African Yearbook of Rhetoric - Volume 2, Issue 2, January 2011

man can achieve a lot in eighty years and then find himself somewhat elevated at the end of it, both in the sense of being looked up to and praised (usually for his wisdom) and also in the sense of being able to survey the landscape of his life from the dignified heights of experience. The level of the viewer is actually not important because it is, after all, a landscape shaped in the mind where the narrowing lines of perspective drive inwards, back into the past, until the vanishing point truly disappears in the time before words - looking back is made difficult because the topography of the past changes whenever a different mood washes over it. But that should not matter. What is seen and how it is seen is private when it comes to memories, though others may guess that a promise of tender green was brushed in over a bleak plain and that a scorched patch was shifted a little further to the right and then more so, almost out of sight. It is only human to make a few adjustments to one's own landscape and, in the past twenty years, many arid areas were turned into very pretty gardens where culture and the cultivated blend harmoniously.

John Warr was writing at the time of the English revolution, three hundred years before the adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the introduction to their publication of his writings in A Spark in the ashes, Sedley and Kaplan refer to Warr's "appreciation of individual worth" and how he develops from this "the entitlement of people to overthrow a government which has broken its compact with the people and turned to tyranny". We hear an echo of this in the preamble to the Universal Declaration, which begins with the claim that "the inherent dignity and ... the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world", and goes on to proclaim that it "is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law".

Colleges and universities come in every size and shape and operate in every kind of society imaginable. Generalising about these fascinating (endlessly complicated) institutions is hazardous to one's health, but I have come to believe that there are certain propositions that do apply in many contexts, across countries and institutional types. In this short essay, I will concentrate on lessons that I have learned from many years working to build teams of administrative colleagues and faculties in the United States of America.

There is an advanced concept in the design of imaging optics, used to ensure aberration-free images after passage through a series of optical elements, published in 1821 in the Philosophical Transactions by John Herschel and known as The Herschel Condition. The present article has nothing to do with that. Instead, the expression suggested to me that it might be a good occasion to praise a great human being, and interesting to trawl through the extensive Herschel publications and correspondence for personal comments to discover Herschel as a person, rather than as a dry Victorian scientist, albeit one of the leading researchers and philosophers of the nineteenth century. The correspondence is huge, preserved in libraries and archives around the world but made accessible through a project that paralleled a similar effort made for the Charles Darwin letters. The Herschel Calendar lists and summarizes 14 815 letters.

I believe it is a valid assumption that most students applying to medical schools wish to become physicians because they look forward to caring for the sick with empathy and compassion and to be of benefit to mankind. In their altruism, they view their future role as healers who endeavor to provide comfort and support to those in need. Unfortunately, in the last three or four decades and perhaps even earlier, those goals and aspirations seem to diminish and even disappear as students traverse their medical education and training. And as they emerge as bona fide physicians and finish their residencies, it is often hard to detect signs of their original altruism.

This essay is intended as a tribute to Stuart Saunders for his pioneering role in the long process of political and social transition in South Africa.

This one-minute story is dedicated to Stuart Saunders's love for painting. I hope he will forgive me for trusting words more than pictures. It is also an indirect and tardy response to the gift Edmund White made me of his Écorché vif (original, Skinned Alive), on a bright winter day of 1997, not far from the Picasso Museum in Paris.

There is, of course, more than one way to think about philanthropy. What follows is, therefore, a personal view, and it differs a good deal from views that are widely held these days. It derives from my experience of having been "on both sides of the table": five years as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and six years as president of the University of Chicago. Others, depending on aims and experience, will have very good reasons to hold a different view. I only wish to offer some aid and comfort to those made slightly uncomfortable by the currently dominant discourse.

Civil society is an all-embracing term for organisations and activities outside of the state or government spheres. During the apartheid years some of the most important internal initiatives in opposing apartheid and defending the institutions, people, and ideas opposing apartheid came from organisations, institutions and individuals firmly located within civil society. The apartheid government had little hesitation in launching sometimes crippling attacks on many opposing it. Many non-profit organisations (trade unions, churches, civic organisations, legal defence bodies and universities among them) suffered from state incursions in attempts to control core aspects of their activities. An ironic but positive consequence of these attacks was that they often helped to strengthen civil society by making those attacked more focused, more resourceful, and more determined in their opposition to apartheid. It forms a central antithesis of the apartheid regime that it helped throw up bodies addressing inadequacies in apartheid education, health, legal, employment and social policies and by doing so strengthened oppositional politics and activities, thereby helping bring forward its own demise. Then in 1994 came the end of the apartheid state and the establishment of the democratic state, which was accompanied by the state entering into new relationships with what was by then a generally vibrant civil society. But the relationship soon produced a totally different set of tensions between state and civil society. It is this canvas of transition to democracy and the tension surrounding the messy relationship of the state to civil society after the 1994 election that forms the setting for this essay.

Nearly fifty years ago as a foreign student at Cambridge I wrote a weekly sea-mail letter to my mother in Africa. Many weeks afterwards a reply came. Later as a postgraduate, research required long hours of copying papers in old libraries. And my thesis was written by long-hand and later typewriter. Written information flowed at the pace of physical transport. In South Africa there was no television and a mere two or three state-controlled radio stations. Opinion and news were furnished by a few national newspapers.

In recent years, Muslim men have received rather unfavourable "press". Yet, in my travels, I have met many Muslim men who loved dearly their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters and who strove to demonstrate their love where there were few opportunities for the public expression of tenderness. These are stories of my encounters with several such men, and of another "local hero" who lives in Rwanda. As I write these stories, earth-shattering events have broken out across the Middle East. I hope that the people of the Middle East - especially the women - will soon know greater freedom, and that we shall come to know them with greater nuance and empathy.

One of the issues in university education is what breadth of understanding is reflected in both the teaching and research. There is a regrettable tendency for academics, having become great experts in their own field, to then remain bunkered down in those fields for ever - indeed often taking a remarkably narrow view even of these specialist fields. This narrow world view is then transmitted to the students, together with an intolerance for other views, or at least an undervaluing of their worth. Many examples can be given from many disciplines: one classic example was the way the world of psychology fell prey to Watson's very narrow views on behaviourism; another is the disdain expressed in some literary circles for scientific thought; a third is the similar disdain expressed by some pure mathematicians for applied mathematics, or theoretical particle physicists for more applied physics.

The American Philosophical Society, held in Philadelphia "for promoting useful knowledge", is the oldest learned society in the United States and now one of the liveliest organisations of its kind in the scholarly world.

My title alludes differentially to a very fine comparative study, The next 25 years: Affirmative action in higher education in the United States and South Africa, containing an essay entitled "Looking Back" by the honoree of the present volume, Dr. Stuart Saunders. In a history still to be written, the career of Stuart Saunders as a leader in South African education will not be limited to his role as a stellar contributor to the end of apartheid, which is chronicled in his memoir, Vice-chancellor on a tightrope. The strong voice that speaks in his remarkable autobiographical narrative, in which the two decades running from 1975 to 1995 are central, has continued to be heard without let-up during a time when higher education in South Africa has been forced not only to reckon with the country's continuing transition to democracy and its struggle to open up economic opportunity to all of its inhabitants, but also with globalisation and all that it implies for institutions of higher learning on the African continent, where South Africa's wealth and relatively sophisticated institutions thrust it into a position of leadership in education and research. In this essay of tribute I propose both to extend the purview of The next 25 years to the full set of issues Stuart Saunders has been confronting over the past decade and to narrow the temporal focus to pressing present-day concerns.

A sculpture has been defined as "something you bump into when you stand back to look at a painting". Nowadays the thing that you tread in when you step back to admire a sculpture might very well be a painting, or a print in the form of a frozen chicken or a chocolate body part. That is good. Such developments extend the boundaries of art.

Most who write about Stuart will have known him far longer than I have, but ours has been a constant and enduring link since I was first taken to the University of Cape Town in 1987. My first and lasting image of Stuart is his proud defiance while leading UCT students in one of the many anti-apartheid marches. Of course he did so much more than march. He was once described to me by a person of note, not known for his swearing, as that b*** UCT Professor. Stuart campaigned long and hard for the ending of apartheid, and also for the needs of all his students, as well as for reforms in medicine and its teaching, for which so many have reason to be grateful.

Stuart John Saunders was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 28^th August 1931. After graduating MBChB with honours in 1953 at the University of Cape Town, he did post-graduate research at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith in London and at Harvard University. He received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1965 (University of Cape Town). He began his administrative career as the University of Cape Town's Head of the Department of Medicine (1971-1980) and was co-founder of the university's Liver Clinic & Liver Research Unit (a field in which he wrote some two hundred articles and co-authored a study that has become a classical reference). He was Vice-Chancellor from January 1981 to August 1996.