The man credited with leading the turnaround of student numbers at the University of the Witwatersrand has resigned. Peter Bezuidenhoudt, director of marketing and communications and chief executive of Wits Enterprise, joined the institution in 2000, when student numbers had plummeted since the mid-1990s.
Education minister Naledi Pandor has warned that underperformance in the education system will be tackled more decisively.
The education department in KwaZulu-Natal is recruiting teachers who retired and who accepted voluntary severance packages as part of its strategy to relieve educator shortages in certain subjects. Christi Naudé, spokesperson for the department, said 426 teachers have already been registered on the provincial database.
School principals, school governing bodies and representative councils of learners have signed “contracts” with the provincial department of education, undertaking to improve the achievement of grade 10, 11 and 12 learners. Persistent failure to meet these contractual obligations could, in severe cases, lead to the redeployment or even dismissal of principals, according to the Western Cape department of education.
When it comes to debating Afrikaans in society and in science –something that has become a defining quality of Stellenbosch University (SU) in recent times — Professor Russel Botman can wear a been-there-done-that T-shirt comfortably. The new vice-chancellor of SU was spokesperson for the student representative council of the University of the Western Cape in 1976.
South African higher education could face a leadership crisis with the opening of four vice-chancellor positions from the end of the year and a struggle to fill them with high-quality appointments. This comes at a time when institutions are battling to find suitable leaders and managers.
When Rosemary Visser heard that the University of Pretoria (UP) would be offering Spanish from March this year, she signed up immediately to secure one of the 40 available places. As the personal assistant of A-rated scientist Professor Mike Wingfield, director of the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), Visser has often been lost in translation.
Only four South African higher education institutions are led by whites. They are Professor Calie Pistorius (University of Pretoria), Professor Frederick Fourie (University of the Free State), Dr Theuns Eloff (North-West University) and Dr Rolf Stumpf (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University).
On a summer’s day late in 2005, Professor Brian O’Connell’s jam-packed diary dictated tea with the directors from The Atlantic Philanthropies, a United States-based donor. The events that followed still have O’Connell, the vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, reeling.
The education department’s R5,9billion recapitalisation of the higher education sector comes in the wake of a realisation that "you cannot expect to produce students of the 21st century with 20th-century equipment," according to Dr Molapo Qhobela, deputy director general of higher education.