What does Student Governance mean?

When I decided in 2002 to write a Master's thesis on student governance at the University of Cape Town (which eventually became a PhD), I only knew the term student governance in the way we had used it in 1999 as a Students' Representative Council ("It is what we are meant to be doing") and eventually the way we defined it in the context of the far-reaching UCT Student Governance Review of 1999-2002. The formal definition we came up with then was:

"Student governance consists of the structures and processes implemented to: 

(1) reflect and guide the needs and views of students within the University's governance system; (2) represent the interests of students in the institution; (3) execute and initiate key functions in the interest of students, (a) oversight of student activities; (b) leadership and development of the student body; (c) advocacy of student interests; (d) provision of benefits to the student body; (4) focus student attention on challenges facing society; (5) facilitate student participation in national higher education policy development. (SGR 2000: 7). 

Now that was a darn good definition; perhaps for an SRC a bit to formulaic; and it was not really reflective of what we did, of our political commitments and the struggles we were fighting: fighting for students against academic and financial exclusion, organising and leading protest marches, holding meetings in residences and on upper campus, rallies, oh the pamphleteering (where was Twitter!), taking racist lecturers to task, and then all the speechifying for every other thing on campus. And the Fish Eagle with Appletizer, not to forget. 

After having studied student politics for a long time, reading and researching, and writing about it; in the process writing an entire PhD about it, and having been supervised by a political philosopher (for my sins! - but thank God for THAT training!), my definition of student governance has changed quite a bit. The SGRs' definition of 2000 I would call a quite formal definition of 'student representation' rather than one of student governance, and I would also point out to some limitations ..."structures" ... and "processes" that are "implemented"...  too much functionalist policy speak. But as I say, it is a good definition. 

So what does Student Governance mean? I had to answer that question in less than 1000 words, and for me, that is not easy :) :) The above snippet gives an idea: student governance, in my view, is different from concepts like student participation, student representation, or so, by the idea that governance is normative (see: good governance, bad governance) and related to rules. It is about the making and changing of rules, and the effect that these rules have on behaviour. Governance is about regulative politics, and student governance is about both students participating in the making and changing of rules and students being governed by rules.   

It is always a huge honour I think to be asked to do write the official entry for an international encyclopedia. In the age of wikipedia, this might not be such a big thing anymore after all. And yet, as much as I was wowed by the request to write the entry on "Higher Education Expansion in Africa and the Middle East" for the Springer Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions (2017), so I feel extremely honoured to write the entry on "Student governance" for the new SAGE Encyclopedia of Higher Education. 

For other formulations of this concept of student governance, please see other publications of mine and of my colleague Manja Klemencic available via Google Scholar. 

Understanding #FeesMustFall: Starting a qualitative data analysis

My interest and that of other researchers into the student movement - like Tanja Bosch, a professor and expert in communication studies, media studies and youth at UCT - is in the different uses of different platforms of social media during movement campaigns like #FeesMustFall; the different audiences, etc.; and the significance of the use of social media for the specific character and successes and failures of the student movement.

Just yesterday, my colleague Nkululeko Makhubu and I got an interesting lesson in social movement theory by Luc Chicoine, a visiting scholar from the University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada, - remember the Maple Spring? He introduced us to the concepts of 'framing' and different types of frame alignment, cycles of protests and contention (by Makhadam as he pronouces it), etc. all adding to the seminar he gave earlier this week at the HSRC on protest event analysis. Yes, it is acronymed to number 1.

Today now, Travis Noakes (nope, he is not banting at the moment I asked :), gave all of us, that's Prof Bosch, Makhubu and me, a workshop in using Nvivo 12 for analysing our data. It's a process - and it has it's own language... nodes, nodes, child nodes, parent nodes. Seems very time-consuming, but, as the wordcloud above shows, it may actually be worth it.

What's the point? Eventually, the close to 500k tweets we got as digital trace data from the net will be connected to a qualitative database, and all that feed into getting a better understanding of the amazingly creative way, student activists in 2015 invented a South African 'internet-age networked student movement' (yes, I coined that term :). Never mind the remarks about the 'anti-social media' by Prof Jonathan Jansen in his 2016 book. The point is, listen and you won't get burnt - as by fire. But it has always been difficult for principals to listen to the children in their care...

As we are starting to talk to student leaders at UCT about the use of social media during the 2015/16 South African Student Spring (as Ferial Haffajee calls it in her first excellent book What if there were no Whites in South Africa) we are getting a striking cloud of words. This is very, very rough. But I thought it is worth sharing... That students see their movement as a social movement first and foremost, linked with Twitter and Facebook, Rhodes, leadership, and so forth.
Follow our project @osphera #FeesMustFall

Internet-age student movement research in the era of big data and social media

I have written previously about the South African student movement (of 2015/16) and the way social media use by students and others during the movement signaled a new era in student politics - and possibly grassroots politics overall in South Africa, making it the first 'internet-age student movement in South Africa' (see publications). As it was during the Arab Spring, Facebook and Twitter, along with other platforms (like WhatsApp) were used prolifically by activists, sympathizers, as well as journalists to inform on the movement.

This Wednesday at the HSRC, Nkululeko Makhubu and I got really excited to receive the raw data of all tweets with hashtag #feesmustfall in an excel file from the period of 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2016 to analyse. It is extremely exciting to have such big data to work with - it is also a bit scary to think how much information about a person remains stored in the 'cloud'. Today it is almost exactly three years since the start of #RhodesMustFall, and two and a half years since that of #FeesMustFall. Yet, with the right extraction tools, it is possible to get information to the most miniscule datum.

For instance, in our dataset, we have for every one of the 576,000 tweets extracted so far the exact date and time when it was tweeted, location, language, user name of tweeter, twitter handle of tweeter, gender; mentions (handles of others mentioned in the tweet, the actual tweet content including links to pictures, videos, websites etc. in the tweet), other hashtags, and so forth.

Even though this is open, publicly accessible data, it still requires of the researchers to be extremely sensitive to the ethics of research. Thus, how one treats matters like the identity of a tweeter, is really an important question; after all, using certain data in ethically questionable ways may have very real-life implications for the tweeter. What I tweeted in the hype of activism in 2015 must be seen in that context... and such big data sets do not provide such context. As a young student being thrust into the midst of student activism and protest, I may have said (or rather: tweeted) things that I may very well want to disown now; the university experience - including participating in a student protest - is, after all, a learning experience and it is part of learning that one makes mistakes... 

Pear factor, a media monitoring, research and analysis company, sent me last year a 'teaser' of their capabilities when it comes to doing social media data analysis and infographics (Thanks very much!). I included (above) two snips of those infographics.

We will be doing different kinds of analysis on our own data set, but this just illustrates how, in an aggregate fashion, much can be learnt about the 'virtual'/online dimension of the student movement. The timeline indicates here that tweeting using their keyword and hashtag spec 'exploded' mid October 2015 - coinciding with the national timeline of #FeesMustFall (i.e. March to Parliament on 21 October, March to Luthuli House on 22 October, March to Union Building on 23 October 2015). It also shows the geographic spread of tweeting centred on South Africa and the main metropolitan centres in particular, but spreading around the globe, including English-speaking Africa, Europe (especially UK) as well as the United States, India, Middle East and Australia.

I will be documenting the progress with this study in detail on the Osphera.net website and make regular updates via @osphera and on my own blog, facebook and twitter accounts.

 

The African Renaissance - and its Buildings

The duomo cathedral in Florence

Walking through Florence in November 2017, the history and legacy of the European Renaissance is omnipresent. Not only that there are, of course, specific museums and exhibitions, and then there is Michelangelo's David and the Uffizi, and so on. But what is so fascinating to me is also the architectural legacy. Wikipedia says that "Italy of the 15th century, and the city of Florence in particular, was home to the Renaissance. It is in Florence that the new architectural style had its beginning, not slowly evolving in the way that Gothic Architecture grew out of Romanesque architecture but consciously brought to being by particular architects who sought to revive the order of a past Golden Age. The scholarly approach to the architecture of the ancient coincided with the general revival of learning." The renaissance there was multilayered; it also span as a period several hundred years.

New houses in a typical township

As I walked through Florence, Italy, while visiting for a conference at the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) of the Scuola Normale Superiore (which is a number of posts worth on its own), looking at the magnificent buildings I could not help but thinking. First, most of those buildings are churches, cathedrals (such as the famous Duomo) and other religious institutions. The second most magnificent buildings, to me, were the 'government' buildings and those urban palaces built by the dominant families of Florence... like the Medici's, and their rivals, like the Strozzi family. 

Wits University in Johannesburg

What the architecture of the African Renaissance does and will look like is somewhat peripheral. What I was rather wondering is, if the 'dominant ideological apparatus' at the time was the catholic church and that is clearly reflected in its enduring buildings, what is the African Renaissance's equivalent and what buildings are we talking about? This assumes for the moment that the African Renaissance does and will have a 'built environment' dimension. I immediately thought about universities and other educational institutions, and seeing that Florence in the 14th to 17th century was pretty much Khayelitsha on steroids, I had to ask myself again. Why oh why are we not building magnificent universities and TVET colleges etc. in the erstwhile townships? Why not having in Soweto etc. also iconic university and educational buildings that become central focus points, like a cathedral in keeping with what I perceive as the 'education'-bias in popular (and political) African 'ideology' during these renaissance times.  

Student Politics and Protests: International Perspectives

New book out, edited by Rachel Brooks
Student Politics and Protests: International Perspectives

Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives explores a number of common themes, including: the focus and nature of student politics and protest; whether students are engaging in fundamentally new forms of political activity; the characteristics of politically engaged students; the extent to which such activity can be considered to be ‘globalised’; and societal responses to political activity on the part of students. 

Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives does not seek to develop a coherent argument across all its chapters but, instead, illustrate the variety of empirical foci, theoretical resources and substantive arguments that are being made in relation to student politics and protest.

International in scope, with all chapters dealing with recent developments concerning student politics and protest, this book will be an invaluable guide for Higher Education professionals, masters and postgraduate students in education, sociology, social policy, politics and youth studies. The book includes the following chapters, including a chapter on student politics in Africa co-written by Manja Klemencic and me, based on our work and that of our authors published in the book Student Politics in Africa: Representation and Activism (2016) which can be purchased from ABC or downloaded for free from African Minds.

1. Student Politics and Protest: an Introduction. 
2. Campaigning for a Movement 
3. Student Struggles and Power Relations in Contemporary Universities. 
4. Neoliberal Discourses and the Emergence of an Agentic Field: the Chilean Student Movement 
5. Affinities and Barricades. 
6. Student Politics and the Value(s) of Public Welfare 
7. The Politics of Higher Education Funding in the UK Student Movement 1996-2010 
8. Student Power in 21st Century Africa 
9. Students’ Associations 
10. ‘If Not Now, Then When? If Not Us, Who?’ Understanding the Student Protest Movement in Hong Kong 
11. Student Mobilization during Turkey’s Gezi Resistance: From the Politics of Change to the Politics of Lifestyle 
12. Network Formation in Student Political Worlds 
13. Conclusion

Online / Blended Learning Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education Management - from University of Stellenbosch

The University of Stellenbosch Business School is offering a post graduate diploma in Business Admin and Management (PG Dip BMA HEM) which has the Specialization in Higher Education Management: enrollments are now open for 2018.

This post graduate diploma is the academic degree in the professionalization of the various functions that support HE in South Africa. Our modules focus on:

Higher Education Perspectives, Governance and Policy Frameworks, Human Development and Learning Theories, Diversity and Equity, Internationalization, Change Management and Transformation.

I will be lecturing the introductory "Higher Education Perspectives" course. :)

The qualification is relevant for colleagues in Student Affairs, International Offices, Registrars, Administration, Marketing and Alumni, Social Responsibility and Impact, Transformation and Institutional Research and Planning. It is also essential for anyone who seeks to make a career in supporting HE and student and institutional success.

 We invite colleagues from the DHET, from the private sector as well as NGOs and Social Responsibility Foundation and we hope that we have a wonderfully vibrant and diverse group of students who make up our first cohort in 2018.

The PG Dip HEM is one year, offered in blended learning (can be done while you work), and you will be part of a small group of students who get supported by a dynamic set of experts who are specifically chosen to teach the modules.

Basically: every Tuesday from 4-8pm either online or if in Stellenbosch at the centre.
plus two teaching blocs of 1 week each - one in the first semester, one in the second.

For any information, you can either contact the USB directly for all the information (see link), or  email the convenor Dr Birgit Schreiber.

Now this PG Dip is really interesting - but it is different from the PG Dip in Education (Higher Education) that I have been doing at the University of Free State, which is targeted more towards academics, teaching and learning managers, and all those who are less interested in the 'management' side and more interested in the teaching and learning side of higher education. 

Reflections on the Student Experience and Student Life in Europe in the 20th Century - J Burkett Book is out!

It's quite unusual for me to publish a chapter in a book on student life in Britain and Ireland in the 20th century... after all, my work is typically about the student experience, student life and student politics in South Africa and other African countries.

But that has to do with the 'evolution' of this book as a whole (which has been several years in the making), and my specific contribution which is theoretical and structured in terms of ten propositions about student politics in the 20th century. 

The ABSTRACT of the chapter

Student activism is ‘a highly complex, many-faceted phenomenon’ for which serious systematic efforts at understanding it only emerged as a scholarly response to the student revolts of the twentieth century. Until the mid-1960s, student activism was thought of as more characteristic of developing countries than the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, even though students had historically been part of the political equation there, for example during the Bourgeois revolutions of the 1840s. The student activism of the late 1960s stands out, however, as perhaps the most significant student political period of the twentieth century in Europe and North America. Philip Altbach was there. As a student at the University of Chicago, he was part of the anti-war Student Peace Union (SPU) from its establishment in 1959 and served as national chairman of the SPU from 1959 to 1963. In the early 1960s he turned his attention to studying student politics rather than actively participating in it. During this period he produced his PhD thesis, Students, Politics and Higher Education in a Developing Society: The Case of Bombay, India, and began to make a name as an emerging scholar on student politics in America, India and the developing world (working on related topics with Seymore Martin Lipset), and he tried himself as scholarly commentator on matters such as the civil rights movement in the US. This chapter sets out to order Altbach’s theoretical contribution systematically, by formulating ten propositions for understanding student activism in the twentieth century based on his work.

Altbach’s Framework for Studying Student Activism in ten Propositions

Conceptual points of departure

Proposition 1: Conceptual frameworks matter

Proposition 2: Political development and legitimacy matters

Proposition 3: Higher education matters

Proposition 4: Institutional characteristics matter

Proposition 5: Discipline matters

Proposition 6: Students’ backgrounds and experiences matter

Proposition 7: Ideas matter

Proposition 8: Student agency matters

Proposition 9: Conjuncture matters

Proposition 10: The response matters

Conclusion

Contents

1 Introduction: Universities and Students in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland (by Jodi Burkett)

Part I Student Experiences and Day-to-Day Life

2 On Going Out and the Experience of Students (by Matthew Cheeseman)

3 Prisoner Students: Building Bridges, Breaching Walls (by Daniel Weinbren)

4 ‘Education not Fornication?’ Sexual Morality Among Students in Scotland, 1955–1975

(by Jane O’Neill)

Part II Student Organisations and Unions

5 ‘Forgotten Voices’: The Debating Societies of Durham and Liverpool, 1900–1939 (by Bertie Dockerill)

6 The National Union of Students and Devolution (by Mike Day)

7 Investigating the Relationship Between Students and NUS Wales (by Jeremy Harvey)

Part III Student Networks and the Wider Community

8 Sound, Gown and Town: Students in the Economy and Culture of UK Popular Music (by Paul Long and Lauren Thompson)

9 The National Union of Students and the Policy of ‘No Platform’ in the 1970s and 1980s (by Evan Smith)

10 ‘Don’t Bank on Apartheid’: The National Union of Students and the Boycott Barclays Campaign (by Jodi Burkett) 

Part IV Student Activism: Practice and Theory

11 Rebels and Rustici: Students and the Formation of the Irish State (by Steven Conlon)

12 ‘Women Are Far Too Sweet for This Kind of Game’: Women, Feminism and Student Politics in Scotland, c.1968–c.1979 (by Sarah Browne)

13 Altbach’s Theory of Student Activism in the Twentieth Century: Ten Propositions that Matter (by 

Thierry M. Luescher)

ISBN 978-3-319-58241-2