Racial and gender transformation topped the agenda of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) first lekgotla earlier this month and vice-chancellor Njabulo Ndebele has made it the priority of his final three-year term of office. Judging by the university’s employment equity and student profile, it remains an elusive goal. Of the 404 professors and associate professors, 60 are black and 78 are women. Of the 21 702 students last year, half were white, 28% black, 14% coloured and 7% Indian. The outstanding 1% comprises of 233 students who did not declare their race. Male and female students are split 50:50.
But transformation is moving beyond mere number-crunching. Answering a few tough questions, Ndebele argued that an immediate outcome of the lekgotla has been the creation of “safe spaces”, so that perceptions on race and gender can be thrashed out in order to reconcile different identities on the UCT campus.
Why are UCT academic staff still largely male and pale?
Black women members of staff may feel that the environment is not sufficiently empowering. The dramatic shifts have not yet occurred. We have equity programmes in each and every faculty intended to change the demographic profile within a reasonably short time.
Black undergraduate enrolment dropped by 1%, according to the 2004 Teaching and Learning at UCT report, and the number of black undergraduates has been hovering at about 50% since 2000. What does that say about UCT’s attractiveness to black students?
It is difficult to pinpoint reasons, but the fact is that we remain an institution that is highly selective … We are still in a crisis situation in the schooling system where we have to go out of our way to look for black, female students of talent and ability who do not have the means to pay. We are getting them, but we are not getting them in sufficient numbers to make the dramatic shifts that we desire.
Can UCT afford this route amid perceptions that it is a privileged white institution which escaped the higher education mergers?
We must continue trying to change the demographic composition precisely because it is one among a range of measures of transformation … We set aside every year from the general operating budget some R35-million for bursaries targeting students of ability who do not have the means to pay.
What does it say about UCT support programmes that 85% of black students successfully completed degrees in 2004 compared to 95% of white students?
Any student who goes into a UCT class or lab must expect high levels of support. You can no longer predict who will perform best: black or white. It has a lot to do with the support mechanisms in the department … We are able to produce more black engineer graduates than other universities combined.
Transformation includes institutional change. How do you see this and how do you measure it?
Staff and students experience UCT most intimately in the classroom. That is where you have the interference of our individual histories which are seldom acknowledged in the learning environment. [The classroom] is the heart of transformation because living in South Africa today is about sharing identities and cultural experiences.
It is hard to measure … It is about students and staff feeling that UCT is a special place of growth; that they are going to emerge with a set of intellectual and ethical, moral skills that appropriately equip them for our society.
Has institutional change affected relations with students? There have been protests over a lack of consultation on fee hikes and changes to the academic calendar…
It is a result of their participation that we have them questioning much more closely why the fees should be at this level or the other. We started discussions very early in the year. They would have been privy to a lot of information so that they themselves could formulate models of fee structures.
What does the university mission to be “a world-class African university” mean, particularly in terms of relations with academics elsewhere in Africa, and research areas?
Our flagship programme is the Universities Science, Humanities and Engineering Partnership Programme in Africa which brings together eight universities. It has produced some 23 PhDs; not a single one of these graduates has left the African continent.
Last year we opened the Institute for Infectious Diseases that is looking at the big diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, across the continent, cooperating with researchers in those fields to get a handle on these diseases.
Will transformation remain on the agenda indefinitely?
The challenges will be different … I suspect 20 years from now South Africa will be wondering what all the fuss over demographic shifts was about. In Nigeria at independence there were no Nigerian scholars. Now Nigeria is a net exporter of PhDs.
How do you intend to symbolise a university in transformation — presumably not through a Latin campus anthem?
What it will be I can’t say now; I hope it will come out of a consultative process on campus. Definitely, there is consensus the symbols that we currently have are not sufficiently expressive of who we are becoming.