Thinking about the future of higher education and the African university

In the course of 2021, a team of experienced researchers affiliated to the Human Sciences Research Council as well as several top universities and research organisations in Africa have interviewed 35 thought leaders and asked them to 'reimagine the African university'. 

These thought leaders include current and former university leaders, higher education specialists, student and youth leaders, higher education funders, and leaders of NGOs. The responses received are insightful, fascinating and provocative. On their own, every interview presents a vista onto a horizon not too far away. Among the first matters to be noted is, of course, that there is no single kind of African university; the future of African higher education is precisely in its diversity and differentiation. It is in recognising that a diverse society and economy must provide for a diversity of educational pathways and locally relevant offerings. 

Edited transcripts are being published progressively on the website of the project at the HSRC. 

At the same time, some of the most striking thoughts presented by the interviewed thought leaders are being distilled by UWN journalist and copy editor Mark Paterson and I into articles that are being published weekly in the University World News Africa edition, since February 2022. They are all freely available for further study at the UWN website. 

 The publication schedule for the UWN articles (and transcripts on the HSRC website) is below (and may be subject to change).

	Interviewee	Interviewer	Date of interview	Date of publication
1	Prof Goolam Mohamedbhai	Prof Crain Soudien	17-May-21	14-Feb-22
2	Prof Mogobe Ramose	Prof Catherine Odora Hoppers	21-May-21	21-Feb-22
3	Prof Reitumetse Mabokela	Prof Relebohile Moletsane	10-May-21	1-Mar-22
4	Mr Rekgotsofetse Chikane	Prof Thierry Luescher	20-May-21	6-Mar-22
5	Prof Dzul Razak	Prof Catherine Odora Hoppers	30-Jun-21	16-Mar-22
6	Prof Catherine Odora Hoppers	Prof Crain Soudien	11-Mar-21	23-Mar-22
7	Prof Neil Turok	Prof Crain Soudien	21-Jun-21	28-Mar-22
8	Prof Adam Habib	Prof Crain Soudien	25-May-21	4-Apr-22
9	Prof Madeleine Arnot	Dr Alude Mahali	21-May-21	Apr-22
10	Prof Paul Zeleza	Prof Crain Soudien	1-Jul-21	Apr-22
11	Dr Tade Aina	Dr Alude Mahali	12-May-21	Apr-22
12	Ms Lihle Ngcobozi	Prof David Everatt	8-Jul-21	May-22
13	Prof Saleem Badat	Prof Crain Soudien	12-May-21	May-22
14	Dr Rajesh Tandon	Prof Relebohile Moletsane	3-May-21	May-22
15	Prof Claudia Frittelli	Prof Thierry Luescher	26-May-21	May-22
16	Prof Phil Cotton	Prof Sharlene Swartz	29-Oct-21	Jun-22
17	Prof Peter Materu	Prof Sharlene Swartz	16-Nov-21	Jun-22
18	Prof Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni	Prof Relebohile Moletsane	15-May-21	Jun-22
19	Prof Issa Shivji	Prof Crain Soudien	21-Jun-21	Jun-22
20	Prof Laura Czerniewicz	Mr Krish Chetty	10-May-21	Jun-22
	and many more to come...

Symposium on Transformative Leadership in African Contexts - Zanzibar

As a social researcher it is always invigorating to be in a place where social research meets systematic, structural, institutional and individual change. 

Young Africa needs change; the opportunity to change the odds. Transformative leadership offers a framework to empower change and just solutions through action with an ethical purpose. For the next five days, I am in Zanzibar to participate in the transformative leadership symposium, which includes a panel on reimagining the African university in the 21st century. 

Some early questions and comments: There is a lot of data; but how to move from data to action? How do we overcome the silence on the political discourse and the pushback from political actors? We need to make sure not to loose sight of the large goal and the 'whole'. 

If we don't know what we are aiming for, how will we ever get there? We have to set an 'utopia' for us in order to be able to have a common direction. 

In the picture we see Prof Sharlene Swartz presenting at the first session; Prof Crain Soudien who was chairing the session; Dr James Otieno Jowi from the Education Department of the East African Community, and Ms Rahab Wawuri a MasterCard Foundation Scholar alumni.

Access to higher education vs. financial exclusion

As someone who only was able to study at a university with the assistance of national financial aid as well as numerous part-time jobs as tutors and research assistant, dishwasher and waiter, and with the benefit of scholarships, grants and awards based on merit, I believe that making the best of education available to all students, irrespective of their ability to pay, is non-negotiable. \

In March 2021, six years since the original #FeesMustFall protests, yet again protests erupted in the Johannesburg CBD. The video clip from my interview in the SABC News show "Full View" remains topical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIoTtgXtGkg see it here.

The importance of academic advising: JSAA Vol. 9(2) published!

The Academic advising has become a focal point in the new JSAA issue (Vol. 9(2)). The editors of the journal have given the JSAA platform to this topic in order to advance professional and scholarly debate on it. Schreiber, Luescher and Moja do so with the understanding that the demand for professional student support and transition programmes is increasing unabatedly. This is at the same time as higher education in Africa proceeds on its trajectory of rapid expansion and massification, even in the context of the changing circumstances presented by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. 

As participation in higher education widens, there is also increased pressure for efficiency, relevance, and success. It is important to ensure that students are equipped with relevant knowledge, skills, and competencies, develop personally and socio-culturally, and succeed academically, by making successful transitions into and through higher education and into the world of work and livelihoods. 

An evidence-based development of high-impact interventions using multiple methods, including student engagement surveys and action research approaches, is a proven strategy (Strydom et al., 2016). The development of context-relevant, high impact co-curricular programmes, support services and interventions by means of a reflective scholarship of Student Affairs and Services (SAS), institutional research and reflective practice, is also an imperative in the professionalisation of SAS in Africa. 

The guest-editors of the academic advising articles of this issue, François Strydom and Gugu Tiroyabone, have opened up the conceptual and praxis field on academic advising for Student Affairs in Africa. Thus, the first seven articles in this issue are specifically focused on academic advising and offer case studies, critical discussions, and reviews, on this high-impact practice in higher education. 

In addition to the articles on academic advising, there is also a set of articles that deals with a wider variety of themes to keep the JSAA lens as wide and diverse as possible. This includes international students, counselling and psycho-social support for students extended curriculum programmes, student governance, and ways to develop mindfulness among first year students. 

The Aftermath of #FeesMustFall Exhibition goes international!

The University of Botswana, Gaborone, Department of Sociology is hosting the "Aftermath" exhibition from 27-29 October 2021, accompanied by a series of engagements including an opening panel discussion with Prof Thierry Luescher, Drs Angelina Wilson Fadiji and Keamogetse Morwe, Ms Tania Fraser and others; and two seminars on the photovoice methodology and the findings and goals of the project respectively. The exhibition is displayed in the University of Botswana Library Foyer between 9 am to 4 pm. RSVP OR MORE INFO: Dr Mashumba: mashumbal@ub.ac.bw; Dr Mookodi: mookodi@ub.ac.bw

SESSIONS WITHIN THE EXHIBITION

Wednesday, 27 October, 1 – 2 pm:

Opening Panel: “Student wellbeing, to us”-University of Botswana, Sociology, & Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa 

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99693710773 Meeting ID: 996 9371 0773

Thursday, 28 October, 1 – 3 pm: Seminar:

“Photovoice Methodology: Opportunities and challenges for Social Policy research and advocacy”

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/91881268503 Meeting ID: 918 8126 8503

Friday, 29 October, 2.30 – 4pm: Concluding seminar

“Purpose and findings of the Study ‘Violence and Wellbeing in the Context of the Student Movement”

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99448232101 Meeting ID: 994 4823 2101

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Aftermath: Violence and Wellbeing in the Context of the Student Movement, is a collection of 34 images taken and/or supplied by South African student leaders, which they reflecton as representations of their experiences of violence during the #FeesMustFall student movement - and their search for wellbeing after these experiences. The images have beenselected and curated from more than 100 images that were produced as part of a joint photovoice research project hosted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) withthe University of Venda (Univen) between 2019 and 2021. The research team led by Prof. Thierry Luescher (HSRC), Dr Keamogetse Morwe (Univen) and Dr Angelina Wilson Fadiji(University of Pretoria), held photovoice workshops with 26 student leaders and activists on five campuses of public universities in South Africa which experienced high levels ofviolence during the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall student movement. Student participants were selected from the University of the Western Cape (UWC), Cape Town; University of Venda(Univen), Thohoyandou; University of the Free State (UFS), Bloemfontein/Mangaung; University of Fort Hare (UFH), Alice, and Durban University of Technology (DUT), Durban. Thestudent leaders participated in institution-specific, face-to-face photovoice workshops on their respective campuses (except at DUT where workshops were held via Zoom onlinedue to the Covid-19 pandemic). Among the criteria for participation were that they should have experienced violence as part of student protests on their campus - whether asobservers, victims or perpetrators - during the 2015/16 student protests.

In curating the exhibition, a number of themes emerged including: protest and violence, oppressive spaces, safe spaces, patriarchy (and the defiance of it), fear, escape, trauma,unity and wellbeing. The aim of this exhibition is to raise awareness about the high levels of violence on South African university campuses and the impact this has on studentwellbeing. While trying to put pressure on often uncaring and unresponsive university leaders and policy makers, students end up being exposed to unacceptable levels ofviolence, either perpetrated by students themselves or as victims of the violent responses carried onto campuses by police and security services.

The student leaders and activists, whose reflections are represented in the exhibition’s pictures and accompanying captions have expressed the hope that by sharing their photosand stories, an awareness would be created in the public, in government and among higher education policy makers and university leaders. They hope that this awareness willensure that student grievances are taken seriously without the need for protesting. They also hope that student counselling services are expanded to better support students whostruggle with mental health issues.

This exhibition is available online at South African History Online and additional info on the HSRC website.

Journal of Student Affairs in Africa is now hosted by the University of Pretoria

 

It is with great pride that I can announce that JSAA is now hosted by the University of Pretoria and is receiving an allowance to be able to continue to operate as a fully open access journal. The journal is available at: https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/jsaa. 

The JSAA Executive has also approved a new editorial board structure whereby JSAA will now have a three step structure including at its apex the Editorial Executive, currently made up of Prof Teboho Moja (as Editor-in-chief), Prof Thierry Luescher and Dr Birgit Schreiber. The second step will be an Editorial Board made up of about ten African and South African student affairs scholars and professionals with expertise in different areas of student affairs as Section Editors. This is a new structure. The third step is the International Editorial Advisory Board which is made up of international experts in SAS who are recognised for their support to the Editorial Board as senior reviewers and experts.

Tweeting #FeesMustFall - Chapter in book with Lorenzo Cini, Donatella della Porta and Cesar Guzman-Concha

 

Any moment now the book "Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism" must be published. It has been a while in the making! In fact, the process started with discussions during the 2017 conference on contentious student politics at the Scuola Normale Italiana in Florence. I was very privileged to give the keynote at that conference, which was organised by the eminent social movement scholar, Prof Donatella della Porta, from the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). Two chapters in this book come from South Africa. The one is by Francesco Pontarelli who was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Johannesburg during the #OutsourcingMustFall / #FeesMustFall protests in 2015/16, and the other one is from my team here at the HSRC. 

Indeed, I had the pleasure of leading a whole team of junior and early career researchers to prepare with me this chapter, which comes from an interest that I have had since the early days of the #FeesMustFall movement, namely, the relationship between the online life and offline protesting. We never stop learning. The way we tried to trace this relationship in this chapter is by looking at the number of tweet events over time and the number of protest incidents. There are certainly much more sophisticated ways of doing this, and we are noting some of them. In our case, the mix of interview data, a protest event analysis and twitter data gives us an interesting mix to propose ways in which this relationship plays out. 

My honourable co-researchers and co-authors for this mini-project were: Nkululeko Makhubu (HSRC Master's Intern till February 2021);  Thelma Oppelt (HSRC PhD Intern till September 2020), Seipati Mokhema (HSRC Master's Intern till December 2021) and Zodwa Radasi (HSRC Postdoctoral fellow). 

The full book can be ordered here. And our chapter can be downloaded here. 

 

University staff and students experiencing Covid-19: An African student affairs perspective on a global pandemic

Building an African knowledge base for a new sub-field of higher education from the ground up requires ethnographic work, immersion, deep understanding. In the context of an extra-ordinary crisis - the C-19 pandemic - the traumatic 

Extract from the Editorial:

"Over the course of their history, African universities have had to contend with many crises, and they have learnt to quickly adapt to ensure that conditions for teaching and learning, as well as student development and support, continue. Political turmoil, economic downturns, fiscal austerity, social conflicts, staff and student strikes, virus outbreaks and even civil wars have forced universities into circumstances that require difficult decisions in a context of great uncertainty and complexity (Fomunyam, 2017). While such disaster periods and events often have deeply disruptive effects on the university  community, they tend to last a limited time only. However, the choices made during such periods of crisis frequently outlive the crisis itself and come to define a university’s  functioning well after the crisis has passed (Adedire, 2018; Chetty & Luescher, 2021).

In the past, crises that impacted African universities were typically limited to a particular region, nation or institution in their scope. In 2020, however, the global Corona virus disease (Covid‑19) came to affect universities comprehensively and worldwide in an unprecedented manner (Schreiber & Ludeman, 2020). African universities across the continent needed to respond to the global health threat and state-instituted lockdown restrictions.

University leaders across the continent and globally had to decide on various kinds of emergency measures and reimagine teaching and learning and student engagement and support in order to ‘save the academic year’ (Dell, 2020; Moja, 2021). The leadership of Student Affairs and Services(SAS) were typically part of such decision-making from the start (Schreiber et al., 2020; Perozzi et al., under review). The participation of SAS leaders and practitioners in the decision-making was crucial as they often are the first port of call when students are in dire straits and require support, be it social, psychological counselling, academic advising, student governance related, access to resources, etc. And yet, even SAS practitioners were not quite prepared for the unprecedented crisis that was about to hit the higher education environment locally, on the African continent, and at a global level. This special issue provided SAS practitioners with an opportunity to reflect on their work, its appropriateness, and to implement risk-mitigating strategies even as the crisis was unfolding.

As campus after campus closed, leaving only a remnant of ‘essential services’ to continue on site in some cases, learning in most universities was either suspended or moved online in some form of ‘emergency remote teaching’ (Adotey, 2020; Commonwealth of Learning, 2020; Dell & Sawael, 2020). Similarly, most SAS provision either moved online or was suspended if they were considered ‘non-essential’ services (Ayele, 2020). Key higher education actors like the Association of African Universities (AAU) swiftly realised that any form of online learning would potentially exclude many students across the continent who would normally benefit from a campus environment that made up for the lack of a conducive home learning environment or provide other forms of essential learning support (AAU, 2020; Schreiber et al., 2020). Thus, on the one hand, the AAU called on African universities to implement online learning urgently, while also urging African governments to invest in digital infrastructure in rural areas and promote access for all those unable to access online educational services (AAU, 2020; Chetty & Luescher, 2021). Student Affairs practitioners have been challenged to respond in innovate ways to meet the diverse needs of different students, enhance student learning and development, and advance the social justice imperative that underpins and drives SAS work.

As much as most governments issued “one size fits all” instructions to universities, on the ground the Student Affairs practitioners had to contend with their diverse local realities. Universities with international students and those with students from far-flung regions faced different challenges in assisting their students’ speedy return home than others with a more local student body. There are instances where international students were sent home without financial help from their institutions or assistance from home. Some highly resourced universities were able to issue students who did not have electronic devices like a laptop or tablet with such, along with data vouchers and so forth. Some universities who already used advanced online learning platforms were able to expand their use and deliver learning in an advanced online learning environment while others had to improvise (Chetty & Luescher, 2021). Universities who had a student body made up largely of financially needy students who needed to return to their communities, often permeated by crime and violence, needed to mitigate the impact of these factors and support students or bring them back to campus (UNDP, 2020). Some universities, which had faced crisis prior to the Covid pandemic, had experienced Student Affairs staff and programmes that were attuned to crisis and remote contexts (Schreiber et al., 2020).

Considering higher education and SAS in Africa during the Covid‑19 pandemic while moving forward, there are a number of lessons we need to keep in mind. Firstly, the experience of past crises on the African continent and beyond teaches that emergency protocols often turn into, or inform, new standard operational policy after a crisis subsides (Chetty & Luescher, 2021). In light of this, it is clearly imperative to describe and analyse these moments of crisis, the conditions that gave rise to them, the ways the crisis was managed, and the changes in policy and practice that ensued from it, so as to be able to reflect on them, theorise and learn from them.

The closure of institutions coupled with remote teaching, added more pressure on the students and SAS practitioners. The switch to remote teaching laid bare the enormity of the digital divide on the African continent in its starkest and most iniquitous form as students in far-flung remote rural areas were unable to get access to academic programme. Quintana and Quintana (2020) and Händel et al. (2020) indicate that during the pandemic there were many factors that led to compounded anxiety amongst students including “grade anxiety”, absence of adequate infrastructure and overall unpreparedness of institutions and students. There were concerns about the mental health of students and staff and in some instances, institutions added more service and resources to address the challenges (Moja, 2020). Some of the issues that came up for students as a result of being removed from their campuses had to do with them not having appropriate learning spaces and an increased food insecurity as they depended on their financial support that includes expenses related to their living expenses. For a foreseeable future there is a strong likelihood of studies to be conducted to extract more of the lessons learned and the long-term impact of the pandemic."

Extract (pages v-vii) from: Luescher, T.M., Schreiber, B., Moja, T., Mandew, M., Wahl, W.P. & Ayele, B. (2021). The Impact of Covid‑19 on Student Affairs and Higher Education in Africa. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 9(1), v‑xiii. DOI: 10.35293/JSAA.v9i1.1721