates more sensitive to the important questions of the human condition. In its 100th year, my sense is that Wits has remained committed to this important feature of the meaning of ‘graduateness’.
But the recurrent theme of Murray’s book is a Wits university engaged in a struggle for academic freedom against powerful forces. We have long recognised – and Murray repeatedly points out – that the struggles of this period were centred more on the narrower aspect of institutional autonomy than on the full spectrum of academic freedom. Nevertheless, given that the focus of government challenges touched mainly on matters of institutional autonomy, it is understandable that Wits’ strategic response at the time was driven by this consideration – even as other core components of the principle of academic freedom were being neglected. The emerging posture of a university willing to rise in defence of academic freedom was important because this was to become infused into the institutional culture of Wits. In no small measure, it is this form of voice from Wits and others in the South African higher education sector at the time that all