As Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande took to the podium in his yellow Bafana Bafana shirt last Friday, delegates in the back rows of the auditorium broke into song.
Nzimande responded by raising a clenched fist and chanting ‘Phambili [forward] for education” — to which other delegates quickly joined their voices.
By this time, at the closing session of his two-day summit, Nzimande’s easy manner had won the consensus of at least some delegates — possibly a majority — to summit procedures and conclusions that some had feared would be marked by vociferously divisive clashes.
His personal charm continued here as he moved from a type of progess he supports to one he feels less attuned to.
Gesturing towards his PowerPoint-equipped laptop, he said: ‘I can’t use this thing — this thing the president calls the bioscope.” With his audience on his side yet again, Nzimande got down to business.
‘We are trying to reclaim our democratic traditions under different conditions,” he said, reminding delegates of the consultative styles that had marked post-apartheid education policy discussions immediately before and after 1994. ‘Creating caring universities” was his main emphasis.
‘Institutions must show caring from the time they receive a student’s letter of application to when the student leaves the graduation hall,” he said.
The summit had been ‘hugely successful”, given that participants from higher education institutions across the country were engaged in issues many considered ‘controversial”.
‘Transformation is a continuous long-term process,” Nzimande said, to nods from his audience.
Referring to vice-chancellors who had expressed their concerns to him about ‘losing their autonomy”, he pointed out that he too is accountable; he has to ‘sign a performance evaluation with the president”.
Turning to the controversial and much-feared (by academics) review of tertiary funding that he has warned is on its way, he said this must be based on a model of institutional differentiation — ‘and we need to bite the bullet now” in choosing among the models the summit had debated.
Race and gender discrimination constitutes a ‘brutal violence of the mind”, Nzimande said, acknowledging Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana’s phrase earlier in the summit. But summit participants had acknowledged that these injustices — still prevalent on campuses, according to the Soudien report — are intolerable, Nzimande said.
All the material produced from the summit material would be studied by the higher education ministry, Nzimande said, but it should also be the ‘responsibility of stakeholders” to do so. — Additional reporting by David Macfarlane
Janis Kinnear is a second-year journalism student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, which hosted the summit. See www.education.gov.za for Nzimande’s full addresses at the start and finish of the summit