The Standards Bearer (Published 1997)

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On her visit to South Africa last month, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a moment to compliment her beaming host at the University of Cape Town, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, the school's vice chancellor. Clinton told an overflowing audience that Ramphele was a role model not just for them but also ''for young people throughout the world.'' The room erupted into applause. It was a triumphant moment for Ramphele -- and one wholly unforeseen in the fall of 1995, when, as a candidate for the university's highest office, she faced an auditorium packed with angry, jeering students.

To an outsider, Ramphele (pronounced ram-FAY-lay) might have seemed a shoo-in for the job. Trained as a doctor and an anthropologist, she had been deputy vice chancellor for five years. And her credentials as an anti-apartheid activist were impeccable. She was one of the founders, with Steven Biko, of South Africa's Black Consciousness movement in the 1960's, which held that blacks must be the leaders in their own liberation movement. But the University of Cape Town, perhaps this country's top university, is a campus in transition, struggling to redefine itself in the new South Africa. For decades, it catered to white students. Now the student body is 45 percent black, and the new arrivals do not necessarily see their outspoken -- some would say arrogant -- leader as their champion. For one thing, by black South African standards, Ramphele comes from a relatively well-off family. Though they lived in a village without running water, her parents were schoolteachers, which makes some students regard her with suspicion.

Moreover, whatever the legitimate grievances of South Africa's black population, Ramphele is on the rampage against a new ''culture of entitlement.'' No one, she says, should get a job he can't handle or a house he can't pay for simply because he is black. ''I find it interesting that we are comfortable with sporting victories,'' she says. ''We only have the best people representing us when it comes to those things. But not when it comes to matters intellectual.''

This view puts her at odds not only with her more ''Africanist'' colleagues but also with mainstream members of the African National Congress, the country's ruling party, and with many of South Africa's leading businesses, which are falling over themselves to hire and promote the limited number of well-educated blacks, often as window dressing. Institutions and professionals who insist on achievement, she says, are labeled ''elitist.''

So the atmosphere during the university's selection process was tense. On that day in September 1995, a black student who stepped up to the microphone called her application for the job ''insidious and insincere.'' With the room hooting its appreciation, he challenged her to convince him that she was not simply looking for a prestigious, high-paying job.

Dr. Ramphele leaned her elbows on the podium, rested her chin on her fist and with narrowed eyes and a slight smile waited for the audience to settle down. In the new South Africa, she pointed out, she could be having an easier time and making a lot more money somewhere else. ''The gravy train may be running across this country,'' she said firmly. ''But it is not running at U.C.T. If I was seeking a ride, this is not the place for it.''