It was easily one of the most humiliating spectacles that could occur in a place of higher learning. Students stormed into the office of the university vice-chancellor, a highly respected man of letters, lifted him up by the armpits, and frog-marched the bespectacled academic to the gates of the university as an act of ejection. They had done this before. In fact, most leaders of this university were at some point ousted from their offices and taken to the campus exit, where the police would sometimes rescue the professor from the mob.

About 300 kilometres south of this northern campus, another vicechancellor experienced something even worse. Five or six campus bullies came into one of the offices of the ‘no-nonsense leader who insisted that staff and students work strictly according to the rules and regulations … so they got fed up with him’. The invaders told the vice-chancellor that this was his last day in office and that he was leaving ‘right now’. One of the deputy vice-chancellors tried to intervene, saying, ‘You cannot treat our vice-chancellor like this,’ but he was told to shut up and get on with this work. The VC having collected his belongings, the thugs drove him off campus in his own car. Council, his nominal boss, did nothing. The vice-chancellor was never seen on campus again.

These acts of institutional thuggery targeting principled leaders are visible, in-your-face confrontations that work to undermine the managerial authority of a public university. What is much less obvious is the hundreds of smaller events that, as a senior adviser to government put it, ‘silently eat away at the institutional integrity of a university’.

This chapter makes visible in finer detail the micropolitics of corruption in South Africa's dysfunctional universities – how and why it happens, by and for whom, and with what consequences for higher education institutions. The chapter also gives some conceptual flesh to the myriads of corrupt activities that occur in dysfunctional institutions.

There is a broader intellectual interest in this endeavour, for we still do not have research that, in the words of education scholar Jacky Lumby, ‘unravel[s] the nuances and subtleties of daily activity at the micropolitical level’.