The Vice-Chancellor (VC) of the University of Cape Town, Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, has been the subject of a long series of complaints and criticisms of her leadership, as Daily Maverick and others have reported. Now the VC’s defenders are pushing back, attempting to discredit her critics through a variety of media.

Central to the furore is the VC’s practice of treating people in ways that they experience or perceive as bullying.

In 2020, the UCT Ombud reported that as many as 37 employees of the university — “of all different races” — had complained to her that they “felt bullied, silenced, undermined, rebuked and/or treated unfairly”. She observed that their “pain was visible” and that none of them had wanted her to approach the VC as they “feared retaliation”.

When the Ombud met with Phakeng, Phakeng told her that “she keeps a black book in which she notes all the names of the people who do not like or support her” and told the Ombud that the Ombud’s name was now in this black book.

More recently, Phakeng has been criticised for her treatment of other people, including young black women.

Readers of a recent IOL article by Edwin Naidu, headlined “UCT’s VC Phakeng cleared on bullying allegations”, might imagine that the VC has finally been cleared of these many allegations of misconduct.

The key message in Naidu’s article is that the allegations of bullying against Phakeng entail trivial dignity offences, not abuses of power. Her accusers — myself included — are simply over-sensitive or thin-skinned. In this narrative, Phakeng is the victim, not the perpetrator, despite the fact that she has enormous power and authority as vice-chancellor of a premier university.

The truth, however, is that the many serious allegations about Phakeng’s alleged abuses of power have not been investigated fully and Phakeng has not been exonerated.

Phakeng tried to suppress the original allegations reported by the Ombud and called for the Ombud to be disciplined. UCT’s governing Council was aware of the Ombud report but chose not to act on it: The specific allegations were not investigated further. The university tried to suspend the Ombud.

More recently, senior university leaders — including former Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lis Lange — have left their jobs under non-disclosure agreements that, we understand, prevent them from speaking out about their treatment by Phakeng.

The university has had to bring in a series of consultants to work with Phakeng on her leadership style. No details of these interventions have been made public. None of these facts are acknowledged in Naidu’s report about bullying by Phakeng.

Naidu’s gutter journalism

Naidu appears to have taken on the role of propagandist for Phakeng, with little regard for the truth.

This has already been revealed with respect to another of Naidu’s articles (on 21 October), in which he attempted to discredit former DVC Lis Lange by alleging that she had misrepresented her academic credentials and that her original appointment had been irregular. It was Lange whose letter to Senate in September raised the suspicion that Phakeng (and the Chair of Council) had attempted to suppress discussion of Phakeng’s hostility towards and treatment of a DVC that culminated in her departure.

Naidu’s report was comprehensively rebutted by Phakeng’s predecessor as VC, Max Price, and the then Chair of Council, Sipho Pityana. Price and Pityana pointed to error after error, misrepresentation after misrepresentation in Naidu’s report. They point out that the allegations “dredged up” by Naidu have been “fully tested” and rejected in the Western Cape High Court, that a subsequent application to the high court for leave to appeal was refused with costs, and that “following a further application, the Supreme Court of Appeal found no reason to reconsider that decision and also dismissed the application with costs”. Naidu omitted to tell readers any of this. 

Price and Pityana also point out that Naidu made no attempt to contact either of them. They note that “he clearly should have done so, both to check the accuracy of the information that had been provided to him and to solicit our response to the criticisms levelled at us by his other source or sources.” They accuse Naidu of failing to comply “with even the most rudimentary standards of ethical and competent journalism”. 

True to form, when Naidu proceeded to proclaim Phakeng’s innocence of bullying charges, he made no attempt to contact me, despite the fact that the article focused on a year-old report by Johannesburg lawyers on a complaint that I had laid against Phakeng. Naidu has again failed to comply with even the most rudimentary standards of ethical and competent journalism.

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Dirty tricks

The specific errors in Naidu’s most recent article are less serious, however, than the implications for the governance of the university. Naidu’s article reveals how far into the mire of dirty tricks Phakeng’s defenders will descend in order to discredit critics of her leadership style and of deepening authoritarian managerialism in the governance of UCT.

Naidu’s article about Lange’s appointment was based on information contained in court papers. These papers contained allegations made by someone currently in a senior leadership position within the university. It would not be surprising if the papers were provided to Naidu by someone in a senior leadership position who wanted to discredit Lange.

We know that an apparently confidential letter from a DVC, appointed under Phakeng, was also leaked to Naidu, who quoted from it in a previous article defending Phakeng. These (and other leaked letters from an acting DVC and an unnamed dean) appear to have been an orchestrated attempt to discredit Senate because of Senate’s discontent over the leadership crisis.

After trying to discredit Senate and take out Lange, Naidu turned to me. His article on 23 October was based on confidential university documents that appear likely to have been leaked by someone close to or on behalf of Phakeng. UCT considers these kinds of documents so confidential that they are password-controlled. Naidu is, of course, silent about how he obtained confidential, password-controlled documents.

It is not difficult to understand why university leaders might leak confidential documents to a reliable propagandist now. In the past few weeks I have written for Daily Maverick two detailed analyses of the current crisis at UCT, pointing specifically to the systemic problems of governance that have deepened under Phakeng’s leadership.

I assume that my name is inscribed in Phakeng’s black book.

Leaving aside the question of who leaked documents to Naidu, his article was quickly retweeted from Phakeng’s #FabAcademic Twitter account. We don’t know whether Phakeng herself did this. As is well known, she has attributed other notorious tweets from this account to her nephew, acting on her behalf. Either way, it is hardly appropriate for a vice-chancellor’s Twitter account to be used to help to disseminate scurrilous news reports based on leaked, confidential university documents.

My complaint against Phakeng

Naidu’s account of my complaint against Phakeng for bullying is no more reliable than his previous attempt to smear Lange. It contains the predictable mix of misrepresentation, factual error and selective quotation. Crucially, it misrepresents my primary complaint and overlooks the reasons given by the “advisory panel” for why they believed that they could not consider it.

My complaint did not hinge on what Phakeng said in a meeting of Senate — as Naidu reports — but rather Phakeng’s threat of retaliation against me during the subsequent attempted but unsuccessful alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process.

The university commissioned Johannesburg lawyers to advise on how it should proceed. The recommendation from this “advisory panel” was that my principal complaint could not be assessed because they were “not privy to what factually took place during the ADR proceedings” because the ADR proceedings were confidential. The lawyers, therefore, proceeded to disregard the core of my complaint against Phakeng. It appears that they did not even ask Phakeng whether she had threatened me, as I had alleged. None of this is mentioned by Naidu.

The panel considered only my secondary concerns (about comments that Phakeng made about me in Senate) and concluded that these were insufficient to warrant bringing disciplinary action against Phakeng for bullying. Based on this advice, the Chair of Council decided not to proceed to a formal disciplinary process against Phakeng. My primary complaint was never investigated.

Bullying is about the abuse of power not dignity offences

The error made by the Johannesburg lawyers — and repeated by Naidu — was to ignore the power relations involved. Bullying is not a matter of dignity offences between equals. Bullying is about the abuse of power by someone with power against a subordinate. My complaint focused on the abuse of power by a university vice-chancellor against a subordinate — or insubordinate — professor. In ignoring questions of power, the Johannesburg lawyers and Naidu trivialised the complaint, concluding I had been “over-sensitive”.

When I received the lawyers’ report (exactly one year ago, in October 2021), I wrote to the Chair of Council:

“The Panel seems to have concluded — and you seem to have concurred — that any threats made by the VC during ADR proceedings cannot be considered under the university’s bullying policy. Members of the university in positions of power can act with impunity if proceedings are governed by confidentiality agreements. Any reasonable person will conclude that [the so-called ‘panel’ of Johannesburg lawyers] has not considered the most important element of my complaint of bullying. By extension, you have not considered the most important element of my complaint. This might encourage senior members of the university to believe that they can act with impunity. This is an unfortunate starting point in the application of the university’s new bullying policy.”

Little did I know at the time that the university had already begun to use non-disclosure agreements to limit any broader consideration of the conduct of the university’s leaders — and, presumably, to allow university leaders to act with impunity.

Little did I know that the dirty tricks propaganda machine would busily try to recast the vice-chancellor as the innocent victim, despite persistent allegations that she has abused her power in her interactions with people in subordinate positions within the university.

Anyone who knows me and read Naidu’s scurrilous article would have been surprised to learn that over-sensitivity is one of my qualities. My skin is thick, which is fortunate because anyone who dares to criticise the Vice-Chancellor opens themselves up to multiple attempts to discredit them by fair means or foul.

This is not how universities should deal with bullying. Power, and abuse of power, should be taken seriously, not trivialised. They should be investigated fully, not partially. Confidential documents arising out of bullying complaints should not be leaked for the purpose of discrediting the complainant.  

Any university employee who feels bullied by a powerful university officer will now think twice about laying a formal complaint or even agreeing to mediation processes in which threats of retaliation are protected from scrutiny. This is especially true for academics whose future promotion or research funding might be vulnerable to retaliation.

Successful universities need to be places where debate and deliberation are encouraged, not landscapes of fear where bullying goes uninvestigated and unpunished, morale drains away and too many members of the university understandably retreat into silence. DM