Wits as an ‘open’ university 1939–1959: black admissions to the university of the Witwatersrand

Abstract

In 1959 the Nationalist government, after a decade of power, finally secured the passage through parliament of legislation to impose apartheid structures on South Africa's university system. The country's two previously ‘open universities‘, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) and the University of Cape Town (UCT), were now largely ‘closed’ to black applicants. This paper 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, but it also demonstrates that the university's doors were never much more than half open to blacks. Certain faculties and departments, most prominently Dentistry, never admitted black students, and in 1953–4 the university appeared to wish to appease the Nationalist government by instituting a quota system for black admissions to its medical school. In the formal social and sporting spheres, official university policy was one of applyi...