Between August 1990 and December 1992 I occupied the position of vice chancellor and principal of the University of the North, now known as the University of Limpopo. I had left the University of the Witwatersrand at the end of July 1990 after ten happy years of research, writing and part-time private practice. Left behind, too, were countless hours of stimulating discussions, often at lunchtime, with senior colleagues Charles van Onselen and Tim Couzens.

During the ten years I spent at the African Studies Institute, I remained in accordance with the apartheid laws of the day, a virtual ‘visiting’ professor, in spite of my senior colleagues’ satisfaction with my academic work and professional practice as a clinical psychologist. What saved me from any chronic feeling of disadvantage and marginalisation as a professional from the broader South African psychology fraternity was the professional regard and support of my colleagues, who included, apart from Van Onselen and Couzens, one-time vice chancellor Professor Karl Tober and academic luminary Professor Phillip Tobias, who were senior enough to appreciate and support the range of academic and professional work I was doing. It was a degree of support I could not vouch for from my professional colleagues on campus and in most psychology departments elsewhere in the country. Fortunately I was too busy to brood over what might well have been a hurtful predicament.

Following my active involvement in the academic and administrative development at the then University of Transkei between the years 1975 and the beginning of 1981, my interest in higher education had developed to such an extent that I aspired to be a vice chancellor in years to come. Rightly or wrongly, I felt it was the kind of work I could do and do well. As I saw it, a vice chancellor's main task was to provide academic leadership. All other responsibilities must find sustenance from the realisation of that primary task. Predictably, my two-and-a-half-year stay at the University of the North turned out to be extremely demanding. In those hectic days my attention was divided between routine university responsibilities and increasing participation in higher-education structures at a national level.