UCT attacks Rhodes Must Fall critics and defends transformation plan

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has been remarkably compliant with Rhodes Must Fall's (RMF) demands and agenda that has more to do with anarchy than transformation. It's probably fear.

UCT's "accelerated transformation" plan, which is still in development, has seen the censorship of its art that is deemed racially offensive (to RMF, I suppose) and a draft strategy to rapidly fill academic posts with black Africans.  An academic I know who has sent the plan says its "badly written among other things".

Oddly enough, in 2014 vice-chancellor Max Price defended the slow pace of transformation and why there are few black academics arguing it takes more than 20 years from PhD to full professor.  What has changed between 2014 and today - have they found a way to truncate the 20 years?

Over recent weeks and months there has been criticism of RMF and UCT - particularly UCT kowtowing to RMF - notably from UCT professor Kenneth Hughes, which created huge controversy and who was prevented from lecturing, and political analyst RW Johnson.   

I too was critical in letters to Cape Argus, BDlive - see here and here - and on Daily Maverick.

In a letter to Daily Maverick, UCT's executive director of alumni and development Russell Ally attacked Hughes and Johnson as racist.  But UCT has been strangely quiet about RMF, which destroyed property, threatened staff and Price and set fire to his office.  They dropped criminal charges last year and after protests earlier this year.

But UCT has a problem with its critics, whom they calls racist, a politically and emotionally-laden word that is dangerous to use carelessly and extremely damaging to the reputations of those who are innocent?  And UCT equates itself with Oxford, Yale and other fine institutions, where academic freedom and values are prized above all?

It urgently needs someone - not council, which is also emasculated - to save it.  Perhaps well-resourced donors who fear their endowments being squandered in a politically-motivated firestorm where the arsonists are working with the firefighters, not to put the fire out, but give it more oxygen.
 
Updated May 11 with links to Politicsweb - here, here, and my own contribution here, furthering the debate with Russell Ally who has now taken a vow of silence on this matter. Also read this cautionary tale by a lecturer.

Updated May 12 with additional links to Politicsweb - here and here.