DUT push to improve staff-student relations

taking responsibility and being accountable.

“Any manager who has a matter escalated to me should know they have failed in their duty. If, as a vice-chancellor, I escalate management matters to council, let it be known I will have failed in my duty.”

Mthembu, a mathematician by training, is passionate about producing more academics and believes DUT has the potential and responsibility to help South Africa increase this number.

His extensive experience in academia, including being the vice-principal and deputy vice-chancellor of Wits University, will serve him well in his new position.

Before taking over the reins from former DUT vice-chancellor Professor Ahmed Bawa in October, Mthembu served as vice-chancellor and principal at the Central University of Technology (CUT) in the Free State for 10 years.

In an interview with the Sunday Tribune, Mthembu said he was happy to be back in his home province as he was now closer to his family, which was based in Nkandla, where he grew up.

His father was a school principal and his mother a teacher.

He joked about how he had had to readjust to Zulu and English after having to communicate in Sotho and Afrikaans for almost a decade in Bloemfontein.

“During my tenure at CUT, I never had students protesting over accommodation but that has been one of the challenges I’ve had to deal with here because we simply don’t have enough beds. That is because universities of technology were not designed to provide accommodation for students. But because of the demand, provisions were made, but not enough resources allocated,” he said of the differences between the two institutions.

The father of six daughters spoke glowingly about his love of maths and how, as a young boy, he dreamt of following his father’s footsteps as a maths teacher.

“Both of my parents were teachers and when I went to junior secondary school, we had an excellent maths and science teacher who had been taught by my dad.

“I can say from a young age I had great admiration for teachers and always thought I would become one until my first year at Fort Hare University when one of the lecturers suggested that I should enrol for an honours degree after completing my BSC,” he recalled.

After his honours he did his masters and when he obtained his PHD at the age of 28, there was no going back to do a teaching diploma so he became a lecturer.

“I don’t regret how things turned out because I did teach even though it was not in a high school. I have a fiveyear contract with DUT and don’t expect anything more, so maybe when I leave here I could teach mathematics to the youth, sort of as an experiment to show that you don’t have to be a genius to do well in mathematics because I’ve proven that with myself,” said the 55-year-old.

His success has not come without sacrifice. Raised by disciplinarian parents meant he had to learn to exercise self-discipline at a young age and when he got to university he chose not to have a girlfriend because he was afraid it would distract him from his studies and cause him to fail.

“Once my parents were away for a weekend. On their return, my father called me. He asked which household tasks I had accomplished during their absence. I was perplexed because he had not asked me to perform any before he left.

“With a bit of tough love on the buttocks, he told me it was my duty to look around and find something to do or fix.”

“He said he didn’t have to tell me about things I was old enough to discover for myself. From then, I became pretty much self-controlled, requiring little or no external oversight from my parents. I became my own personal bureaucracy and established my own controls,” he said.