This is a ‘historic session”, said Ahmed Essop, chief executive of the Council on Higher Education, as delegates waited on Friday last week for the formal declaration at the end of Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s two-day summit.
Essop was introducing higher education and training director general Mary Metcalfe, who was to read the declaration. The idea for such a summit goes back to 1988, Essop said — ‘and if we know Nzimande he probably thought of the declaration back then also”.
The declaration would help the higher education sector make progress with transformation in a climate of ‘deliberative democracy”: ‘This is the start of a conversation,” Essop said, ‘not the end. The forthcoming Green Paper [to flow from the summit] will be a further opportunity for conversation.”
‘The declaration distils just the high-level points of consensus,” Metcalfe said before reading it out loud. Plenty of delegates were visibly on her side, giving her the thumbs-up early on when she referred to the need for ‘strong governance” and ‘deepening robust and inclusive democratic processes”.
But the solemnity wavered for a while when a typo on Metcalfe’s PowerPoint surprisingly asserted that ‘we recognise the poor conditions under which many students learn and love”. ‘Oooh,” the director general exclaimed, as her eye caught the typo on screen well before many delegates had noticed it.
Blushing pinkly, she paused, but was unable to change ‘love” to ‘live” quickly enough to prevent the entire auditorium catching on and collapsing into laughter. But heads around the hall were soon nodding in affirmation again as Metcalfe moved on to the need for African languages to be developed as academic languages.
‘This includes the development of African-language-based postgraduate outputs across disciplinary areas,” said Metcalfe to applause. Delegates appeared also especially supportive of the declaration’s commitments to:
- Annual reviews of universities’ progress in relation to the Soudien report on racism and other forms of discrimination;
- The need for ‘caring universities” and ‘student-centredness”;
- Increasing the number of younger researchers;
- Developing student leadership; and
- Improving opportunities for young African academics, particularly women. — Additional reporting by David Macfarlane
Laila Majiet is a second-year journalism student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the venue of the summit