Equipping students with tools for the future

UNIVERSITIES in South Africa retain outdated, often discriminatory cultures which are exclusionary, so there must be a concerted effort to fight discrimination with a more significant commitment to social justice, said Professor Sibongile Muthwa, Nelson Mandela University Vice-Chancellor and head of Universities SA (Usaf).

“In many ways, we would like to see universities make a greater commitment to inclusion to fighting discrimination and be strongly committed to social justice,” she said.

Speaking ahead of next month’s major indaba on current pressing problems and challenges for the tertiary sector, hosted jointly by Usaf and the Council on Higher Education, she said the conference would focus on critical debate around the knowledge project, which remained in need of transformation.

“Underpinned by issues such as, Fees Must Fall, for example, the issues of decolonising language will be interrogated in terms of what we choose to teach, how we choose to teach it, and who teaches it,” Muthwa said.

The second higher education conference takes place under the theme “The Engaged University” and seeks to reach out to communities.

Usaf, whose membership comprises 26 heads of universities across the length and breadth of the country, have been challenged to ensure that their institutions assume the roles of delivering on public good and making their universities live up to the expectation of being national treasures.

Muthwa said, by the end of the conference, “it would be wonderful for us to have interrogated the future world of work.”

“How is the future world of work, what does it need to look like and what kind of student are we turning out? Because we’re training students for some of the positions that don’t yet exist. So, our commitment is to make sure that the students have got disciplinary depth in their own field, but also that they’ve got adaptive expertise so that, they’re able to adapt to the environment that we don’t know yet. These are some of the issues that we hope the conference will engage,” she said.

Muthwa said there was a greater need to understand the needs of the students better. “The student that we have now is different from the student that we had 20 years ago 25 years ago, and we find that the universities have not changed enough to take on board and to accommodate the diversity of knowledge and backgrounds of students that come into our universities.”

As a result, the key themes related to addressing the funding crisis, research impact, teaching and learning, transformation, and equipping both the sector and students with tools for the world of work.

“I also hope at the end of the conference, the universities would have worked through these discussions, and the participants to bridge the social distance between their work and the work of the communities in which they live,” she said.

“To what extent can universities use the experiences of societies around them actually to transform the knowledge project? So for me, it’s both at a practical level, but also at a level of the transformation of our approaches to the formulation of knowledge,” she added.

Putting scholarship at the heart of the university mission by ensuring that it is as important as learning and teaching, and research and innovation, would also be critical during debate on the engaged university, she said.

Muthwa said in a nutshell, the university’s aims comprised scholarly missions through which work was deployed, learning and teaching, research and innovation, and engagement.