Stellenbosch University
Welcome to Stellenbosch University
R11.2m Mellon grant to investigate transformation at Maties
Author: Ilse Arendse & Lynne Rippenaar-Moses
Published: 16/02/2017

While the #FeesMustFall movement of 2015 and 2016 highlighted the urgency of questions around transformation in the higher education sector, it left many stakeholders, in particular universities, perplexed about how best to respond to students claim of continued inaccessibility and discrimination.

Now, thanks to a R11.2 million Andrew W Mellon grant, Stellenbosch University's Sociology and Social Anthroplogy Department will delve deeper into questions about how best to transform higher education environments by concentrating on its own existing curriculum and engaging with critical pedagogy and institutional transformation through its Indexing Transformation project. The project will be officially launched on 16 February at the university.

According to Prof Steven Robins, the Indexing Transformation project leader, the Department will now be able to interrogate what 'transformation' actually means for South Africa's higher education sector as well as the wider South African society.

"In 2015 a documentary called Luister (Listen) about black students' experiences of studying at Stellenbosch University was posted on YouTube. It instantaneously generated a vociferous national debate about institutional racism and the linguistic and cultural obstacles black students encounter at Afrikaans-medium universities," says Robins.

"Whereas the management team had previously framed transformation at the university simply in terms of statistical data, graphs and indices on campus racial demographics – of white, Indian, Coloured and black African students and staff – the Luister documentary foregrounded the lived experiences of black students in the residences, in the university town and on the campus."

According to Robins the project will also help the Department shed light on who defines, evaluates, and measures institutional transformation and how knowledge in the human sciences in South Africa has responded to the racialised histories of their formation, 22 years into post-apartheid democracy.

These questions will be central to this new research and postgraduate education project which is being undertaken by a team of researchers in the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department. The project has been made possible by a five-year grant of R11.2 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and will support a part-time programme manager, research projects, 78 graduate student scholarships, and a weekly seminar series. It will also be used for an international conference on institutional transformation that will set agendas and identify challenges for the study of transformation and an annual workshop of faculty and graduate students working on transformation issues.

It will be driven by Robins, who is the Principal Investigator, co-Principal Investigator Dr Bernard Dubbeld, and a Steering Committee consisting of Mr Jan Vorster, Ms Elizabeth Hector, Ms Anne Wiltshire and Ms Nwabisa Madikane.

The project will also involve the development of research clusters, the introduction of a coursework Masters focusing on the theme of Critical Transformation Studies, and a seminar series. The aim with these scholarly interventions, says Robins, is "to develop Indexing Transformation into an innovative and dynamic intellectual space for scholars and graduate students to interrogate the diverse dimensions of transformation".

Speaking about the new project, Dr Saleem Badat, Program Director: International Higher Education & Strategic Projects at the Mellon Foundation, said that they "are pleased to be associated with Stellenbosch University as one of the leading research universities in Africa".

"The Foundation's partnership with Stellenbosch seeks to strengthen and promote the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies, and to support high quality programmes oriented to producing new knowledge, and building new generations of intellectuals scholars, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds," added Badat.

The project follows directly from the Mellon-funded Indexing the Human project that successfully ran a seminar series and developed a dynamic research space in the Department between 2014 and 2015.

"Indexing the Human succeeded in catalysing critical reflection on the history of the human sciences in Stellenbosch, and in South Africa more generally. Our current project emerges out of this on-going concern with the nature of knowledge production in the human sciences. It is also the outcome of the recognition that our university spaces and intellectual work require serious examination in relation to persistent racial inequalities and obstacles to democratic, inclusive intellectual practice, a recognition amplified by recent student protests across South Africa," said Robins.

Photo: Students from Stellenbosch University participated in the #FeesMustFall movement in 2015 and 2016. (Stefan Els)