Thank you for this honour and thank you for considering this event worthy of your time and presence.
I have just returned to UWC after an absence of almost 10 years. The UWC I knew before I left and the UWC I have returned to are significantly different.
The ideological origins of UWC are to be found in the 1959 Extension of University Education Act, which made it a criminal offence to register at a university designated for any “racial group” other than one’s own without ministerial permission.
Dissent over the mission and purpose of South African universities as an instrument of apartheid remained a source of conflict and a focus for resistance at UWC, as at other HDIs (historically disadvantaged institution). But it took a different form at UWC, where the resistance was not only vigorously political but also very consciously intellectual.
Change in UWC’s character began with the appointment of Dr Richard van der Ross as rector in 1975. Student leadership in resisting the then university administration unintentionally provided the new rector with the leverage to bring about some significant changes.
In 1978, the university council rejected the ideological basis upon which the university had been founded, providing the basis for the development of a university-wide partnership of staff and students, which gradually (and at times painfully) found its form over the next 15 years.
Memories of staff and students protesting together during this time are a reminder both of the viciousness of the time and of the growing political and intellectual solidarity on campus. UWC was actively and critically exploring alternatives to the apartheid order and positing new kinds of knowledge and ways of understanding the world.
I recall that, in this period of violent repression, students and staff constructively debated tough issues and offered and contested a range of options, all connected to a democratic discourse.
I mention these things, chancellor, not out of nostalgia, but as a heritage we can draw on for the strength and intellectual vitality of the university. The academics attracted to UWC at the time were pioneers, ahead of their time and able to bring academic knowledge to bear on cultural realities.
The post-1994 environment did not stimulate the same intellectual vibrancy as there had been during the struggle.
UWC was caught off-guard by the inherent tensions of the time and lost significant numbers of its best academics to politics and public administration.
With normalisation, student numbers dwindled, with many going to institutions closer to home and these factors tainted UWC’s reputation. And, perhaps most immediately threatening, the institution faced financial bankruptcy and the leadership resorted to extreme measures such as downsizing. Through its handling of such steps, they lost the confidence of the university community.
UWC faced its darkest moments and reflected a depressed and inward-looking culture, with leadership strategies inflexibly anchored in the assumptions of the previous era. Clearly, past models of success may be inappropriate, even disastrous, if adopted uncritically. What was good for yesterday may not be good for today. We have to adapt or go under in a very dynamic environment.
When Brian O’Connell became vice-chancellor in 2001, UWC was financially bankrupt, public confidence in it was at an all-time low, and the National Working Group had recommended that it merge with the Peninsula Technikon on the grounds that UWC was not financially viable and that, having lost so many fine academics, its academic standing was likely to fall.
I served as DVC during the first five years of Professor O’Connell’s tenure. This was truly a challenging period. I do recall that the threat of a merger became a rallying call and I have vivid memories of a campus coming together as a community to discuss the risks and contradictions of the senselessness of the recommendation.
Fortunately, the merger recommendation was not accepted and we could retain our autonomy and build strength by incorporating Stellenbosch University’s dentistry and taking on the entire regional undergraduate nursing mandate.
UWC was recapitalised and in its plan for recapitalisation it dismissed the notions both of the market-driven university and of the historically disadvantaged institution with its deficit discourse. Both concepts were seen as threatening the intellectual project in insidious ways in a society in transformation.
I left UWC after it was recapitalised. Since then, under Brian O’Connell’s inspiring leadership, it has forged ahead to become one of the nation’s acknowledged research-intensive universities and a formidable intellectual powerhouse. UWC’s research impact in fields from genetics and biotechnology to nanoscience, from renewable energy to space science, places it in the leading position, or among the leaders, in South Africa.
Science and technology are vital drivers of human progress, but it is also vital to think critically and imaginatively about the challenges of our time and place, with a view to making moral, intellectual and spiritual sense of the past, make sense of the present and bring clarity to the future.
For this reason, we are also proud of the achievements in the humanities and social sciences. Arts and science are complementary and I will continue to implore colleagues and students to commit to enriching the perspective of their disciplines by making connections with other areas of knowledge.
And so from finding its soul under Richard van der Ross, defining its intellectual tradition under Jakes Gerwel to the final transformation of UWC into a mature academic project crystallised under Brian O’Connell – who has done sterling work, leading the university from a very weak position to its current prominence as a first-rate institution. O’Connell’s cardinal role in securing state-of-the-art buildings and facilities has depended on the acknowledged importance and quality of the academic work being done.
That is wonderful. But I need to tell you that Professor O’Connell has also created an awkward dilemma. Many historically advantaged institutions feel entitled to the best and view high-end resources spent on HDIs as wasted. Conversely, most HDIs tend to argue that it is now their turn for redress and that universities which have “arrived”, like UWC, should receive less state funding, which should rather be spent on boosting their capacity. We cannot afford futile ideological squabbles about resources to cloud issues of access.
To get where we need to be as a nation, we have to deal appropriately with the question of access to higher education. However, for access to be real, there can be no compromise on the aspiration to excellence. We need to tone up our whole higher education system so that no student or academic is left feeling that second rate is good enough.
South Africa needs the best from all its universities and UWC remains committed to working with ALL its sister institutions towards realising the full potential of our people and building a sustained academic network in Africa and globally.
Regrettably, chancellor, an all-too-familiar theme emerged over the past two years. Pre-1994, under Prof Gerwel and in 2004-2005 under Prof O’Connell, the university was able to find its common purpose and sense of community only in response to an external threat. When we define ourselves oppositionally only, it may mean that in the absence of an external challenge we become too inward-looking and tend to turn on ourselves, as indeed happened in the late 1990s, and as has happened again over much of the past two years, with UWC gaining publicity for all the wrong reasons.
Clearly it cannot be desirable nor sustainable to build an intellectual community through an in-group-out-group or us-versus-them polarisation of the world.
It is a mark of failure not to take imaginative hold of the large opportunities our standing as a research-based institution presents. We need to focus on the big picture before us and direct our energies accordingly.
Chancellor, before I outline key elements of this big picture for us at UWC, that we will attempt to energise the university community around, allow me to briefly sketch some elements of the context and prevailing challenges which we have to consider in shaping and refining UWC’s intellectual project.
Three areas of rapid change stand out as demanding our engagement across disciplines. Global warming and climate change is likely to result in increased shortages of food and drinking water and health challenges. Second, in a world that is deeply scarred by abject poverty increased proportions of the world’s population – and indeed of South Africa’s population – is living a precarious, undignified existence at the periphery of society. And thirdly, the world is experiencing a growing culture of consumerism, immediacy and extreme individualism without responsibility.
These insistent areas of change need to be researched rigorously. But it is also incumbent on the university to create an environment which heightens awareness of them.
Our world, however, does not exist as a set of binary opposites. Things are seldom simply black or white. Brian O’Connell has often presented a slide image of Cape Town’s affluent CBD alongside the city’s underdeveloped townships, not to illustrate these states of living as fixed opposites, but rather as the inherent, complex tensions of our world.
Unfortunately, we tend to oversimplify these in binary terms. Closer to home, these actions have recently resulted in embarrassing attacks based on racial and xenophobic grounds. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to issues such as these that are threatening and unraveling our rainbow project.
In the face of that complexity, this university has opted to position itself as an “engaged university”, seeking to use the dynamics of these tensions to drive intellectual work. The avoidance of binary thinking means that an emphasis on research does not exclude a focus on epistemological access. Neither does an emphasis on teaching inherently exclude learning or scholarly research.
Another distortion arises when the tensions between institutional autonomy and audit demands for accountability are not recognised. The minefield of complex choices in an increasingly regulated environment has to be faced. In addition, because of overt regulation, universities face a constant struggle to maintain their legitimacy and intellectual integrity as the critical insider-outsiders necessary for the society’s health.
What are some of the implications of this challenging context which I have outlined for South African universities and more specifically for UWC?
First, as a higher education sector we have a joint responsibility for the whole system, and need to keep assessing our roles in it. That is no simple matter. Universities are complex, multifaceted institutions, required to fulfil multiple roles. Roles, which as pointed out, are often presented as binary opposites. Universities are deeply embedded in the global knowledge economy, which requires high levels of knowledge production and innovation.
They need to develop in their students the capacity to learn and relearn. And they need to produce a critical and ethical citizenry able to advance the development of a democratic society.
The list is endless and complex. In this complex system the nexus between research, teaching and learning is vital, and ignoring it has the potential to do enormous damage. When UWC set out to emphasise both meaningful access and research excellence, we were advised by many that it was an impossible path.
However, we continue to believe that for research, teaching and learning to be functionally interdependent, we have to undertake them in the context of engagement.
Chancellor, in the context of these interdependencies I would want to tentatively advance a few notions about UWC. The first is that of a research-led, learning-focused university – a university where the research enterprise is the focus of both staff and students, and is embedded in our curriculum from undergraduate to postgraduate level.
A university where learning rather than teaching is the focus, which acknowledges that learning takes place in very holistic ways with flexible modes inside and outside the classrooms.
A university that recognises that our graduates should be T-shaped. That, chancellor, I am sure got your attention, but I wish to immediately point out that it has nothing to do with the fact that my first name starts with a T.
T-shaped people have both sufficient depth in their discipline and extensive breadth in deploying the range of skills that 21st-century society demands. In effect, we are not speaking of skills, but of skilfulness. Today it is about “learning to learn”, where students develop the capacity to employ a range of resources and to change and relearn in response to the constantly changing nature of the society around them. We owe it to our students to let them experience spaces conducive to T-shaped learning opportunities.
Second, chancellor, I want to advance the potential of UWC as anchor institution in this region.
Historically, UWC has been placed at a hostile remove from central Bellville and it has isolated generations of students from the city and the world of work. Transforming the apartheid landscape by appropriately developing the buffer between the main campus and the city has remarkable potential. It would revitalise the Bellville CBD, bring three universities and TVET Colleges within walking distance of one another, vastly improve the educational experience of 60 000 students and, through stimulating innovation, build the regional economy and improve the lot of surrounding communities.
UWC is making significant progress to become fully connected to the city and surrounding communities and industries, and the imminent relocation of major health sciences departments to the Bellville CBD is an indication of UWC’s intent.
This should afford students more T-shaped learning opportunities while bringing health services and training within easier reach of communities.
I trust that, as an anchor institution, we will see more productive partnerships and working relationships with the regional authorities and businesses from which UWC has historically been separated. After all, chancellor, it should be no coincidence that a whole province is named after the University of the Western Cape.
Thirdly, chancellor, we intend to strengthen our international partnerships andalliances.
Finally, thank you to the university community for your confidence in me. Thank you sincerely for giving me the opportunity to express with abundant joy and emotion, “I am home”. I pledge to be a true servant of the University of the Western Cape, its people and its aspirations. God bless.