On 10 October 2025, the University of Fort Hare closed its Alice and East London campuses after protest action. The closure protected people in the moment, and it was a defensible decision. But it also illustrates the bind that every South African institution knows well: the harder question — the one that defines the season ahead — is how to protect both institutional continuity and the legitimate right to protest at the same time.
Protest is part of the fabric of South African campus life, and it is protected for good reason. The task for institutional leaders is not to suppress it but to keep people safe and keep the institution running through it, while drawing a clear line between legitimate dissent and the criminal opportunism that sometimes attaches to it.
Continuity and dissent are not opposites
Treating every protest as a security threat is both wrong and counter-productive. It inflames the very tensions it seeks to manage, and it squanders the goodwill that institutions need most when things are difficult. The universities that navigate unrest well start from a different premise: that dissent and continuity can coexist, and that the security function exists to make that coexistence possible.
In practice this means designing for the legitimate case while preparing for the criminal one. The student exercising a right to assemble and the opportunist using cover to intimidate, damage or loot are different problems requiring different responses — and conflating them is the most common and costly error we see.
Read the tempo before it escalates
Most serious escalations announce themselves. There is a tempo to unrest — a build-up in grievance, rhetoric and coordination that is visible to anyone watching for it. Early-warning intelligence, drawn from open sources and the institution's own networks, gives leadership the days of notice that turn a scramble into a plan.
- Early-warning intelligence to read tempo before it escalates
- Pre-agreed de-escalation and engagement protocols, owned above the security function
- Continuity plans for teaching, exams and research that can be invoked quickly
- Clear, humane thresholds for closure and, just as importantly, for reopening
Closure is a tool, not a strategy
Closing a campus buys time and protects people, and there are moments when it is the only responsible choice. But a closure also carries costs — to students whose terms are disrupted, to the institution's reputation, and to the trust that makes future engagement possible. Used reflexively, it becomes a substitute for readiness rather than an expression of it.
Closing a campus is a tool of last resort, not a strategy. The strategy is readiness.
Readiness is unglamorous, and it works
Readiness is the tabletop exercise nobody wanted to attend, the protocol agreed before tempers rose, the intelligence picture built in calm weeks. It is the de-escalation training that lets a security team hold a line without escalating it, and the continuity plan that keeps examinations on track when a building is unavailable. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is what separates a season that costs days from one that costs a year.
The institutions that come through protest seasons intact have usually done their hardest work long before the first placard. They have decided, in advance and at the most senior level, what they will protect, what they will tolerate, and how they will tell the difference — and they have rehearsed it until it holds under pressure.
