ABSTRACT
This chapter is about students and teachers in South African universities between 1950 and 1965. It explores some of the perspectives of the period and to make intelligible some of the responses of those in the universities to the situation in which they found themselves. Academic fascination with intellectuals is egocentric and introspective. The Afrikaner professors at Potchestroom who in 1959 gave interviews to the press, criticising government apartheid policies as disregarding the feelings of non-whites, were severely sanctioned by a special meeting of their university council for ‘careless and undignified exercise of their right to freedom of speech’. The effectiveness of this form of sanction among Afrikaners is evidenced in the professors’ apologetic response. Academics in South Africa, black, Afrikaner and English white, play out their respective roles as blacks, Afrikaners and English-speaking whites.
