An open letter to the UCT community

Press release by Concerned Alumni

On transparency, trust and the duty of candour owed to us, the University community

As the undersigned alumni of the University of Cape Town, we write out of enduring loyalty to an institution that has long claimed intellectual honesty, rigorous debate, and principled governance as its defining virtues. It is precisely because UCT occupies such a prominent place in South African public life — and in our own family legacies — that we have paid close attention to the information being conveyed to stakeholders by the UCT Council.

As the supreme governing body of the University, Council bears a particular duty of candour to the institution’s stakeholders, including staff, students, alumni, donors and the broader public. That duty is especially acute in periods of institutional risk.

We are alarmed by indications that UCT Media Spokesperson Elijah Moholola refuses to work with Council and specifically its chair, Advocate Norman Arendse because of his concerns about its probity. Unfortunately, we believe there is ample evidence already in the public record to warrant his reported refusal.

Over the last two years the UCT community received a series of official communications through UCT News, including reports issued in the name of the Chair of Council, Advocate Norman Arendse SC, updating the community on Council meetings. For most stakeholders, these reports constituted the primary — and often sole — window into Council deliberations.

However, unprecedented circumstances have since opened a far wider window into the affairs of Council. Through sworn affidavits, court papers, and livestreamed proceedings in the Mendelsohn v UCT litigation, as well as other public UCT communications, a materially different picture has emerged from that painted in the Council reports authored by Advocate Arendse.

Our concern is not that Council debated sensitive matters behind closed doors — that is expected. The crux is that material financial and institutional risks were described to Council in grave and urgent terms, while being significantly misrepresented, deferred or omitted altogether in Council’s communications to the wider university community.

This divergence warrants careful attention. Universities will always face financial and political risks, and councils must often deliberate privately. But when the same institution appears to describe those risks very differently to different audiences, trust and confidence are inevitably diminished. Tone is not incidental in institutional governance: when risk is consistently framed as marginal or manageable, stakeholders are deprived of the information necessary to make informed decisions about engagement, support and advocacy.

The concern raised here rests on striking contrasts between what was communicated to the UCT community via the Chair’s reports and what transpired in Council meetings during 2024 and 2025. These differences are not rhetorical. They are matters of record.

Throughout 2024, UCT News communications from the Chair emphasised UCT’s fundraising resilience, noting that while philanthropic income declined from R768.5 million in 2023 to R445.7 million in 2024, this remained consistent with pre-2023 levels and reflected global economic pressures rather than institution-specific distress.

Yet at the Council meeting of 19 October 2024, the Vice-Chancellor reported that withdrawals by specific donors amounted to approximately R250 million in funding losses already incurred. Council members were reminded that this occurred against the backdrop of an existing annual deficit of roughly R350 million, meaning that these withdrawals materially compounded an already precarious financial position.

These figures did not feature in contemporaneous communications to the broader university community and only surfaced publicly much later.

In his report-back on the same meeting, Advocate Arendse described Council’s engagement as involving “full, frank and robust discussion and debate having regard to all the relevant and material facts (including any financial consequences)”.

A sworn affidavit by a sitting Council member describing that period recounts a far more sobering account: that the Vice-Chancellor presented a detailed report focused on current donor losses rather than speculative future risks; that he warned of donor discomfort arising from the Gaza resolutions, particularly in relation to academic freedom; and that Council members explicitly noted the gravity of a R250 million funding loss in the context of an already significant deficit, with warnings that the situation could worsen further if these concerns were not addressed.

This context casts the Chair’s contemporaneous appeal to stakeholders, urging them “not to pre-empt the outcome and take any action that might be premature”, in a markedly different light.

A still starker contrast emerges in relation to the Council meeting of 15 March 2025.

At that meeting, the Vice-Chancellor reported that the termination of USAID grants had already resulted in losses of R31 million over the project period, with broader risks looming. He explained that US federal agencies fund 155 projects at UCT, predominantly through the NIH, with a combined value of R2.75 billion over their full duration and approximately R660 million at risk in 2025 alone. Council was told that the salaries of 475 research staff, as well as 61 postgraduate students and 20 postdoctoral fellows, depended in whole or in part on this funding, and that over 200 staff retrenchments were likely if funding were withdrawn.

Crucially, Council was informed that the Gaza resolutions adopted on 22 June 2024 risked triggering US sanctions targeted specifically at UCT, based on information received from the US Consulate in Cape Town.

Extracts of this report, later published by Politicsweb, allowed us as stakeholders to assess for ourselves the scale of the risk confronting our alma mater.

Affidavits describing this meeting paint a picture of a deeply divided Council. They record that the Vice-Chancellor made an impassioned plea for Council to rescind the Gaza resolutions in order to mitigate funding losses, warning that management was being asked to confront severe financial harm with its “hands tied behind its back”. A motion to rescind the resolutions was ultimately defeated by a single vote, following intense debate.

There was extensive press coverage of these events. Many of us wrote directly to the VC to offer him our support for his 15 March report and imploring Advocate Arendse to hear the pleas of the VC.

These dynamics were largely absent from the Chair’s public-facing summary of the meeting, which focused instead on concerns about leaks rather than on the substance of the deliberations themselves, raising questions about whether transparency had become a secondary concern.

On 14 May 2025, following the 10 May reconvened Council meeting, Advocate Arendse informed the university community via UCT News that recent US federal funding cuts had

been “marginal”, while assuring readers that the situation was being closely monitored and that diversification strategies were under way.

Less than a week later, on 20 May 2025, the Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation, Professor Jeff Murugan, issued a campus-wide communication describing “serious developments” affecting US federal research funding. He reported that UCT stood to lose over R437 million in the next 12 months, and R1.67 billion over the period 2025–2027, if existing awards were terminated — losses with potentially long-term consequences for researchers, patients, and the broader health system. Both communications were issued within the same institutional context, drawing on the same underlying funding environment. It is difficult to reconcile these figures with the earlier characterisation of funding cuts as “marginal”.

Another striking example of the dichotomy between averments in the Review Application and the feedback from Advocate Arendse to our community is apparent from the 4 July 2025 report on the Council meeting of 28 June 2025. Here the Chair referred only in general terms to a Development and Alumni Department Report on the “implications of the DGF grant to the Neuroscience Institute”. From a perusal of the court papers, we can guess these “implications” to have been that around 22 May 2025 the Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) had demanded the return of R20 million which it had already paid to UCT (as the initial instalment of the R200 million donation to the Neuroscience Institute). Advocate Arendse informed the court of this letter in an affidavit on 25 June 2025.

Once again, a matter of concrete financial consequence (and so crucial to the court proceedings that Adv Arendse had to depose to an extra affidavit about it) was rendered nebulous in public-facing communication. One can only postulate that this was probably because DGF’s demand for the return of this donation, was according to the court affidavits, “due to the false allegations in Mr Arendse’s affidavit.”

Diametrically opposed to this stance, in December 2025, the Vice-Chancellor openly shared the findings of his campus-wide listening exercise, candidly acknowledging deep divisions, a climate described by many as “toxic”, and widespread fear about expressing honest views. The VC’s update bravely admitted:

“From what the practitioners have been able to gather in just over 40 weeks of ‘listening’, and notwithstanding the dangers of misinterpretation, misunderstanding and over-generalisation, the most worrying trends can be clustered under the statement: ‘UCT is not a welcoming place’.”

“Running across the themes was a sense of a university where the Gaza resolutions adopted by Council have laid bare entrenched divisions and polarisation to the point where collegiality is at its lowest point. The words ‘toxic’ and ‘unsafe spaces’ were a constant reference. This climate causes individuals to fear expressing their honest opinions, which has an adverse effect on creative and innovative thinking.”

This climate did not arise in isolation. It developed alongside a period in which we experienced a widening gap between the activity at governance level and the reassurance conveyed publicly. The Vice-Chancellor’s willingness to confront uncomfortable truths stands in marked contrast to the tone of Council report-backs over the same period.

Since then, despite a Council meeting having taken place in early December 2025, no report-back has been issued by the Chair.

Taken individually, any one of these contrasts might be attributed to emphasis or timing. Read together, in our opinion they reveal a pattern in which material risks were presented to Council with urgency and gravity, while being significantly downplayed — or not communicated at all — to the wider university community.

This letter does not engage with allegations of dishonesty on the part of the Chair of Council or any individual member. Our concern is more serious and more institutional: the trend of material information being omitted, downplayed or framed in a manner that obscures its gravity, thereby depriving stakeholders (and decision-makers) of a fair and complete picture.

Our UCT is a public institution sustained by trust — trust that difficult truths will be shared, not only reassuring ones. When litigation and media disclosures become the primary means through which the university community gleans information, that trust is inevitably weakened.

We address this letter in the hope of a transparent and substantive report on the Council meeting of 6 December 2025 and similarly on those to be convened this year. The tradition of candour must be reinstated.

Signed

Concerned Alumni of the University of Cape Town
12 February 2026

This letter has been signed by 188 Alumni of UCT

Cover image courtesy of Jude Kapelushnik