SEMINAR & WEBINAR: Thursday, 31 March 2022, 4 pm at Barratt Lecture Theatre 3 & online via Zoom (details below),
TOPIC & SPEAKERS: Kenneth Chiridza, David Fryer & Claire McCann, "Rhodes University’s Nine Tenths Programme: closing the gap between township and university?"
Mass unemployment and low-quality government services including schooling reflect, and reinforce, high levels of inequality and black working-class poverty in South Africa. While South African universities were desegregated several decades ago, only a small minority of township youth are able to progress to and through higher education: middle- and upper-class learners of all races predominate in admissions and graduations, especially at elite institutions. Universities have attempted to address the gap through measures like community engagement programmes. Rhodes University Community Engagement (RUCE) operates the flagship Nine Tenths Programme, a matric mentoring programme launched in 2016. This paper, based on original research, shows that the Nine Tenths Programme (like RUCE generally) has registered important successes but also faces challenges. It demonstrably helps bridge the gap into university for individual learners, but is less able to close the gap between the university and township learners' communities and schools. This raises important questions about such civil society initiatives in general, and their ability of achieve a necessary scale of change, and whether university cultures can transform to make community engagement more central.
SPEAKERS: Kenneth Chiridza completed his Bachelor of Economics (Honours) at Rhodes University in 2021, and has set his sights on entrepreneurship, particularly in the energy space. David Fryer is a member of NALSU and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics & Economics History at Rhodes, with research interests in economics education, macroeconomics, labour economics and the economics of welfare regimes. Claire McCann is doing a Masters of Economics, has been a mentor in the Nine Tenths Programme, and was recipient of Rhodes University's 2020 Student Volunteer of the Year Award.
JOINING: register in advance for the seminar, which will use Zoom, by going to:
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://zoom.us/meeting/
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HOSTS: The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES).
NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.