Race and Transformation in Higher Education Conference raises crucial themes in pursuit of Stellenbosch University’s transformation journey

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Aslam Fataar (photo provided); University of Stellenbosch (https://www.sun.ac.za/Home.asp); Zethu Mkhize (https://www.sun.ac.za); Nico Koopman (photo: Naomi Bruwer); Therese Fish (photo: https://sun.ac.za); Leslie van Rooi (photo provided)

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The recent conference on Race and Transformation in Higher Education was organised by Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Transformation Office and held from 15 to 17 November at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) on the Stellenbosch campus.
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The recent conference on Race and Transformation in Higher Education was organised by Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Transformation Office and held from 15 to 17 November at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) on the Stellenbosch campus.

The context for this conference was SU’s complex and variegated experiences of grappling with the imperative to transform the university in conformity with human rights, equity and redress. Deliberations centred on higher education transformation in regional, national and global contexts. As such, the conference asked particular questions about the extent to which SU has broken away from its apartheid past.

Co-hosted by SU, the University of Bath and Nelson Mandela University, the conference discussed how race intersects with notions of class, gender, sexuality, language and other markers of difference to provide the basis for universities’ institutional culture and operations.

Attended by 150 persons from various regional and international universities, as well as participants from civil society, the conference occurred in the wake of the release of the Khampepe Report, which highlights, among other things, the lived experiences particularly of students and staff of colour at SU. In this light, understanding how institutional dynamics impede universities from establishing a transformed institutional culture was central to the conversation at the conference.

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Attended by 150 persons from various regional and international universities, as well as participants from civil society, the conference occurred in the wake of the release of the Khampepe Report, which highlights, among other things, the lived experiences particularly of students and staff of colour at SU. In this light, understanding how institutional dynamics impede universities from establishing a transformed institutional culture was central to the conversation at the conference.
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The conference deliberated on generating constitutionally informed concepts, norms, ideas, policies and practices to galvanise and deepen transformational outcomes on university campuses. The lack of social cohesion in higher education was interrogated by conference attendees.

The conference consisted of plenary sessions in the mornings that covered various dimensions of the conference theme, including the role of race in higher education transformation, race research in university functioning, and race within the ambit of institutional culture(s).

The afternoons consisted of several parallel sessions staged at various sites in the broader Stellenbosch area, including sites on campus. These sessions primarily concentrated on SU’s knowledge, teaching and learning, social impact and engagement relationships with its local publics in alignment with the university’s focus on restitution and development. These community-based engagements focused on developmental challenges such as health, sustainability, educational development, slavery and indigeneity, university residences and visual redress initiatives at the SU campuses. The overall purpose of these sessions was to generate robust discussion about racialised exclusion and lack of development in communities, and what role SU can play in transformation in and through these communities. They offered perspectives on how to use the knowledge and infrastructure of the university in processes of restitution and development in local communities.

Considerations of race at the centre of the university’s operations

Professor Rajani Naidoo was the conference keynote speaker. Born in South Africa, she now holds the position of vice-president of community and inclusion at the University of Bath (UK). Her address focused on how race and racism have been informing universities’ overall functioning and transformation-related practices. Situated within the regulative context of governmental and quasi-governmental higher education policy discourses over the last three decades, Naidoo discussed the impact of race on the policies, discourses, approaches, governance and transformation practices at universities. In particular, she discussed how universities are addressing race and racism as one of the cornerstones of their transformational quest.

SU’s Professor Jonathan Jansen focused in his address on the study of race in South African higher education. Jansen averred that the South African university’s identity and functioning are still fundamentally informed by the residue of a racist epistemological orientation, which he believes should be systematically uprooted.

Dr George Mvalo, the chairperson of the Universities South Africa’s (USAF) Transformation Managers Forum and based at Vaal University of Technology, presented an incisive address on the complex and variegated challenges of transformation across South Africa’s higher education landscape.

Wits University’s Professor Melissa Steyn concentrated in her address on the role of race and racism in shaping universities’ internal institutional culture(s). She highlighted the origins of racist thinking as part of the emergence of colonialism, from the start of European imperialism in the fifteenth century, and how it seeped into the ordering dynamics of the modern state and its institutions. She discussed how relational dynamics at universities continue to be constrained by racism in universities’ daily functioning, and called for a radical rupture of racism at the heart of their operations.

Professor Dennis Francis of SU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology offered an important address on cisheteronormativity in higher education. He argued that discrimination and exclusionary behaviour meted out to transgender and queer students and staff is a core feature in the university’s social, academic and recreational spaces. His presentation and the pursuant discussion raised concern about how queer students and staff continue to be marginalised on SU campuses. Conference attendees called for radical improvement in the university’s processes and disciplinary procedures to address this exclusionary behaviour.

A book-based panel discussion featured three authors of recently published books on race and transformation. The panel illustrated how academics are pursuing scholarship on the topic of race. Professors Zsa Boggenpoel (Faculty of Law, SU), Premesh Lalu (Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape) and Kopano Ratele (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, SU) provided illuminating examples of how cutting-edge scholarship can challenge the erstwhile racist epistemological tropes still extant in higher education. As the panellists illustrated, the promise of the transformed university is most aptly pursued when scholarship based on justice and a commitment to inclusive planetary justice is placed at the university’s centre. Their books are: Zsa-Zsa Boggenpoel, Law, justice and transformation, LexisNexis, Cape Town (2022); Premesh Lalu, Undoing apartheid, Polity Press (2022); and Kopano Ratele, Why men hurt women and other reflections on love, violence and masculinity, Wits University Press (2022).

An emphasis on the public good role of the university as central to the university’s transformation objectives

The conference emphasised the importance of the university’s local public good role as a cornerstone of its transformation objectives and operations. This was emphasised during most of the afternoon parallel sessions, where members of the local communities emphasised the linkages between the university’s internal transformation processes and its societal roles.

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The conference emphasised the importance of the university’s local public good role as a cornerstone of its transformation objectives and operations. This was emphasised during most of the afternoon parallel sessions, where members of the local communities emphasised the linkages between the university’s internal transformation processes and its societal roles.
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The university’s past, present and future are deeply implicated in its public commons and societal development role. In this regard, the session in Pniel on slavery and identity focused on the deep history of this region, while the sessions in Cloetesville and Kayamandi signposted the area’s contemporary developmental challenges. The session at the Sustainability Institute at Lynedoch indicated the role of university education in securing our planet’s future.

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The conference underscored the position that the university should systematically put to work its research and knowledge, teaching and learning, and social impact endeavours in service of bettering the lives of local communities in and beyond Stellenbosch.
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The conference underscored the position that the university should systematically put to work its research and knowledge, teaching and learning, and social impact endeavours in service of bettering the lives of local communities in and beyond Stellenbosch. SU’s myriad of current social impact collaborations in the broader Stellenbosch community and beyond provides a productive basis for a systemic approach, in which communities and their ways of knowing are placed at the centre of the university’s societal work.

In the end, it might just be that the notion of “transformation in and through the university” will enable SU to take its rightful place as a national asset in service of society, while simultaneously breaking from its apartheid past.


Professor Aslam Fataar is a transformation-based research and development professor at SU; Dr Therese Fish is vice-dean: clinical services and social impact in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at SU; Professor Nico Koopman is the deputy vice-chancellor for social impact, transformation and personnel at SU; Dr Zethu Mkhize is the director of SU’s Transformation Office; and Dr Leslie van Rooi is SU’s senior director of social impact and transformation.

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Kommentaar

  • Anton Visagie

    This is an excellent article, presenting, as it does, a wonderful summary of the major themes related to institutional transformation at universities generally. Congrats on the article go to the authors and thanks for doing this important work.

  • Transformation in education is nothing more than indoctrination with woke ideas. And here in Europe wokeness is losing its credibility.

  • Reageer

    Jou e-posadres sal nie gepubliseer word nie. Kommentaar is onderhewig aan moderering.


     

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