Prof Norris takes UB unions head- on
‘ We cannot exempt cartels of personal comfort seekers from the realities of urgent change’ Says some of the leaders want to abuse university resources for personal businesses
Gloves are now off at the University of Botswana as the Vice Chancellor has decided to take head- on the university trade unions which have called for his sacking.
The unions last week petitioned Minister of Tertiary Education Dr. Douglas Letsholathebe to fire Professor David Norris on grounds that he has failed the university due to his blurred roadmap, failure to address salary arrears, deplorable teaching and learning resources and litigations among others.
This week Prof Norris took a swipe at the unions indicating that some of the leadership of the unions are abusing the university resources to advance personal businesses something they are angry that he has stopped.
He told Botswana Guardian in an interview that a transformational core of the new strategy that the university has adopted needs new ways of understanding and doing things. He explained that it should be obvious therefore that the long- engrained practices promoting deficient work ethics and ignoring mediocrity have to be done away with. “It is to be expected that this will disconcert all those who want to defend the cynical culture of doing little. We cannot exempt cartels of personal comfort seekers from the realities of urgent change. “There cannot be partial exemption from the fair rules of Corporate Governance. My administration is working within the powers of the mandate that this nation has entrusted its national University with. “Obviously, those who are calling for my head do not recognise corporate governance or care to know how a university continues to function in the era of severe global reorientation,” Prof Norris hit back.
He explained that the University launched a new strategy that aims to direct UB’s focus towards impact on society. This direction, he said has become more important now than ever before, given that economies are increasingly powered by knowledge creation and intellectual capacity. The Vice Chancellor pointed out that the University must therefore play a significant role in enabling Batswana to transition Botswana to an economy driven by knowledge capital. The UB new strategy calls for intensified research and innovation and importantly relevance to society, he said. “We want a university that is globally recognised for academic excellence and certainly not a Local College. You can’t aim to be a Professor at UB while only being recognised as a Lecturer by other Universities. “You can’t have a research impact of two or anything less than five ( measured as H index) and be promoted to a Professor position,” argued Prof Norris.
On salary arrears the vice chancellor revealed that he is fully committed to doing everything in “my power for the comfort and improvement of staff wellbeing over and above just wages”. He pointed out that he has worked and will continue to work constantly until he finds a solution to these inherited challenges. To give perspective, he said when he joined UB in December 2017 the University had a budget deficit of over P250 Million. According to Prof Norris by the end of the 2018/ 19 financial year they had cut the deficit to zero. He added that the University had a small surplus at the end of the 2019/ 20 financial year and attributed the improvements in the University’s finances among others: Minimisation of revenue leakages; Cost savings initiatives; Cuts on wasteful expenditure; Leveraging on University facilities to generate revenue; Proper award of post- retirement contracts; Increase in student enrolment numbers. “Because of this financial prudence, staff at the University of Botswana received salary increments of three and four percent during my tenure at UB since the end of 2017”, the VC said. Regarding the university ranking, Prof Norris stated that in 2020, the University for the first- time submitted its data for inclusion in the influential Times Higher Education ( THE) University World Rankings Survey. He said UB achieved an overall ranking of 27th in Africa and 1006 in the World. The vice chancellor who is known for his firm belief in research, pointed out that research was assessed in terms of productivity and impact through a bibliometric analysis of the University publications sourced by the THE partner Elsevier from the Scopus database. He indicated that before participation in the ranking surveys, a number of higher education publications had ranked the University as number 43 in Africa.
“For too long the University focused on teaching without due facilitation of research,” he said, adding that as a result the Office of Research Development remained elementary. Platforms to manage the pre- award, post- award, and publication phases of a research grant or contract did not exist and processes were tedious, manual and slow, Prof. Norris said. The Research Management System ( RMS) has now been sharply upgraded and the UB research community appreciates the ease with which they can now apply online for grants, he pointed out.
“ORD now uses citation- tracking databases to measure research performance of academic staff and the research standing of the University,” Prof Norris narrated.