If there’s a general sense that academic publication is about knowledge dissemination rather than meeting performance targets, academics and universities become less vulnerable to predatory journals.
Students experience intense feelings of discomfort, confusion and even embarrassment at being classified as “different” and an “anomaly” alongside the norm of white academic success.
Assessment should be a part of teaching and learning at universities. It’s important because it will subvert exclusion and allow all students to take responsibility for their work.
More must be done to develop mechanisms based on intrinsic motivations of committed, quality academics. It’s important to limit the harms currently being caused by rent seeking.
Phrases like “knowledge production” conceal the fact that knowledge answers to something beyond itself and beyond us. To produce knowledge is to find out about something.
The ministerial task team’s report presents a jaundiced view of an important organisation that’s opened the doors of higher education to many who would otherwise have been closed out.
There are other ways to conduct meetings and present lectures. Could adopting, adapting or even just understanding more about these help universities to release colonialism’s grip on their practices?
Students from South Africa’s public school system battle to cope with the rigorous demands of any university degree without genuine, committed support.
There’s no doubt South African universities need to undergo a real shift. But are the country’s current intellectual and academic forces up to the task?
It’s important that South African teachers, lecturers and professors develop curricula that build on the best knowledge skills, values, beliefs and habits from around the world.
If universities work together they are more likely to find creative solutions to problems. Collaboration will allow them to benefit from the global academic community’s collective wisdom.
2017 promises to be another tough year as South African universities head into the uncertain terrain of further addressing and healing the divisions that have been exposed.
Director of Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University & Visiting Research Professor in Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, Rhodes University
Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria
Chief Director: Tshwane University of Technology – Institute for Economic Research on Innovation; Node Head: DST/NRF SciSTIP CoE; and Professor Extraordinary: Stellenbosch University – Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology., Tshwane University of Technology
Associate Professor of Higher Education Studies. Head of Department of the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University