How varsities can create the students we need today
Management needs to keep up with the realities on the ground
One of the positive outcomes of the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall protests was its production of highly conscientised young people on their way to becoming game-changing professionals in their fields. I know of many former student leaders from that period who are now lawyers, academics, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists and, indeed, parliamentarians.
But the struggle for free education and the decolonisation of higher education remains unfinished. Major gains have been made to democratise universities.
Organisationally we have managed to change the race and gender patterns of the senior executive leadership and the student profile to reflect how SA truly looks. But institutionally we still have a long way to go.
Many households still find the system unaffordable; our current student loan scheme does not cover every person who deserves it; our student life services and infrastructure continue to battle with the rapid pace of massification; and we are still unable to produce the critical skills needed for our times that will secure work or self-employment out of our undergraduate qualification programmes.
These institutional issues rally student discontent every year. Departments of student affairs at all universities try to strike a balance between allowing student activism while putting regulations in place to avoid disruptions that may threaten teaching and learning.
The search for this equilibrium is the grand question of our times in the developing discipline and practice of student affairs.
Three questions arouse my curiosity. First, what is it that student affairs departments must do to produce conscientised students who will contribute to meaningful and productive change in their universities?
Second, what conditions must be in place to allow for the authentic development of the type of student we need in our times who will have the curiosity to find creative solutions to the complex challenges facing their own university?
Third, how can we create a multi-sector environment of sociopolitical development that will create a student body aware of the society it exists under, its role to change it, and how this can be achieved outside the parameters seemingly constructed by our formal political order?
Anyone with ready-made answers to these questions would be a genius. The answers require a process that will be led by an organised team that has appetite and competencies to bring academic departments, components of the student life division, and the external community under the same roof to craft a single paradigm of development.
The days when universities used to think that student affairs belongs to the oncampus precinct are long gone. Students now reside in the city where they spend a larger part of their 24 hours, and they get shaped by these streets more than the classroom.
In other words, the student development strategies, theories and practices that will be relevant for the future are the ones that will be embedded in community engagement.
What is also clear is that student learning seems to be a social function that is established in the residence space. Students do not learn in isolation. Rather, they are now learning from each other as a community in dialogue.
Academic excellence has become a social movement. They organise their own talks in their own safe spaces to speak their minds, learn and unlearn from each other. They breathe knowledge to each other in their own African languages, pray and inspire hope, and critique the Westernised poison they imbibe from the classroom.
This is an opportunity for decolonised student development and training that should not be wasted.
In essence, the student affairs themes of our times are changing drastically, and they require a leadership management with eyes and ears on the ground to package these matters into a dynamic project of student conscientisation.
A class of communitybased leaders with wings to affect every sphere of institutional change and social transformation will emerge from this engaged project of student development.