Many years ago, Harry Oppenheimer said: "In Johannesburg there is nothing to see and in Cape Town, no one to talk to."
Recent shifts of Joburgers to the south have cured this imbalance. But not every conversation in the Mother City offers reassurance.
Last Monday, I asked a senior academic at the University of Cape Town's law faculty whether there was any blowback from her administration on a widely posted notice calling a mass meeting in her faculty to "decolonise UCT Law".
The notice cautioned: "Blacks only. All oppressed, conquered, enslaved people of the African diaspora."
My interlocutor advised that her faculty was "perfectly relaxed since the event is not an official meeting ... and anyway very few students attended".
Intrigued by this line of argument, that numbers and a lack of official standing cure any violation of the university's nonracial principle, I ventured to ask a hypothetical: "What if a group of students called a whites-only meeting on the campus. Would you be happy with that?"
She suggested that "historical context" was the key differentiator in allowing discrimination.
But few university administrators could be unaware that on the same day, news arrived that from 2018, funding for South African universities' A-rated researchers will be cut by 90%. UCT has around 35 such academic superstars.
The same government funds that can splurge R30-million on a pension payout for Eskom's Brian Molefe for 16 months' work can't retain the country's knowledge base.
And then there is this week's state-sponsored assault on school governing bodies. The cull on excellence continues.
UCT has produced five Nobel prize winners, an impressive total. Until you measure it against the University of Chicago, which this month increased its Nobel haul to 90.
But with the savage research cull here, expect no more laureates from our once premier universities.
US journalist Bret Stephens recently wrote that the University of Chicago's president, Robert Zimmer, was the best academic head in the US. Aside from prodigious fundraising, he is a stickler for principle.
No doubt his views on the link between his university's excellence and free speech would result in his being hounded out of UCT. After all, that university disinvited its academic freedom lecturer last year, and hid paintings it deemed some would find offensive.
Zimmer is not to be found in this fearful corner. He offers instead a "campus culture committed to discourse, argument and lack of deference".
Doubling down on this view, all University of Chicago first-years are sent a letter warning them: "Our commitment to academic freedom means we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."
Later in the week I attended a dinner hosted by Cape Town businessman Philip Krawitz, at which he suggested that the assault on excellence at institutions can lead to destruction.
He quoted management guru Dr Ichak Adizes: "If the rate of internal disintegration exceeds the rate of external integration, a family, a company or a country will self-destruct."
Adizes is a modern thought leader. But the wisdom of buying peace by conceding principle - or simply starving knowledge acquisition of core funding - is ancient.
Predicting the ruin of the Roman Empire, because its elites had bowed down before various plundering and mad emperors, the historian Tacitus warned: "Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."
Since those seeking to "decolonise" legal education have already scored a victory by removing Latin from the LLB syllabus, a translation is in order. It means "They make a desert and they call it peace."
We have been warned.
• Tony Leon is a former leader of the DA and ex-ambassador to Argentina
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