On course for change: universities gear up for transformation dialogue

SOUTH African universities are charting a course for transformation ahead of the second National Higher Education Summit to be staged in Durban next week.

At a dialogue hosted by Independent Media and the University of Johannesburg at UJ’s Kingsway campus this week, academics, university management and student representatives from a number of universities gathered to debate the challenges facing higher education institutions, and the transformation issues that needed to be addressed.

Students and Vice-Chancellors alike agreed that the pace of transformation had been slow in universities and broader society, with issues such as racism, access to higher education and the need for a decolonised curriculum topping their concerns.

The Vice-Chancellors welcomed student activism to bring about change, but also called for constructive dialogue to effect the necessary change.

The Vice Chancellor of Rhodes University, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, said 2015 would go down in history as a watershed year in higher education.

“21 years after the advent of our democracy, there is palpable discontentment, disenchantment and impatience with the pace of transformation and responsiveness in our society. And this manifests itself in our campuses of higher learning.”

FAST TRACKING TRANSFORMATION

Dr. Mabizela said the stu- dent activism was long overdue. “We owe a debt of gratitude to our students for pushing transformation as forcefully as they have, and the worst thing we could possibly do is to construct them as angry, irresponsible and ill-disciplined. No-one will dispute the importance of the issues they are bringing to the fore.”

“21 years into our democratic dispensation, the age of innocence is well and truly over. Many young people starting universities experience a sense of alienation in those institutions - we still have racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, prejudice and all other forms of chauvinistic behaviours in our campuses.

We must create and maintain institutional environments that are positive, affirming, supportive and inclusive. We must attend to the issue of the curriculum – are we still presenting knowledge from Europe and North America to the exclusion of knowledge that comes from other parts of the world? We have to embrace knowledge coming from South America, from the rest of the African continent, coming from the East. And we must ensure that we equip our students with skills to analyse knowledge coming from diverse parts of the world.”

UJ Vice-Chancellor Prof Ihron Rensburg said transformation in the country as a whole had been slow: “It’s difficult to look at the past 50 years and to conclude that we’ve been able to push forward significantly. We may have deracialised the elite, but we have not transformed root and branch. Inequality in South Africa is worse now today than it was 21 years ago. So we need a new ‘76 generation.”

BUILDING PLATFORMS OF ENGAGEMENT

The Vice Chancellor of North-West University, Professor Dan Kgwadi, noted that constructive engagement was very important in the transformation process. However, he cautioned that the situation was a complex one.

“We are all leaders navigating a very complex environment,” he said. Prof. Kgwadi cited for example the debates around the language issue, noting: “We have to balance that with issues such as access. How do you come up with a balance? This is the complexity we must navigate as leaders.”

“Universities are a microcosm of society. As institutions of higher learning, we should be able to come up with solutions to societal problems,” he said.

Prof. Rensburg noted: “It is self-evident that the students’ struggles and also the workers’ struggles are demonstrating to us that change is difficult, because there is no trust.

There are vested interests who are concerned about significant transformation and change.

Far too often I hear that the conversations between management and student leaders or management and worker leaders are pointless because nobody on either side of the conversation is really willing to give anything. We need solutions and some ideas as to how we are going to get to a point where conversations that matter happen.”

UJ SRC Secretary-General Mmangaliso Mkhonta questioned whether the engagements around transformation should be limited to campuses, or whether they should be taken to the broader community. “There is a youth movement in South Africa and I think we are not ignorant of the fact that young people are taking it to the streets, young people taking it out there to say we’ve been in these institutions of higher learning and we’ve seen the injustice and inequality manifesting, and we are gaining momentum,” he said.

Open Stellenbosch Movement representative Jodi Williams said that the discourse surrounding transformation had been dominated by the term platforms for engagement, but that it was important to consider certain issues before the engagement began: “There are three crucial points that we need to be cognizant of before we can even start engaging. First, we need to ask ourselves who sets the terms of engagement? In my opinion, that is us – the greatest stakeholders of this transformation project.

Then we need to ask ourselves how do we engage with the drivers of this transformation project when they clearly have indicated incompetency due to a lack of understanding of what transformation is?

And how do we trust that these drivers of this transformation project will act in good faith?

How do we trust that they will understand the needs of marginalized students on campus?” Williams said representation should extend beyond black representation, to include women and marginalized groups. There was a problem of lack of representation within important decisionmaking bodies, which were dominated by heteronorma- tive and male voices, she said.

BURNING ISSUES

The key issues to be addressed in the transformation included racism in institutions of higher learning; high fees which presented a barrier to higher learning; a lack of African content in the curriculum; a colonial legacy within management and curricula of universities and the use of Afrikaans in universities.

These issues are expected to come under discussion at the National Higher Education Summit to be staged in Durban from 15 - 17 October.

Prof. Rensburg welcomed the opportunity for dialogue to drive change: “It is time for you to define yourself, you have demonstrated to us that this is an epoch changing possibility that sits in front of us.

As Vice Chancellors we must look at how we go forward progressively. We have this opportunity to make headway, and we must be open to examining how we go forward,” he said.