Lessons from the Roedean fiasco

It began as a seemingly minor timetable clash between two school tennis teams. But it soon spiralled into a high-octane drama with national implications, exposing intractable biases around a war 6,000km away, the way in which global political conflicts are seeping into our school culture, and the way in which institutions are manifestly ill-equipped to deal with crises of this sort.

The backdrop is well-trodden territory. Roedean School, one of Joburg’s pre-eminent private girls’ schools founded 123 years ago, failed to provide opponents for a first and second tennis team from King David, the elite Jewish school, which arrived at Roedean’s Parktown campus for the fixture on February 3.

While King David’s staff claimed the no-show was because it was a “Jewish school”, Roedean hotly denied any antisemitism, claiming that it didn’t field a team because of “prior commitments”, including a “compulsory academic workshop”. “As such, no formal fixture was scheduled to take place on February 3,” it said.

This, critically, turned out to be a lie, as a voice note between Roedean principal Phuti Mogale and King David’s principal, Lorraine Srage, recorded the day before the fixture, later revealed.

“We’re facing a bit of pressure from our community and our constituents regarding just not playing against King David,” Mogale says in that call. She laments the rise of “cancel culture”, adding that there is a lot of pressure from parents because “what is happening out in society is now affecting us at a school level”.

It lit a fuse in society like little else could. Talk-shows lit up with listeners arguing ferociously according to their preconceived positions on Israel and Gaza. The narratives, for the most part, largely fell into three categories: that politics should have no place in schools; that King David deserved the boycott for effectively supporting Israel’s incursion into Gaza in which more than 70,000 people have been killed; or that Roedean is a hotbed of hate and antisemitism.

Roedean, at the centre of a storm it hadn’t seen coming, froze. By February 12, it had thrown in the towel, retreating as fast as it could. The school issued a formal apology, acknowledging that what happened was “deeply hurtful to the Jewish community”, rejecting “antisemitism and all forms of discrimination and prejudice”, and admitting its earlier statement had been incorrect because of “communication challenges”. Mogale, after only seven months at the helm, resigned immediately.

Yesterday, Roedean’s chair, Dale Quaker, resigned, saying “the nature of the public commentary has crossed acceptable boundaries, and has had a direct impact on [my] sense of safety”.

But the findings of the first phase of an “independent external forensic review” into what happened, released yesterday by Roedean, listed numerous failures by the school.

It said the tennis fixture “was forfeited because academic workshops had been scheduled at the same time as the match”, but added that “protocol was not followed and the situation was subsequently compounded by failures in communication and judgment at leadership level”. A second phase of the probe, due to be concluded within two weeks, will examine the root causes of all of this.

The information gap

With heads rolling, the sound and fury of this fallout will have alarmed many other institutions and schools, illustrating how much is at stake in an era of always-on social media. But it has also put companies and organisations on notice that they need to set in place firm policies, should they happen to land in an ethnically explosive conflict of their own.

Lebo Madiba, a crisis management expert who runs the PR Powerhouse and is also a parent of a child at Roedean, says on this score, the school messed up badly.

“First, Roedean put out a statement without looking into the issue properly, so they weren’t able to publish something that was as close to the truth as possible. Instead, they should have put out a holding statement saying they would interrogate the facts and announce a course of action later. Once you’re caught out, it becomes exponentially harder to walk back what you’ve first said – and there’s now doubt over how honest you are too,” she says.

Madiba sees this is a governance faux pas that others would do well to learn from, lest they end up in a similar predicament.

“Crisis communications is a core part of governance: did you tell the truth, and close the information gap? Up till today, the jury is out on whether Roedean has done that properly. Yes, they apologised – but are they sorry for their initial stance, or for lying? It’s still not entirely clear,” she says.

Madiba doesn’t believe Mogale should have resigned, arguing that the board should take responsibility for how this unfolded. For one thing, the board should have had a clear position on such an eventuality – reaffirming that it is apolitical, despite pressure from the parents – and it should have communicated this early, and stuck to this position.

The alternative – simply hoping that these racial, ethnic or religious divides don’t manifest in your organisation – is a losing strategy.

Rich Mkhondo, a veteran crisis communications expert who has worked with companies like MTN, says this issue spiralled so quickly because it involved the emotive issue of the Israeli state’s attacks on Gaza. “Whenever a crisis involves race, ethnicity or religion, it becomes far more sensitive, because South Africans have a history of immediately refracting issues through their specific political lens,” he says. “Most people have a view already on what’s happening in the Middle East, so people immediately retreated to their preconceived ideas.”

Mkhondo agrees that given the likelihood of such a situation catching fire, organisations including schools and companies ought to pre-empt this by having a position on how they will respond. In this case, however, the truth is that even if Roedean had such a policy, it fatally tipped the scales against it by not telling the truth.

Once you’ve done that, Mkhondo says, you’re up against it. “The rule in crisis communications is that you should be the first to disclose what happens. When you don’t do this, and you think people are stupid or won’t talk to others who know what happens, it backfires. Lying always, always exacerbates a crisis,” he says.

In response to questions from Currency yesterday, Roedean’s board said only that it “didn’t lie – at the time of issuing the statement, that was their understanding of events”.

While Quaker is now gone, replaced as chair by Pick n Pay executive Thembi Mbengashe-Mazibuko, the second phase of the investigation will likely dig deeper into the board’s culpability for what happened – including the part played by Lindi Dlamini, Roedean’s executive director.

Can’t avoid politics

The Roedean fiasco underscores too how businesses that feel they can still operate in a vacuum are fooling themselves.

Nicola Kleyn, the former dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science and co-author of When Crisis Strikes with broadcaster Francis Herd, says it’s a timely lesson in how large macro issues – in this case, the war in Gaza – can manifest in your local neighbourhood, and you have to be ready to deal with it.

“Some people claim this type of political conflict has no place in a school environment but in our modern society, you can’t ringfence things as neatly as that,” she says. “What’s playing out in the wider society will end up playing out in your own backyard and at your dining room table. So what you need to do is find a mechanism to navigate through this, ways to start a dialogue, and a path towards a solution when this happens.”

Kleyn agrees that Roedean did a lot wrong in all this – not telling the truth about the reason for cancelling the match, for starters – but she says this crisis may never have escalated had the school been alert to the “weak signals” earlier that there was trouble brewing. In this case, some of the Roedean pupils who had previously played a tennis match at King David had apparently been “traumatised” by the presence of posters of Israeli hostages and armed security at that school.

“Had Roedean tried to understand what these reservations, whether they were right or wrong, actually stemmed from? The school knew there were more tennis fixtures scheduled against King David and that their pupils’ concerns weren’t going to just disappear. They needed to deal with this, but they don’t appear to have done so,” she says.

Her view is underscored by the forensic review, released yesterday, which says the concerns raised by the students before the match “were not managed through appropriate leadership processes [and] they were not escalated, assessed or resolved”.

Ultimately, Herd says this debacle goes beyond simply poor crisis management, and speaks to issues of integrity and leadership.

“Whatever you do behind closed doors can be held against you on the front page of a newspaper. It’s a reminder to leaders to be really careful about saying anything that they don’t want to get out. In terms of crisis management theory, Roedean lied, which is a no-no of course – whatever you say after that will sound like spin,” she says.

As grim as this fallout has been for Roedean, Herd says this confrontation is likely to serve as a wake-up call for all other institutions.

For one thing, it reasserts much-needed transparency. For a long time, private schools operated behind a veil of elitism, Herd says, and while Mogale evidently thought the call with King David would be held under some sort of code of silence, this painful lesson in accountability will provide greater insight for the public into how these schools operate.

But if the wider society will benefit from the debacle, what does this mean for Roedean itself?

Having been caught stretching the truth, it’ll be a long road to recovery, says Madiba. “It’ll have to work on regaining trust. But the impact will be felt on other schools too – now that a channel has been opened up between schooling and politics, it won’t be easy to close. So you can expect more of these sorts of conflicts in future,” she says.

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