In the course of the turbulent 1980s five South African universities – Cape Town, Natal, Rhodes, Western Cape and Wits – were involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in two major confrontations with the Government on important issues of both principle and practice. In both instances, after debilitating effort on the part of these universities, the authorities backed down. There were pitifully few occasions during its forty-six years of power on which the Nationalist Government responded to public pressure on liberal issues and these two episodes are political landmarks in the regime’s retreat from apartheid. The first concerned the ‘Quota Bill’ and the second was the threat of financial sanctions posed by F W de Klerk as Minister of National Education in his attempts to coerce the universities into clamping down on political activity on their campuses.

The ‘Quota Bill’

In July 1982, Dr Gerrit Viljoen, then Minister of National Education, informed the Committee of University Principals (CUP) that the Government was considering amendments to the Universities Act (Act 61 of 1955 as amended). Section 4 related to a proposed quota system to be instituted in 1984, which would regulate the admission of black students to the so-called white universities. This could be done by inserting an enabling clause to that effect in the Act and by requesting Parliament to approve such an amendment. The Minister’s justification of these measures was that he believed they could lead to more flexibility when universities made their decisions regarding admissions.

Du Plessis had spoken against the proposal at the CUP, stating that the University would not wish to implement a racially discriminatory system on behalf of the Government and that the system contained no advantages for black students. The concept of racial quotas for the admission of students was anathema to the University at that time, and an extended and bitter battle followed to persuade the Minister to withdraw this section of the Bill. Attitudes were now very different from those in 1953 when the University had itself imposed a racial quota for the admission of black students into the Faculty of Medicine.