The MBA is no doubt the most popular among management degrees that prepares students to enter the world of business. While employers in the corporate world readily accept MBA degrees there has been a fair amount of criticism regarding graduates meeting the needs and expectations of the business world.
The first Confucius Institute for Business in South Africa, and on the African continent, will be established at the Tshwane University of Technology in the near future. Tshwane vice-chancellor Errol Tyobeka and the Chinese Deputy Minister of Education, Yuan Guiren, on behalf of the office of the Chinese Language Council International, signed a letter of cooperation intent in June.
As South African universities have changed, a sense of malaise has emerged among many academic staff. Yet South African debates on tertiary institutions have tended to sideline and objectify the role of academics. The Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) website, for example, lists some 70 publications, all dealing with crucial tertiary education issues.
Have you ever wondered what the possible reasons are for the slow disappearance of fish from our rivers and if we will ever see their numbers restored? A recent research initiative by the Water Research Commission has assessed the ability of indigenous fish species to negotiate different fishway designs in an attempt to optimise and develop new models.
Allan Gray has established 10 annual scholarships worth a total of R1,25-million for full-time MBA students at the University of Cape Town graduate school of business (GSB). The company has been providing funding for previously disadvantaged students at the school for a number of years.
The percentage of women MBA students on campus at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) has been steadily increasing since the first intake of students in the year 2000. “Our MBA programme is currently approximately 40% female, which is a most gratifying statistic for us,” said Shireen Chengadu, director of MBA programmes at GIBS.
As we stand in front of the impressive facade of the revamped AngloGold Ashanti building on Turbine Square in downtown Johannesburg, architect, writer-critic and sociologist Professor Alan Lipman explains that Newtown is slowly becoming one of Johannesburg’s most exemplary architectural locations.
South Africans Simon Alston and Craig Northam have just completed a mammoth journey by bicycle across the African continent, starting in Cairo five-and-a-half months ago and finishing in Cape Town in August, to raise funds for charity. Alston shares some of his thoughts and memories of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
A significant tension — if not downright contradiction — is at work in the onÂgoing transformation of South Africa’s university system. Under the singular name of transformation, two projects with distinct and largely opposed political intentions are at work in changing the ecology of higher education. Current policy is stretched between the pull of democratic redress and the push of neoliberal reorganisation.
Until recently in South African higher education, academic freedom was not a sexy issue. Those arguing in its defence were often perceived to have been using the issue to preserve the status quo in higher education and resist transformation. However, this matter is now perhaps the most interesting and hotly contested one in academic and public debates on higher education.