Hire professional actors. Sing songs. Tell jokes. Perfect some magic tricks. His repertoire sounds better suited to a circus ring than a university, but Professor Kanes Rajah, director of the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) business school since October last year, is being completely serious.
‘I have inherited a post that has been run very traditionally and conservatively. I want to create an environment where people feel free to do what they want to do, rather than constrained by what they cannot or should not do,” Rajah says.
The school’s premises in the Pretoria city centre are being transformed. The walls will be replaced by modified blackboards where students can write their thoughts and ideas.
The seminar rooms no longer look like school classrooms — they now have an executive feel. And these rooms have been named according to the four characteristics Rajah believes should constitute an ideal graduate — persistence, passion, positivity and playfulness.
Professional actors will be available for students in the business school to stage-direct role-plays. Singing and music will be used to show how multifaceted ideas can be broken down into comprehensible constituent parts.
As for the magic tricks, Rajah says: ‘Just like you need a paradigm shift to see how magic works, I believe that we can change the way we think through paradigm shifts in the way we communicate with one another.”
Creativity drives Rajah. That’s the word that crops up regularly in his CV’s job descriptions and publication titles. And it’s a word that Rajah plans to turn into a mantra at the TUT business school.
‘Creativity does not belong to the creative and cultural industries alone,” he says, ‘and in an increasingly globalised and complex world, business schools need to champion non- linear thinking to enable graduates to join the dots up in new ways.”
Rajah was born in Malaysia, educated in the United Kingdom and has worked in the United States and Portugal. He believes South Africans need to cultivate creativity.
‘The culture here is very family oriented, quite traditional, and somewhat subservient towards authority. That is why I am mindful of the need for us to create an environment that is conducive to creativity,” he says.
TUT is the product of the 2004 merger between the historically white Technikon Pretoria and two historically black institutions, Technikon Northern Gauteng and Technikon North West.
This history presents enormous challenges to the business school’s project, Rajah acknowledges — not least in breaking down barriers between students who have little or no history of the creative, engaged interaction that he seeks.
One way of meeting the challenges is to keep the business school small, ‘so that everyone feels important and valued”, Rajah says. It has 245 students enrolled this year and Rajah wants to increase this number to no more than double over the next three years.
Rajah also plans to target student enrolments from all sectors of society and from different academic disciplines. At the same time, Rajah will double the number of permanent academic staff (currently four) and visiting faculty staff (currently 15).
The graduates Rajah hopes to nurture will be men and women with ‘a Mandela mind”. He explains: ‘Mandela is able to see beyond the next harvest, two or three generations ahead.
‘We are not preparing graduates only for the next five to 10 years. That’s a done deal. But in 15 to 20 years, when resources are scarce and populations are bigger — that’s when our graduates will be rethinking the future.”