Prof ihron rensburg biography of donald

You can understand why Professor Ihron Rensburg might be a little bushed. The job of a university vice-chancellor in South Africa today is almost preposterously difficult.

It requires walking on water, or eggshells, or fire, depending on the day of the week.

Today, the widely respected vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg is announcing that he will step down in early 2018, after 11 years in the job. It's an unusually early farewell, meant to give UJ the time to find the right successor.

"At many of our institutions, these things seem to be a surprise," Rensburg says. "It's been a case of investing great effort and emotion and ambition, and one can only do it for so long. You reach a point where it's time for the next incumbent to come into play and bring fresh ideas. But I've been inspired. I've made my contribution, and I'm still making it."

block_quotes_start One result of #FeesMustFall was hundreds of millions of campus damage, but it was overdue - long overdue  block_quotes_end

Rensburg and his team have reinvented UJ since it was created in 2005, through the merger of Rand Afrikaans University, Technikon Witwatersrand and Vista University.

None of those three schools were hotbeds of scholarly inquiry - but since its formation, UJ has quadrupled its output of peer-reviewed research, poached a clutch of leading academics from loftier rivals such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, and built a R1-billion campus in Soweto, where potentially transformative research into primary education is under way. And it is a leading force in the national effort to open the doors of learning to the poor.

"Ten years ago, our first-year class had 8% of students coming from quintile 1 and 2 schools, serving the poorest in our nation," says Rensburg.

"That's climbed, by design, to 28% this year. Between 50% and 60% of our graduates are

The 2018 HEPI Annual Lecture and subsequent reception were kindly sponsored by Pearson, to whom we are very grateful.

Introduction

When reflecting on the legacy of Nelson Mandela, the founding father of South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy, now one-hundred years since his birth and almost five years since his passing, I continue to puzzle over the nature of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and in particular over the conjunctural facts that conspired with human agency to facilitate the country’s specific post-apartheid democracy outcome. For now, in the third decade of South Africa’s democratic era, when widening inequality, deepening poverty and resiliently high unemployment are predominant phenomena, there are voices that hold that South Africa’s transition to democracy was a calamitous compromise that limited the nation’s capacity to make the many leaps forward that are required to tackle these fundamental socio-economic flaws, including the durability of the colonial university model and knowledge system. In contemporary times, these voices go as far as to call Nelson Mandela “a sell-out”. Since the colonised and the colonising, and the colony and the colonising metropole always constituted a contest between and within each other, and thus constitute a single analytic field (Cooper and Stoller, 1997), these questions and debates are equally important to nation-states and their institutions within the colonising metropole.

Here I argue and show that transitions are far more complex than is comprehended by the simple finger pointing of successor generations – they involve contestation over political power and its transfer, and ongoing struggles over the socio-economic and cultural order. Each epoch throws up its own possibilities for rupture of the ancien régime, which must be analysed and grasped in contest; and each new epoch offers possibilities for far more deep-seated transformation and change. Importantly, while Nelson Mandela would be

Adam Habib, another vice-chancellor at the university, said: "If we close it down, we close hope for the most desperate of people."

Even if black families can afford the fees, they may not have the culture of saving for university, or even the confidence that their child will make it.

"So when they do get the results, and realise they can afford it after all, they suddenly rush to see if they can get into university," he added.

The problem is not limited to Johannesburg. Further south, the University of KwaZulu-Natal had 60,000 applications for 9,000 undergraduate level places this year.

South Africa's universities are hugely oversubscribed, with more than 180,000 high school graduates failing to find a place this year.

The education minister has promised previously to increase the number of places but critics of the government point out a lack of action to match those words.

One father at the scene told the local news that the governing African National Congress (ANC), which celebrated its centenary over the weekend, needed to solve this crisis fast.

"The celebrations are over now. We congratulate them. But it's time to go back to work. A black child needs an education," he said.