by Heather Dugmore
Rhodes is proud to have conferred an Honorary Doctorate on Dr Saleem Badat at the graduation ceremony on the 10th of April 2015. Dr Badat is the former Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University.
For eight years Dr Saleem Badat walked the corridors of Rhodes University and through the streets of Grahamstown.
Now he walks through Central Park from his apartment on the upper west side to his office at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on New York’s upper east side. On 1 August 2014 he took up his new post here as the Programme Director of International Higher Education & Strategic Projects.
“It’s good to have money to spend on excellent Arts and Humanities causes instead of having to plead for money, which universities have to do,” says Dr Badat as he enters the historic complex of townhouses in which the Mellon Foundation is based.
That’s another two kilometres clocked up. He walks four kilometres to and from his home on the upper west side every day. “If you don’t like walking, don’t move to New York,” he says. “I’m doing almost 50 kilometres a week, including walks with my dog Joey from South Africa. He loves New York and Central Park.”
Dr Badat ascends the stairs to his second floor office with its beautiful old bay windows overlooking 62nd Street. Across the corridor is the President of the Mellon Foundation, Dr Earl Lewis.
The Mellon Foundation is a major funder of Arts and Humanities programmes and initiatives in South Africa, as well as in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
An exciting cross-fertilisation of ideas
“It’s extremely stimulating being in this position as I interact with some of the top research universities and institutions, scholars and researchers from around the world. There’s an exciting cross fertilisation of ideas,” says Dr Badat, explaining that Mellon specifically supports the Arts and Humanities, and seeks to promote international collaboration, diversity and social inclusion as part of the transformation of society. Universities offer fertile ground for this.
A good example is the Accelerated Development Programme at Rhodes University, which aims to build a next generation of academics, and which Mellon has supported for the past 15 years. To date, 44 predominantly black and women academics have completed the programme, which is all about cultivating outstanding young academics.
Most are now in full-time posts, many with doctoral degrees.
Next generation academic programme (nGAP)
This programme has become the model for a national next generation academic programme called nGAP, which the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has agreed to fund from 2015.
Dr Badat was instrumental in this. As the former Chair of the Board of Higher Education South Africa (HESA), he raised funds and convened a working group of academics from several South African universities who put together the nGAP proposal, which the DHET accepted in 2013.
In his new position he is tasked with deciding on which project proposals from South African ‘research universities’ to motivate to the Mellon Foundation Board for funding.
Towards selecting these, Dr Badat will annually spend some six weeks in South Africa, engaging with the leadership of research universities on their institutional priorities and keeping in touch with the higher education and socio-political terrain.
Increase the number of black and women professors
One of the projects he currently has in mind is how to increase the number of black and women professors at South African universities.
“I need to discuss this further with my colleagues in South Africa but we could potentially design a programme of support for promising associate professors, to strongly assist them, without any compromise of promotion criteria, to become full professors in a shorter period of time,” Dr Badat explains.
“I would also like to look into why there are no black South Africans registered for PhDs in Philosophy. Philosophy is an extremely important discipline that grapples with important ethical and moral questions about how we live in society.”
He says that our society and thinking will be terribly impoverished if we do not produce a new generation of philosophers, particularly black philosophers, who focus on new questions and issues, and produce new knowledge and thinking.
Mellon budget of over R100-million
The 2015 budget Dr Badat has from Mellon for the selected projects in the Arts and Humanities at South African universities is $9 million dollars or over R100-million.
The total Mellon budget is $300 million, with most of the funding going to a small number of major research universities out of some 4000 American universities and colleges.
Seven South African universities, including Rhodes, currently benefit from Mellon and Dr Badat will be looking for exciting new institutional priorities and programmes that can produce new knowledge, support outstanding scholars and postgraduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds, enhance the experiences of postgraduate and undergraduate Arts and Humanities students, and impact positively on institutional change.
He will also connect South African arts and cultural organisations with strong outreach initiatives, such as the Iziko Museums, to Mellon’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Programme.
The Arts and Humanities are severely neglected
Mellon solely funds the Arts and Humanities, and Dr Badat explains why:
“We are living in a world where the Arts and Humanities are severely underappreciated and neglected. Yet our challenge, in a context of lack of human rights, serious inequalities, poverty and environmental degradation, is to build just and humane societies and cities in which people of different nationalities, social and economic backgrounds, languages and cultures can work, live and flourish together. The reality is that you cannot address these issues without the Arts and Humanities and on the basis of Science and Technology alone.”
Refocus on the Arts and Humanities
One of his goals is to encourage South African universities to refocus on the major contribution to society of the Arts and Humanities and its wide range of disciplines – from Fine Art to Drama and Music to Anthropology and Gender Studies to History and Sociology.
He explains that the perception created by politicians and policy makers here and elsewhere is that the STEM areas - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – can solve all our problems. This leaves an impression that the Arts and Humanities are dispensable, and that if you do a degree in this field, you are wasting resources and won’t find a job.
“It is deeply disturbing. There has to be an appropriate balance in funding and appreciation between STEM and the Arts and Humanities in South Africa, and also far more collaboration and interdisciplinary research and communication between them in addressing humanity’s grand challenges – such as inequality and poverty, migration and citizenship, habitable and inclusive cities, environmental sustainability, and clean air and water.”
Exceptionally fortunate for South Africa
To have Dr Badat in his position at Mellon is exceptionally fortunate for South Africa. It means that one of our own, someone who deeply understands our socio-political environment, is in a position of great influence to help direct strategic higher education programmes in the interests of a better society.
“Our purpose on this earth is to create a humane society in which everyone has opportunities and can flourish, instead of being mired in desperate attempts to survive, with the constant worry about where the next meal is coming from,” he says.
When he was at Rhodes, this meant vigorously engaging colleagues in the challenges of social transformation.
A very different Vice-Chancellor
He was a very different Vice-Chancellor to the previous Vice-Chancellors at Rhodes in several distinct ways, as he explains:
“I’m black, with a very different lived experience of- and under apartheid; I was a first generation student, who relied on winning scholarships; I was mentored by outstanding South African radical theorists and I come from a radical, non-racial tradition. I was intimately involved in the anti-apartheid democratic movement and I am from the Humanities. I attended a modest government school, not a private school, I did my PhD at York University, not Oxbridge. I was not a Rhodes graduate, and my academic career was at the University of the Western Cape.
“I say this because there was a tendency at Rhodes to want to ape Princeton or Oxford - without the massive endowments of these universities - and to not want to wholly face up to certain critical challenges emanating from South Africa and the Eastern Cape’s history.”
Transforming an outdated institutional culture
Transforming an outdated and unfriendly institutional culture was and still is crucial to the future of Rhodes and all South African universities, says Dr Badat who emphasises that this is critical to attracting and retaining black and women academics.
“Rhodes’ Vice-Chancellor, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Development, Dr Peter Clayton, share the view that you cannot be a high quality university without affirming, respecting and embracing difference and diversity,” he adds. “You need to genuinely appreciate people from different social backgrounds, black and white, rural and urban, working class and middle class, gay and lesbian, from other countries ... without this, without drawing on this rich diversity, you are not only diminished as a university, intellectually and scholarly, you also don’t equip your students and community to navigate the real world and to function as good citizens."
Many good people at Rhodes University today
“It makes me very proud that there are many good people at Rhodes University today who are genuinely working towards making Rhodes a home for all and who will maintain the momentum.”
He adds that it makes him proud to see what a number of South African universities achieve with limited resources. “We are very creative and indomitable, we make a plan.”
“When I observe what American universities enjoy in terms of resources, I feel very proud of how good an education a number of South African universities provide. If we had the kind of resources available to the American institutions we would be incredible. We provide great higher education and really incredible value for money.”
Speaking about ‘we’ makes it clear that Dr Badat is still very much South African despite his new surroundings of Central Park and the City of New York that is his, his wife Shireen Badat and their dog Joey’s new home.