Wits leaders MA NY LEADERS HAVE H EL P E D TO GUID E WI TS A S AN INS TITUTI ON S I N C E 1 9 22. OUR C ENTENNIA L YEAR I S A PERFEC T TIME TO C EL E B RATE WHER E I T S TA RTED AND WHO W I L L B E TAK ING U S I NT O TH E FUTUR E.
JAN HENDRIK HOFMEYR THE FIRS T PRINCIPAL OF WITS
Tell my friends to carry on HOME LIFE
LEADERSHIP STYLE
IMPRESSIVE MILESTONES
SCANDAL
Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr was born in Cape Town on 20 March 1894, the younger son of Andries Brink Hofmeyr and his second wife Deborah Catherina Boyers. His father was business manager of the newspaper Ons Land and died when Hofmeyr was three. His mother, Deborah, never married again and proved a domineering influence on his life, supervising his eating habits and hovering over his social life. She also encouraged her son to impose stern discipline in the residences and around staff behaviour. Alan Paton writes in the biography of Hofmeyr that charades were often played at the Hofmeyrs’ home, but “sometimes JHH was asked to abstain because he guessed the answers too quickly”. Hofmeyr was a child prodigy. He matriculated at age 12, obtained a first class honours degree at 15 from the University of Cape Town and a first class master’s at 17. At Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, he was awarded a double first. He became a professor of classics at the age of 22 and Principal of Wits at the age of 24, in 1919.
DRESS SENSE
Historian Professor Bruce Murray noted that Hofmeyr lacked physical presence and style, and captured people’s attention through his command of words. “Appearance did not concern him. He wore ill-fitting, crumpled suits, and cycled each day to Plein Square, invariably emerging at his office with bicycle pump in hand.” 24 W I T S R E V I E W
Hofmeyr was a formidable administrator, displaying great efficiency and “an amazing grasp of detail. He forgot nothing”. Although he was greatly admired by his students, few of his colleagues regarded him as a friend. Academics complained his mother “set herself up as a judge of their morals and she passed judgement and he executed sentence.” Professor Murray noted: “His academic and administrative capacity was exceptional and his understanding of what a South African university could be was, in many ways, ahead of the times. But he was handicapped by his youth and inexperience, his rigid interpretation of sexual mores and a reluctance to contain his mother’s meddling…” Informally known as the Stibbe affair, the scandal involved anatomy Professor Edward Phillip Stibbe and a college typist. Professor Stibbe was an authority in anatomy, who contributed to Gray’s Anatomy and was loved by his students. He was forced to resign under duress as a consequence of action initiated by Hofmeyr and returned to the United Kingdom to further his career. Academics were outraged and animosity towards Hofmeyr increased. The incident is described by Paton as “the most desperate in Hofmeyr’s life”. Hofmeyr wrote to Lady Selbourne at the time: “Professors and schoolmasters and parsons are most unreasonable people. They magnify specks of dust into rocks of offence and are always for the letter of the law as
