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Preface and Acknowledgements
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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This, the second volume of the history of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, has a more political focus than the first. It covers the period from the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 to the enactment of the Extension of University Education Act in 1959, and has as its central themes the emergence of Wits University as an ‘open university’, the extent to which it became ‘open’, and the defence it mounted to preserve its ‘open’ status in the face of the challenge posed after 1948 by the Nationalist Government and its apartheid policies.
In a South African context, Wits University and the University of Cape Town were categorised by themselves as ‘open universities’ in that their admission criteria were supposedly purely academic, applied without regard to considerations of race, colour or creed, and in that whites and ‘non-whites’ were taught together in the same classes. In this they differed from the other residential universities in South Africa, which either excluded ‘non-whites’ altogether or, as in the case of the University of Natal, Durban, taught them in separate classes. Through the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which constituted a major expression of apartheid policy, the Nationalist Government prohibited ‘non-whites’ from attending ‘white’ universities, except with ministerial permission, and established a series of separate ethnic or ‘tribal’ university colleges for ‘non-whites’. As a result, in the 1960s the number of African and coloured students at Wits fell precipitously.
This volume examines the process by which Wits became an ‘open university’ in the first instance, with particular emphasis on the significance of World War II for the ‘opening’ of the Medical School. It also indicates that Wits did not become fully ‘open’ in the 1940s and 1950s. The number of ‘non-white’ students who gained access to the University was relatively small, and certain departments and one faculty – Dentistry – did not admit ‘non-whites’ at all. In the formal social and sporting spheres, official University policy was one of applying the so-called ‘colour bar’: the declared policy of the University was that of ‘academic non-segregation and social segregation’.
Part II - Wits in the Post–War Era 1945-1959
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Wits in the Post–War Era 1945-1959
10 - End of an Era
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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An era ended at Wits with the passage of the separate university legislation in 1959. This was symbolised on 17 April 1961 when Richard Feetham, as Chancellor, unveiled a plaque at the entrance to the Great Hall to record, in both English and Afrikaans, the Affirmation and Dedication pledged by the University two years previously:
We affirm in the name of the University of the Witwatersrand that it is our duty to uphold the principle that a university is a place where men and women, without regard to race and colour, are welcome to join in the acquisition and advancement of knowledge; and to continue faithfully to defend the ideal against all those who have sought by legislative enactment to curtail the autonomy of the University. Now, therefore, we dedicate ourselves to the maintenance of this ideal and to the restoration of the autonomy of our University.
The practical manifestations of the end of the ‘open university’ era were by then already evident, with African enrolments, in particular, plummeting.
The wider impact on the University of the separate university legislation cannot be assessed in isolation. Recent scholars see the years 1959-1961 as a watershed in the making of apartheid; it was then that apartheid moved into its ‘second phase’ in response to the escalation of urban African resistance in the late 1950s, culminating in the Sharpeville shootings of March 1960. The government resorted to massive repression, beginning with the banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, a general tightening of state controls, more rigid influx control, and the active promotion of the homelands policy of separate development in the effort to undercut African nationalism by asserting tribal identities – a policy already inherent in the plans for separate university institutions. It was in this new atmosphere of repression, restriction, control and unrest that Wits entered the 1960s; it was an atmosphere fraught with consequence for Wits and the ‘liberal’ universities in general.
‘NON-WHITE’ ENROLMENTS
Once enacted, the 1959 legislation was complied with by Wits. Whereas the University of Natal, Durban, earned the wrath of the government by exploiting a ‘loophole’ in the initial regulations governing ‘non-white’ access to the ‘white’ universities to continue to admit certain categories of ‘non-white’ students without ministerial consent, Wits was meticulous in following government guidelines.
Notes
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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4 - World War II the Ex-Volunteers and Student Politics
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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World War II, and then the ex-volunteer era, produced something of a sea change in student political activity and culture at Wits. An organised left, inspired by notions of refashioning South African society, made its appearance on campus, and the Students’ Representative Council became politicised in a way it never had been before. For SRC elections ‘slates’ of candidates were introduced, and an alliance between the left and liberals, increasingly attached to principles of non-racialism, moved into effective control of the SRC. For the student body, in turn, the war, and the divisions it caused in the country and on campus, gave it for the first time a sense of being directly caught up in the politics of the wider society; the handling of student affairs ceased to be simply the preserve of the SRC, becoming a matter of general student involvement. The era of the student mass meeting had dawned. In the protests over the 1943 fee increase, moreover, the Wits administration got its first taste of student rebellion.
In the arena of national student politics, World War II and its immediate aftermath likewise effected some major changes. The history of the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond (ANS), the highly politicised national organisation formed by the Afrikaner SRCs in the 1930s, has yet to be written, but it is evident that the organisation suffered badly during the war because of its identification with the paramilitary, pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag (OB). In 1948, after the Nationalists came to power, it was succeeded by a reconstituted Afrikaanse Studentebond, founded on a Christian national basis. The outcome of the war was similarly crucial for determining the character of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), in effect the national organisation of English-speaking students. During the war NUSAS sought to keep itself intact by avoiding polarising issues, notably the admission to its ranks of Fort Hare Native College, which prepared African students for degrees offered by the University of South Africa. The end result of the war, perceived as a defeat for the forces of Fascism and racialism, ultimately ensured the admission of Fort Hare, and NUSAS finally emerged as a ‘progressive’ organisation.
Foreword
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation … to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear … which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
A university that persists in its ambition to sustain an engaged relationship with its community, as Wits does, must in its turn be shaped by the same currents that move that community. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this important book by Professor Bruce Murray is his ability to capture the vapours of the social, political and academic moods that at the time were shaping South Africa as a country, Johannesburg as a city and the University of the Witwatersrand as a social institution. The period covered by Murray’s book and the events that he so carefully describes and interprets have had a profound influence on the University’s development and its institutional identity. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the World War II years and the recovery period thereafter produced the bulk of the threads that continue to weave the wondrous tapestry of the Wits that we know today, in all of its core functions as a university in South Africa: transmission of knowledge through teaching; development of new knowledge and understanding through research; custodianship of knowledge through its libraries and archives; and engagement with its broad community, on whose behalf it often speaks.
I write this introductory note in the year of Wits’s first centenary. My personal association with the University has spanned 45 years, initially as a student and later as a staff member (barring six years in the civil engineering industry). I arrived as a first-year engineering student in 1977, suitably provisioned with one of the outcomes of the 1959 Extension of Universities Act: a letter of permission to attend a white university, handed to me by an official at a non-descript government office in Pretoria (I was a late applicant and had to make this application personally).
1 - Wits at War
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The Second World War began as a European war in September 1939 and ended six years later in the Far East with the Japanese surrender to the United States. In the history of the University of the Witwatersrand, as in much other history, the war was a watershed. The University became far more ‘open’ in its admissions policy as blacks secured access to the Medical School; war-orientated research, notably in radar, gave a new importance to the University as a centre of research; the war significantly heightened student political awareness and marked the beginnings of student activism; and the enrolment of thousands of ex-volunteers – ex-servicemen and -women – at the end of the war helped to make the University a distinctly more adult institution. There were major transformations in the wider society, and these were to have a significant impact on the University’s development. South Africa’s participation in World War II greatly affected economic, social and political life.
Economically, South Africa, and especially Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand, boomed as a consequence of the war. In the six years prior to the war a process of economic restructuring had begun, with secondary industry embarking on major expansion. Under war conditions, in which the country sought to produce armaments and local substitutes for imports, manufacturing surged as the most dynamic sector in the economy. Between 1939 and 1945 the gross value of industrial output more than doubled, from £141 (R282) million to £304 million, enabling manufacturing to surpass mining in its contribution to South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product. The Gross National Product grew by almost 70 per cent, a rate higher than that attained by the United States. The most dramatic growth was in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging complex, now the province of Gauteng, which by 1945 was producing almost half the country’s industrial output. The importance of Johannesburg, the focus of the country’s railway network, as a centre for the commercial distribution of goods for southern Africa as a whole, grew correspondingly.
The wartime industrial growth hastened the movement of peoples, particularly blacks, from the countryside to the towns.
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WITS
- The 'Open' Years
- Bruce Murray
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim
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- Wits University Press
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- 24 November 2023
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In the period between the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the enactment of university apartheid by the Nationalist Government in 1959, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) developed as an 'open university', admitting students of all races. This, the second volume of the history of Wits by historian Bruce Murray, has as its central theme the process by which Wits became 'open', the compromises this process entailed, and the defence the University mounted to preserve its 'open' status in the face of the challenges posed by the Nationalist Government.
The University's institutional autonomy is highlighted by Yunus Ballim in his preface to the centenary edition of WITS: The 'Open' Years. He writes: 'The emerging posture of a university willing to rise in defence of academic freedom was important because this was to become infused into the institutional culture of Wits.'
The book looks at the University's role in South Africa's war effort, its contribution to the education of ex-volunteers after the war, its leading role in training job-seeking professionals required by a rapidly expanding economy, and the rise of research and postgraduate study. Students feature prominently through their political activities, the flourishing of a student intelligentsia, the heyday of the Remember and Give (Rag) parade, rugby intervarsity, and the stunning success of Wits sportsmen and women. WITS: The 'Open' Years paints a vivid picture of the range of personalities who enlivened the campus - among them some well-known figures in the new South Africa.
Part I - World War II and the Ex-Volunteers
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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World War II and the Ex-Volunteers
7 - Professional Faculties
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The post-war era witnessed a formidable expansion in the South African economy, accompanied by steady population growth and accelerated urbanisation, creating a huge demand for skills of all kinds, particularly in the professions. The years 1945 to 1959 constituted a period of sustained growth for the economy, interrupted only by a few relatively mild recessions, and all sectors of the economy advanced. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national income more than trebled in monetary terms, from £666 million (R1 332 million) to £2 225 million (R4 450 million), with per capita income rising from £59,1 to £141,5. The manufacturing industry provided the main engine of growth, and in the process transformed the balance of the economy. By 1960 manufacturing contributed 23,3 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as against 14 per cent for mining, 12,7 per cent for commerce, and 10,8 per cent for agriculture. Two factors underlay industrialisation, namely the expansion of the local market and import substitution, the latter often proving the more dynamic. By 1961 local industry was producing 75 per cent of the value of local consumption, as against 50 per cent in 1940/41 and only 27 per cent in 1929/30. While manufacturing surged ahead, mining and agriculture also boomed, and were crucial in expanding the local market for manufactured goods; the major mining houses, led by Anglo American, were themselves prominent in promoting the development of local service industries to the mining sector. The post-war extension of gold mining in the Far West Rand, Klerksdorp and Orange Free State fields gave the gold mining industry a new lease on life, with gold production virtually doubling between 1950 and 1960. As spectacular was the expansion in the non-gold mining sector, including the creation of the uranium extraction industry, with the value of the production of non-gold minerals trebling in the period 1950-60. The white agricultural sector, for its part, was modernised and transformed with the assistance of the state, and productivity increased greatly. Between 1945 and 1960 the contribution of agriculture to the GDP trebled from £89 million to £248 million.
6 - Profile of Wits
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The arrival of the ex-volunteers at Wits ushered in a new era in higher education in South Africa, one in which it became the norm for the substantial majority of white matriculants – those who satisfied the conditions of university entry – to proceed to university, although not necessarily directly. By the end of the 1950s, over three-quarters of white matriculants were going on to university; among English-speaking white men the proportion of matriculants entering university was as high as 90 per cent. For the four years 1958–61 the number of whites registering at one or other of the country’s residential universities for the first time amounted to a nearly constant 82–84 per cent of the previous year’s matriculants.
In South Africa, as in many countries elsewhere, World War II was a watershed in the development of higher education, leading to a vast growth in university enrolments, fuelled by a rising demand for trained professionals, rising expectations and rising birth rates, and financed in increasing measure by the state, which came to regard universities as engines of economic progress, both in training manpower and undertaking vital research. For the middle classes, and those with middle-class aspirations, a university training now became virtually essential to the pursuit of their careers. Among white South Africans it was a trend accentuated by white dominance of the ‘paying’ professions – medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, architecture, law and accounting – and the extension of the process by which the universities came to dominate training for the professions in South Africa. The other side of the coin was a tendency among the professional bodies to want to dictate academic curricula.
In the immediate post-war years the number of fully fledged residential universities in South Africa doubled with the grant of university status to Natal in 1948, the Orange Free State and Rhodes in 1949, and Potchefstroom in 1950, all previously university colleges under the umbrella of the University of South Africa. The South African Native College, Fort Hare, became the University College of Fort Hare as an affiliate of Rhodes University, while Unisa continued as a correspondence university.
Foreword
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The Diamond Jubilee of the University in 1982 was marked by the publication of Professor Bruce Murray’s Wits: The Early Years: A History of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and its Precursors 1896–1939. It was a fascinating ‘warts and all’ chronicle of Wits’s evolution from a tiny school of mines in Kimberley through phases as a technical institute and a university college to the achievement of university status in 1922. Set against the backdrop of Johannesburg’s development from rough mining town to city, it was no mere chronological account but rather a highly professional history that also managed to be eminently readable.
The success of Wits: The Early Years made it obvious that Professor Murray should be prevailed upon to produce the next instalment of the University’s official history, and moreover that its publication should be a major feature of Wits’s 75th Anniversary celebrations in 1997. The University is fortunate indeed that he agreed to do so.
The work that he has produced (with chapters by Professor Alf Stadler and Jonty Winch) is a fitting sequel to his first volume. He has not been content to rely only on the extensive archival material that was available to him. He has lost no opportunity to dredge the memories of former students and members of staff. The result is a fascinating account of Wits, warts once again in plain sight, during the momentous two decades from the outbreak of the Second World War to the passing of the notorious Extension of University Education Act in 1959.
The book will have wide appeal, not only to Wits alumni but to all who are concerned with South African higher education and its history.
Dedication
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Index
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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3 - Wits and the Ex-Volunteers
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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One of the achievements of which Wits is justly proud is the lead that it took in providing university education for ex-volunteers – ex-servicemen and -women at the end of World War II. In addition to maintaining its regular flow of civilian students, Wits mounted a formidable crash programme for ex-volunteers. Normal entrance requirements were relaxed, courses accelerated and doubled up, lectures duplicated, triplicated and quadrupled, and laboratories staged in relays well into the night. In all, Wits enrolled 2 825 ex-volunteers, more than twice as many as all the other South African university institutions combined. Although there was a substantial dropout rate among those who either found they could not readjust to the demands of the classroom or could not resist lucrative job offers, well over half the ex-volunteers received degrees or diplomas and certificates. By any measure, it was a remarkable accomplishment. For the University, the influx of ex-volunteers was a unique phase in its history. The campus was utterly transformed as virtually overnight the student population almost doubled in size, and school leavers suddenly found themselves in the same classrooms as veterans of the North African and Italian campaigns. Not only were the ex-volunteers more mature – the large majority already well into their twenties – they were also overwhelmingly male, with the proportion of women students consequently falling to under 20 per cent of the total. What changed, above all, was the atmosphere at Wits. The excitement as the ex-volunteers arrived was palpable – in the description of one contemporary, ‘the joint was jumping’ – and they brought to Wits a new sense of exhilaration and purpose-fulness. For those who experienced it, the era of the ex-volunteers was the golden age of Wits, even if it was a sometimes daunting one for younger students fresh from school.
The influx of ex-volunteers greatly intensified the pressures on the University’s already overstretched resources, but it elicited a new willingness in negotiating those pressures. In the faculties of Science, Engineering, Architecture, Medicine and Dentistry, the squeeze was such that first-year courses were duplicated. Instead of being spread out over the entire academic year, they were concentrated and repeated in half-year sessions, with students taking half their courses in the first half of the year and the remainder in the second.
Part III - Student Life
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Student Life
Frontmatter
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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2 - Raikes and the ‘Open University’ 1939–1948
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The war years at Wits were the most dramatic period of advance for black students (African, Indian, coloured), and also Chinese students – collectively referred to at the time as ‘non-Europeans’ or ‘non-whites’ – prior to the transformations of the 1980s. World War II provided a rare opportunity to alter the policy direction of the University, and make Wits very much more of an ‘open university’ than ever before contemplated. The central development during the war was the decision to open the Medical School to ‘non-European’ students by admitting them to the clinical years. This represented a major departure from previous policy, and the war was directly responsible.
Before the war the few black doctors in South Africa had all trained overseas, with the notable exception of J.T. du Randt, a coloured doctor who had qualified at Wits in 1933. A.B. Xuma, who became President General of the African National Congress in 1940, graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, in 1926. Otherwise it was the Scottish universities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and also Trinity College, Dublin, that served as the main training grounds for black South African doctors. By putting an effective end to overseas migration for university study, the onset of war in Europe meant that aspirant black doctors had to receive their training locally, or else not at all. That fact, and the warning of the Botha Committee on Medical Training in South Africa that the country’s black population was in desperate need of basic medical services, provided the main levers to open up clinical training for black medical students at Wits.
While the University’s Private Act and Statutes had never allowed for the exclusion of any student on racial grounds, Council had not formally endorsed the policy of admitting blacks to Wits until 1934; as a result, at the outbreak of war there were no more than a few dozen black students on campus; this included four Indians in the Medical School. The position in the Medical and Dental Schools, however, was that blacks were excluded from the clinical years on the stated ground that there were no clinical facilities available for them.
5 - Raikes, Student Politics, and the Coming of Apartheid
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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In May 1948, in perhaps the greatest upset in South African electoral history, Dr D.F. Malan’s National Party and its allies defeated Smuts’s United Party in the first general election after World War II. For only the second time in the history of the Union the governing party had been defeated at the polls; for the first time since Union in 1910 a purely Afrikaner government was formed. The Nationalist campaign had been waged on a platform of apartheid, involving the fuller segregation of the races, and once in office the Nationalists proceeded to enact a series of measures designed to promote both greater segregation and greater repression. The transition from the compromises of the previous ‘segregationist’ era to the new rigour of the apartheid era was particularly marked in the field of education, with the Nationalists ultimately establishing a new apartheid order in both schools and universities. The first major Nationalist legislative measure dealing with education was the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which put an end to the system of mission schools, supported by African taxation and under the direction of provincial education departments, and set up an entirely separate schooling system for Africans under the central control of Dr H.F. Verwoerd’s Department of Native Affairs. The second major item of Nationalist legislation on education was the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which established separate ethnic university colleges for ‘non-white’ students and prohibited blacks from registering at the ‘white’ universities, except with ministerial permission.
Nationalist legislation in the 1950s appeared to unfold with a logical inevitability in accordance with a pre-determined strategy; apartheid seemingly progressed as a pre-programmed juggernaut that pushed ahead relentlessly, trampling over everything that stood in its path. Recent research, however, has emphasised the elements of fluidity in Nationalist policymaking, and with regard to higher education it is evident that Nationalist policy ran into a series of culs de sac before the route that led to the Extension of University Education Act was clearly mapped out. It was a sense that the new government was not irrevocably committed to university apartheid that informed Raikes, and guided his policy towards both the government and student activists.
8 - Arts and Science
- Bruce Murray, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- Foreword by Yunus Ballim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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The major growth faculties in the post-war era, along with Commerce, were Arts and Science. Between 1945 and 1959 enrolments in Arts virtually doubled, from 629 to 1 236, even though part-time classes in the faculty were abolished in 1950. The number of full-time academic staff rose from 38 to 73. In Science enrolments trebled, jumping from a mere 184 to 553, and full-time academic staff increased from 41 to 69. While the prospects in the public service for English-speaking students educated at Wits evaporated after 1948, the vast post-war expansion in the Transvaal’s teaching establishment was a major stimulus to enrolments in both faculties, and so too was the country’s industrial development. Science, which had become altogether more attractive as a consequence of the glamour that accompanied the scientific breakthroughs of World War II, was the more obvious beneficiary of industrialisation, with the Faculty of Science training scientists required by industry; but the growth in enrolments in the social sciences in the Faculty of Arts was also in part an offshoot of industrialisation. While some Psychology majors looked to a career as clinical practitioners, others were beginning to contemplate careers in public relations and personnel management; by the end of the 1950s the field of scientific personnel management in business and industry was perceived by the National Institute for Personnel Research, founded immediately after World War II, to be ‘gradually coming into its own’. The training of social scientists was not yet the chief function of the Faculty of Arts, but the social sciences were emerging as the main area of growth. Before the war, the chief role of the Faculty of Science at the undergraduate level had been to provide service courses for the faculties of Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry; in the post-war era its central activity became the training of scientists.
ARTS
While by no means the powerhouse for the study of the Arts in South Africa – the country was without any such powerhouse – the post-war Faculty of Arts at Wits was an exciting place for students.
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