Rob Hersov: The battle for the soul of a school called Bishops

Rob Hersov argues Bishops should fly only three flags — school, national, and St George's — and retire the rotating pride-flag policy entirely. His case: cause flags force an institution to take sides on contested issues, citing global survey data showing that pride flags split public opinion roughly down the middle, whereas national flags are near-universally supported. He notes matric students themselves wrote against the policy in 2024, and points to a growing "institutional neutrality" movement at universities worldwide. He also argues, on a strict legal reading of the school's 1891 founding Act, that flag policy belongs to Council — not the Executive..By Rob Hersov*.There is a dispute underway at Bishops Diocesan College. It concerns neither money nor results, but flags. It has set the school Executive against a large part of the school community: Old Boys, parents, and, most tellingly, many of the students themselves.The question is deceptively simple: what should fly on the three flagpoles at one of South Africa's oldest and most distinguished schools? On one side stands the school Executive, which believes the third pole should rotate through a changing roster of cause flags; the pride flag today, others tomorrow. On the other side stand those of us who believe the answer is simple: the Bishops flag, the South African flag, and the St George's flag. Nothing else.This is not a debate about tolerance. It is a debate about institutional neutrality, about whether a school should take sides at all.Flags Are Not DecorationsLet me be clear about what a flag on a school flagpole means. It is not a bumper sticker. It is not a social media post. When an institution raises a flag to its mast, it makes an official declaration of identity and allegiance. It says: this is who we are.The Bishops flag says: we are this school, with this history, these traditions, and this community. The South African flag says: we are citizens of this nation, bound by its constitution and committed to its future. The St George's flag says: we are a school founded in 1849 by Robert Gray, the first Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, and our moral and spiritual framework flows from that tradition.These three flags represent the three pillars of the Bishops identity: school, nation, and faith. They are foundational. They are permanent. They belong to every single boy who walks through those gates, regardless of his race, religion, politics, or sexuality.A pride flag is a different kind of symbol. It represents a cause, one that many hold dear, and understandably so, but a cause nonetheless. And the moment an institution raises a cause flag on its mast, it has made a statement that divides its community into those who are "with us" and those who are not.What the Data ShowsSupporters say that flying the pride flag is simply about inclusion, and that objection can only stem from prejudice. The data tells a more complicated story.A YouGov survey of 1,088 American adults, conducted from 30 June to 2 July 2026, asked whether it is appropriate for an individual to display various flags outside their own home. America is not South Africa, but its divisions over these symbols mirror our own, and the pattern is instructive:.The pattern is stark. A national flag commands near-universal acceptance; every cause-linked flag divides the public roughly down the middle, with a fifth or more unsure. And note what was measured: private display outside one's own home, where tolerance is at its highest. On an institutional mast, which speaks for everyone beneath it, the division can only be sharper.When the same survey asked for overall sentiment toward the pride flag, 31% were positive, 36% negative, and the rest neutral or unsure. The national flag: 78% positive, 7% negative. The point is not that the public rejects the pride flag; it is that the public is deeply and evenly split on it, while the national flag stands almost alone in commanding consensus.In Britain, a 2025 More in Common study ("Pride or Protest? Britons and the Flag Debate") found that only 17% of people would feel more positively about a neighbour flying a pride flag, while 25% would feel more negatively. The majority, 51%, said it made no difference. These are not the numbers of a unifying symbol. These are the numbers of a contested political statement..And in South Africa? Pew Research (2019) found South Africans themselves divided, with 54% saying homosexuality should be accepted by society and most of the remainder disagreeing or unsure. Whatever one's own view, a school that flies this flag is taking a public position on a question that divides its own country and, in all likelihood, its own parent body, and doing so in the name of unity.The Students Have SpokenPerhaps the most striking evidence comes from the boys themselves.In June 2024, members of the matric class and the Student Representative Forum penned a remarkable letter opposing the pride flag. These are not reactionaries. These are not bigots. These are eighteen-year-old boys who have grown up in the most liberal era in human history, and they wrote this:"We accept all boys who are students at this school, regardless of who they are attracted to or who they love, but we do not accept division, we don't accept symbols that seek to split us up into groups based on attributes that we can't control.""The school's and country's flags are the only symbols that are representative of all students."Read those words again. These young men grasped the essential point: that true inclusion means not forcing the entire community to march under the banner of any particular cause. That unity comes from shared symbols, not imposed ones.The response was disappointing. The boys were patronised. They were told they needed more "education" about diversity. A "Diversity Specialist" was quoted saying the school had "its work cut out to educate learners." In other words: the students reached the wrong conclusion, so they must be instructed until they reach the right one. Students who arrive at a considered position deserve engagement, not correction. Teaching that continues until the disagreement stops is not education; it is persuasion by attrition at best, and critics will call it indoctrination.The Global Tide Has TurnedWhile Bishops has moved in one direction, much of the educational world is moving decisively in the other.The principle of "institutional neutrality", the idea that schools and universities should not, as institutions, take official positions on contested social and political issues, is now the fastest-growing governance trend in global education. According to Heterodox Academy, which tracked such policies through December 2024, at least 148 institutions serving roughly 2.6 million students had adopted formal statement-neutrality policies by the end of that year. Dartmouth, the University of Michigan, Southern Methodist University: these are not backwater colleges. They are among the finest institutions in the world, and they have all concluded that taking sides on political controversies is incompatible with their educational mission.The intellectual foundation for this movement was laid in 1967 by the University of Chicago's Kalven Report, which declared:"The neutrality of the university as an institution arises not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints."This is not cowardice. It is wisdom. When an institution takes a political stance, it tells every dissenter that they do not belong. It chills free thought. It punishes intellectual independence. And it transforms a place of learning into a place of conformity.What This Is Really AboutLet us be clear about what this dispute is, and is not. It is not about gay rights. Gay boys at Bishops are protected by the South African Constitution, by the school's own anti-discrimination policies, and by the basic decency of their peers. No flag on a pole changes that.It is about who may speak for the institution. When the school's symbols are enlisted for any contemporary cause, however sincerely held, the authority of a 177-year-old institution is being spent on a question its community has not settled. That authority belongs to the whole community, in trust, across generations. It is not the Executive's to spend.Nor can the Executive answer that it is simply following the church. It has been suggested that in flying the flag, Bishops walks in step with St George's Cathedral, the Archbishop of Cape Town, and its fellow Anglican schools. As a matter of governance, that answer does not hold. The Diocesan College Council, Rondebosch, Incorporation Act of 1891 vests the general direction and management of the College's affairs in the Council (Section 2), a power the Council exercises subject to the school's founding trust deed (Section 6). The role that deed reserves to the Bishop of Cape Town concerns the religious teaching of the school; it does not extend to community relations or to symbolic and public questions of this kind. Neither the Cathedral nor the Archbishop holds a governing remit over flag policy, and what other Anglican schools choose to fly is a matter for their councils, not for ours. The determination belongs to the Council of the Diocesan College, and Council has yet to make it. A policy of this consequence, arrived at by executive practice rather than by the body the school's own Act of Parliament charges with its direction, is not merely unwise. It is a decision made in the wrong room.Some will ask: is the St George's flag not also a statement? It is, but of a different kind. It does not take a side in a live public controversy; it states the school's founding identity. Bishops is an Anglican foundation, established by an Anglican bishop, its chapel and pastoral framework flowing from that tradition. A boy of any faith or none stands beneath it exactly as a boy of any politics stands beneath the national flag: the flag describes what the institution is, not what any member of it must believe. That is the line between an identity flag and a cause flag, and it is a line a school can hold.A cause flag, by contrast, commits the school to a position on a live and contested public question. That is not a decision for the Executive to make alone. Bishops belongs to its boys: past, present, and future. It belongs to the Old Boys who built it, the parents and Old Boys who fund it, and the students who live it every day."But Isn’t It About Kindness?"The most sympathetic argument on the other side deserves a direct answer. Flying the flag, we are told, is an act of kindness: a small signal to boys who might otherwise feel unseen. The impulse is decent, and nobody should doubt the sincerity behind it. But an institution cannot practise kindness the way a person can, because an institution’s kindness is never private. Every gesture toward one group is witnessed by all the others, and each of them may reasonably ask why their cause, their people, their grief did not merit the same. A friend who is kind to you has simply been kind. An institution that is kind to you has chosen you; and choice, from an institution, is ranking. Kindness rationed from a flagpole does not read as kindness. It reads as a league table of who matters.Every school already understands this. It is why Bishops has a uniform. A uniform treats every boy identically precisely so that no boy’s wealth, politics, or circumstances are put on display in the quad. We do not call the uniform unkind. We recognise it as a discipline the institution accepts so that every boy stands on equal footing. A school that allowed each boy to dress for the cause dearest to him would not be kinder; it would simply turn the playground into a contest of allegiances. The flagpole is the school’s uniform: three flags, worn by everyone, ranking no one.The kindest institutions are, in this sense, often the strictest. The referee both teams grumble about equally. The judge who will not tilt toward the sympathetic litigant. The examiner who marks every paper to the same standard. And the school that says no to every flag: no Springbok flag on the Monday after a World Cup, no Movember flag, no cause flags at all, so that it never has to say "not yours" to any boy. Treating everyone identically will occasionally disappoint everyone equally. That is not a failure of compassion. It is what fairness feels like from the inside.The Path ForwardThe solution is straightforward. Bishops should adopt a formal policy of institutional neutrality regarding its flagpoles:1.The Bishops flag, representing the school's identity, traditions, and community.2.The South African flag, representing the nation and the constitutional order that protects all citizens equally.3.The St George's Cross flag, representing the school's Anglican founding and its enduring moral framework.No other flags. No rotations. No causes du jour, however worthy.This is not exclusion. It is the opposite. It is a declaration that Bishops belongs equally to every boy who attends it, regardless of his race, his religion, his politics, or his sexuality. It says: we will not divide you into groups. We will not rank your identities. We will not tell you which causes to support. We will give you the tools to think for yourselves..That is what a great school does. That is what Bishops has always done. And that is what it must continue to do, if those entrusted with its stewardship hold a steady course.The question before Bishops is not a contest between the tolerant and the intolerant. It is a choice between two theories of the institution: one that holds that a school's strength lies in what unites its members, and one that believes the school should lend its voice to the causes of the day.I know where I stand. So, it seems, do the boys, and, judging by the response of the Old Diocesan community in recent weeks, so do a great many ODs..*Rob Hersov is an investor, entrepreneur, Michaelhouse Old Boy and parent at Bishops.

Rob Hersov: The battle for the soul of a school called Bishops

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