Five speakers and five different views on which principles should drive the design for social justice in universities
The session on transformation by design at Universities South Africa’s recent conference on higher education got off to an unexpected start. The title of the session, Transformation by Design – Staff and Student Centrism as ‘architectural’ principles of social justice change in universities, might have had the word “architectural” in inverted commas but it was in fact the actual architectural design of the venue, coupled with lack of foresight, that hit the heart of the subject.
Changing mindsets about disability
The opening panellist was Ms Sebenzile Matsebula, Executive Director of Motswako Office Solutions, former Director of the Office on the Status of Disabled Persons in the Presidency, and a member of the Department of Higher Education’s Transformation Oversight Committee.
She is in a wheelchair and could not traverse the stairs in the lecture hall to reach the stage. When she was finally directed to a way to get there, she devoted much of her presentation to that experience and what it illustrated about transformation.
She said coming into the building that morning showed “we are still so far from transformation” and “this subject of transformation by design really needs to be addressed very, very urgently”.
“It’s not a nice thing, you know, you’re invited as a panellist and you expect that the necessary provision will be made for you but I get to the top of the steps … I’m not familiar with this space, I don’t know there’s alternate arrangements,” she said.
She said the problem was not legislation about disability: “We have policies and innovations sticking out of our ears as a country. Exceptionally good ones”.
The serious challenge, however, is implementation. And one such barrier was her experience in trying to access the room that morning, she said. At face value, it is simply a physical barrier. “But on the other hand, it’s also an attitudinal (barrier) and stereotype because the perception is ‘you’re not really going to get a speaker on a wheelchair’ “.
The White Paper addresses the rights of people with disabilities. The first of its nine strategic pillars is “Removing Barriers to Access and Participation”. These are not just physical barriers, said Matsebula, but also attitudinal and stereotypes and “those are actually 10 times worse than the physical ones”.
She said in an academic environment, hidden disabilities are even more difficult to deal with than physical disabilities.
“Unless we commit to following principles of universal design, we shall not attain the transformation by design that we seek as a country,” said Ms Sebenzile Matsebula, Executive Director of Motswako Office Solutions.
For example, someone who is deaf or hard of hearing at that morning’s session would not be able to follow the communication unless there was something written on the board, and someone with psychosocial disabilities might be daunted by the size of the space.
The answer, she said, is universal design, that is, designing with the needs of a diverse group of users in mind. In this way, everyone is accommodated.
“Unless we commit to following principles of universal design, we shall not attain the transformation by design that we seek as a country,” she said.
Putting the process of gender equality on the table
Dr Sibusiso Chalufu, Executive Director of Student Life at North-West University, who was chairing the session, had started the proceedings by quoting Prof Ahmed Bawa, CEO of Universities South Africa. Bawa had said one of the most important purposes of higher education system and its institutions is to provide opportunities for students to develop physically, socially, emotionally and intellectually.
The second panellist, Ms Fundisile Nzimande, spoke about one aspect which could affect this student development, namely gender mainstreaming.
Nzimande, also from the ministerial Transformation Oversight Committee and until recently on the Commission on Gender Equality, said gender mainstreaming is a global concept which refers to reorganising and developing policies, processes, practices and procedures to incorporate a gender equality perspective at all levels.
“Twenty-five years since we became a democracy, it seems the position and conditions of women are becoming worse,” said Ms Fundisile Nzimande, Member of the Transformation Oversight Committee of the Ministry of Higher Education and Training, and until recently on the Commission on Gender Equality.
She said it was essential to ensure gender mainstreaming was not reduced to an administrative exercise. It had to begin with an analysis of the problem, of how and why inequalities emerged and were experienced, before interventions could be formulated.
“The gender equality sector in our country is getting extremely impatient because it has been 25 years since 1994 and it seems as if the position and the conditions of women are becoming worse,” she said. There were lots of women being promoted to top positions but some didn’t last because the environment was hostile to them. Some were mere marionettes. “We want proper support for women when they are promoted,” she said.
She said transformation and gender mainstreaming was a process, not an event. “We don’t say, ‘haai, it’s enough now’, like they said with employment equity,” and do away with the legislation, she said. “We want to keep making qualitative improvements”.
It’s all about student success
Mr Jerome September said that, unexpectedly for a dean of student affairs (his position at the University of the Witwatersrand), he was not going to push student centrism. Instead, he was going to focus more on student success in his presentation “because I think that’s the key thing that we need to design institutions around”.
He said student success was “the rallying point” for higher education. And not in the narrow sense of only academic success but about everything “that creates the citizen that we think is appropriate to enter our society”.
He said it is widely accepted that higher education has a broader social purpose which goes beyond producing graduates for the marketplace. Enhanced access to higher education for disadvantaged and excluded communities equalised the life chances of talented individuals, irrespective of social origin or financial capacity. In this way higher education became a powerful lever for constructing a more just society, he said.
Mr Jerome September, Dean of Student Affairs at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Quoting international student success guru Vincent Tinto, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, he said student success does not arise by chance.
Nor do improved rates of student success just happen. “When you look at institutions and programmes within institutions that are successful in graduating students, it is because they did not leave student success to chance. It’s not a random occurrence, it has to be purposeful,” said September.
And so universities had to think about how to create an institution which places student success at the heart of what it does.
This covered four areas:
- the academic space, such as student support;
- health and wellness of teachers and staff, which influences the institutional culture;
- material needs such as accommodation and food; and
- the personal development needs of students.
Forget centrism – it is not transformative
Professor Puleng Lenka-Bula, Vice-Rector: Institutional Change, Student Affairs and Community Engagement at the University of the Free State, refuted a key aspect of the topic itself. She said the notion of centrism must not be at the centre of thinking about transformation if we are going to be constructive and progressive. Why? Because it is not in itself a transformational value.
Professor Puleng Lenka-Bula, Vice-Rector: Institutional Change, Student Affairs and Community Engagement at the University of the Free State.
She suggested if we want to design transformational systems we must take into account the writings of Joan Tronto, professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Tronto has said the irresponsibility of the privileged is often to assume that who they consider to be a normal, elite person must be the way to mobilise higher education systems.
Privileged people, Prof LenkaBula said, could be those who are able-bodied, not thinking of those who live with disabilities; or those who are heterosexual imposing thinking that may not necessarily be inclusive.
But privilege is also about privileging of Western knowledge systems over African knowledge systems at the centre of the university community.
The student voice
Mr Thabo Shingange, MA student at the University of Pretoria, a 2018 Mandela- Rhodes scholar, and national spokesperson of the SA Union of Students (SAUS), pulled no punches. He said universities in general, and historically white universities in particular, maintain deeply rooted colonial and racist institutional cultures which “continue to socially exclude and in effect alienate non-white students”.
The demand has been for free education which even the state has jumped onto, he said. Yet we tend to neglect the second part of free education, which speaks to the heart of the university, that is, the kind of knowledge it produces and the values it upholds. Race, class and gender inequality prevalent in broader society characterise the higher education system too, he said.
He identified four key aspects of the “neo-colonial corporate university”:
- The dominance of coloniality;
- the obsession with international benchmarking.
Mr Thabo Shingange, MA student at the University of Pretoria and national spokesperson of the SA Union of Students (SAUS).
Based on Western elite criteria, he said it results in budgeting that discards socially beneficial initiatives such as redress, employment equity and academic development;
- The corporatisation of academia.
Quoting Ronald Cox of Florida International University’s 2013 essay on the subject, Shingange said universities preferred disciplines that could “market products through corporate partnerships” to disciplines that encourage critical thinking designed to challenge the status quo; and
- Authoritarian and despotic management resulting even in staff being afraid to challenge and speak up.
And so the comments flowed
Ms Noluxolo Nhlapo, Transformation Director at Rhodes University, was the first to comment. She said she was frustrated because there was a lot of talk about what we need to do yet very little about what we are doing and its failures and successes.
“We speak always as if we were at the start of something; we do not speak as if we are in a process of implementing transformation plans, of changing the higher education sector to address our needs as a country,” said Nhlapo.
Later she said: “Why are we for example having the same difficulties that we had in 1994 when it comes to issues of disabilities in this institutions? ….Why don’t we speak about those things that are the barriers to us achieving our objectives?”
Professor Pearl Sithole, Vice-Principal: Academic and Research at the University of the Free State, said this panel discussion brought her hope. “Because, to some extent we are seeing a kind of plea to restore the ‘whys’, to interrogate the causality, to work contextuality into the things that we do, which is often consistently thrown out of the window by a patterned administrative centrism.”
“We are in a crisis because of administrative centrism wherein even research data is used only for regulation,” she said.
It was also an issue outside of higher education, she said. “The citizens are burning things because we actually are not speaking to them as we amass the data, impersonalise them into statistics and we do that with students as well.”She said it was a colonial kind of inheritance that is almost self-perpetuating.
“The concept of me as not white is offensive. We must be careful about the words we choose, even as we’re trying to be revolutionary about them,” Professor Yunus Ballim, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Sol Plaatje University advised Shingange.
Professor Yunus Ballim, Vice-Chancellor of Sol Plaatje University, said he appreciated that Shingange was not speaking for all students but it was not helpful for him “to characterise an entire sector with one phrase like ‘neo-colonial corporatist’.”
“It’s not helpful when we still talk about people as non-white, even as we’re trying to be revolutionary about it. I mean the concept of me as not white is offensive. We must be careful about the way in which we choose these words.”
Shingange later said he had not meant to offend but was just making a point.
Ballim said they needed to be intellectually rigorous and avoid essentialising institutions and people to try to understand the problem. “Because, if we’re afraid of complexity, this problem is not going to be solved,” he said.
Written by Gillian Anstey, an independent writer commissioned by Universities SA
