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The biennial Rhodes University Community Engagement Learning Symposium in partnership with the Centre of Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning took place on 9 to 11 May 2023. The Vice Chancellor of Rhodes University, Prof Sizwe Mabizela opened the Symposium at Amazwi South African Museum of Literature and welcomed attendees and acknowledged the efforts of the local organising committee and presenters.
In his introduction, he noted how the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of gathering and community engagement, which is essential for universities to address societal challenges. Mabizela emphasised that universities should not only focus on their excellence in teaching and research but also on their social purpose, and their role in cultivating humanity and addressing challenges that impact the quality of life. Mabizela asserted universities must forge mutually beneficial, reciprocal, impactful, thoughtful, equitable, democratic, sustainable, and knowledge-driven partnerships with local communities. The VC also noted that universities should cultivate graduates who are knowledgeable, positively engaged, active, critical and democratic citizens, with an elevated sense of social consciousness, and who can become agents of societal change.
RUCE Director, Di Hornby noted that wherever Rhodes University engaged researchers travel in the world for the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) conference, they brag about the support received from the vice chancellor.
“There's a lot of the other colleagues when they present, that's where the problem is because it's not coming from the top. So thank you so much for being so supportive of community engagement and you touch on knowledge democracy,” said Ms Hornby with gratitude to Prof Mabizela. “This is what the UNESCO Knowledge for Change consortium is all about, valuing all systems and forms of knowledge. And we also just so happy and so glad to hear that at Rhodes University, we educate students for the unknown, for the unpredictable”
Prof Sizwe Mabizela’s address can be found in full below:
“Thank you very much, Ms. Hornby, Chair and other members of the local symposium organising committee, our keynote speakers, symposium participants, community partners, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Rhodes University, to Makhanda, to the Makana municipality, to the Eastern Cape, and for some of you, to the African continent. We also welcome all those participants who are joining us from different parts of the globe through the immense power of digital technology.
We are delighted to recognise in our midst the following eminent guests for our symposium. My brother, Vice Chancellor of Guli University, Professor George Ovenjulo. He is also the Chair of the Vice Chancellors Forum in Uganda and also the Vice Chair of the Talloires Network. Welcome Dr Marisol Morales, the executive director of the Carnegie Classification of Community Engagement in the Carnegie Foundation. Professor Tim Stanton, Senior Engaged Scholar with the Robinson Associates with 30 years at Stanford University, establishing community engagement and service learning. We also acknowledge in our midst, Dr. Samuel Gwongwa, who is a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Center. Thank you. We acknowledge Professor Peter Clayton, our retired Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Rhodes University.
I'm advised that we have a record number of attendees at the 2023 Community Engagement Learning Symposium. This includes academics from 18 South African universities and eight international universities, some of whom are with us here in person and others are joining us online.
Our sincere appreciation and gratitude go to our local organising committee for organising what I'm confident would be a very stimulating, successful and memorable symposium.
On behalf of our university and the Symposium organising committee, we acknowledge with much thanks and sincere appreciation our eminent keynote speakers, who have very kindly and graciously accepted our invitation to address this symposium. We also convey our profound gratitude and heartfelt appreciation to all symposium presenters for their time and effort in preparing their presentations for this symposium. We are equally grateful to those who will be presenting their posters. This symposium would not have been possible without you and your participation.
If anything at all, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us about the importance of these simple things in life - being able to gather together in the manner that we have. Simple things of handshake, embrace, sharing meals together…And so we do not take your presence here with us for granted, because it's something that is immensely important.
On a guest, ladies and gentlemen, in his seminal book, ‘The Soul of a University: why excellence is not enough’, Chris Brink, who is an alumnus of our university, poses a simple and yet profound question that each university should ask of itself - what are we good for?
What are we good for? According to Brink, universities should not only ask what it is that they are good at, but also what they are good for. That is, as they are preoccupied with excellence in learning and teaching and in research, as what they are good at, they must, on commitment and with equal vision and commitment, engage what they are good at, what they are good for, in relation to addressing societal challenges. The question of the social purpose of a university in a modern society is one that has been constantly raised over decades. And it must always be at the uppermost in all aspects and decision making of any university.
Why you might ask is important. Firstly, Universities are social institutions that exist for the public good. They cannot be ivory towers, standing aloof, isolated, or disconnected or distant from their societal context. They must firmly embed themselves in and be deeply intertwined with their immediate external local community. They must forge mutually beneficial, reciprocal, impactful, thoughtful, equitable, democratic, sustainable, and knowledge-driven partnerships.
Now, I do want to underline the importance of knowledge-driven - I’ll come back to that point. And they must do all this to respond to the societal, economic, environmental, cultural, and other challenges impacting on the quality of life. Universities and communities should co-create solutions to challenges that face them. Not those that face the community or just face universities, those that face them together because they are one.
So, I do want to underscore the knowledge driven aspect of the partnership. As universities are not charitable organisations, they are knowledge institutions. And so the most important asset they can bring into any partnership is knowledge. It must therefore remain committed to producing and disseminating knowledge that leads to a positive change in the lives of our people, knowledge that transforms society, knowledge that transforms our world.
Secondly, through community engagement, universities must cultivate graduates who are highly knowledgeable, who are positively engaged, empathetic, active, critical and democratic citizens with an elevated sense of social consciousness. Through service learning, for example, and volunteerism, our students gain more knowledge about themselves and a greater awareness and understanding of the social realities of our society. In this way, they can become agents of societal change and social transformation. And such graduates are able to strengthen and deepen the democratic values and advance social justice in our society.
In this regard I'm singularly proud that at Rhodes University, we do not train our graduates for a job. We educate them and prepare them for the future, an unknown future, an unknowable future, an unpredictable future, complex and an uncertain future, a future in which they will make their knowledge, talent, and expertise play a certain service to humanity. We educate them for a life of meaning. We educate them for a life of purpose. And we educate and prepare them for a life of consequence.
Thirdly and finally, through research, universities should endeavour to partner local communities, to find solutions to challenges facing universities and communities. But to achieve this objective, university academics and researchers should do research with and not in or on the community to realise mutually beneficial outcomes. This is a process of sharing ideas, sharing knowledge and sharing expertise. Even as academics and researchers share their knowledge and expertise, they also learn from the community, drawing on the vast knowledge that resides in communities. This is really important because we tend to think that we go to the communities to help them, take them out of their miserable existence. We just have to be a little humble. We just have to acknowledge that there is vast knowledge that resides in our community that can benefit and enrich our intellectual endeavours at university and stop thinking of knowledge in a particular way, acknowledge knowledge in its diversity because all of that contributes to the betterment of the human condition.
The absolute of all this is that community engagement must be properly planned, must be intentional. It must be firmly anchored in the other two core activities of teaching and learning and research of the university. Of courses it must also be context-driven. Context here matters. Must be transformative. Time indicated must transform individual students and staff, must transform researchers, academics, must transform communities, must transform our world.
It is for this reason among many that Rhodes University has publicly declared its disapproval and disassociation with global university rankings. As these do not foreground the social purpose of a higher education institution, nor do they take into consideration the social, economic, cultural, and geographic context of a university. We are the only university in this country that has publicly dissociated. Responsiveness to local communities is hardly a consideration in the criteria of the global university ranking. As correctly pointed out by Brigg, these rankings and league tables compress reality into a ranked list in which higher up means better and lower down means worse. They encourage us to fall into line.
Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen, once more, on behalf of our university, I bid you a very warm welcome to the symposium. I sincerely hope that this symposium will afford you space and time, particularly to reflect on the work, and that it will equip and empower us with new knowledge, strategies, and approaches that will help us advance our common objective of creating and sustaining a better society and a better world. A more just, a more humane, a more equitable, a more inclusive, a more sustainable, a more compassionate society and world. I wish you stimulating productive and fruitful discussions. And may you, at the end of this important symposium, leave Rhodes University with a renewed hope and optimism that tomorrow will be a better day than today. I thank you.”