Beyond Black & White (continued)
By Alan Rothberg
To provide access to higher education for the many students who are unable to afford university fees, Wits also enjoys the benefits of bursary programs, awarded to students in need, and scholarship programs, awarded to those who have excelled at secondary school level. We also participate in the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program, in which universities such as Wits and the University of Cape Town work with tenth-grade students to develop their leadership capabilities in business, engineering, science, law, and the arts.
Even with initiatives such as these, there are huge challenges. We can't always provide sufficient accommodation for students who live far from the university. The luckier ones can stay in our residences or on nearby student-centered commercial properties. But many of the rest must travel long distances to the university, often relying on generally inadequate public transportation. This makes their academic lives difficult, particularly during examination times.
Despite these obstacles, overall Wits has been successful in bringing in disadvantaged students and assisting them once they're here. We don't have a policy of taking in 1,000 students and relying on examinations or attrition to eliminate those who are not coping. If we accept 400 students at the beginning of the year, it's our policy— and, we believe, our obligation— to end the year with as close to 400 students as possible.
While we lose some students between admissions and graduation, the greater likelihood is that they will finish their courses, but they might take four or five years to finish a three-year degree. We're working on improving our throughput rate—making sure that students who start don't drop out along the way, and that they complete their degrees in the minimum amount of time.
There are different challenges at the graduate and post-graduate levels. We encourage master's and doctoral candidates to apply for national and international grants or participate in partnership agreements we've made with overseas institutions. We believe we're producing high-quality students, and our graduates have generally done quite well in their careers. But there's another hurdle. Once candidates have made it through doctoral programs and achieved the level of excellence that would allow them to start contributing academically, they're enticed away by the higher salaries in law, commerce, and industry. This makes them quite difficult to retain.
Even so, we're aggressively maintaining our academic standards. The quality of our faculty is high, and we encourage them to take advantage of funding available for professional development. Our goal is to become a top 100 university internationally, which means we must encourage all faculty to produce high-quality research, and we must attract more international students and staff. The more we do this, the more we introduce a different kind of diversity onto the campus, one that goes way beyond a national demographic profile. At Wits, we thrive on the richness of the cultures in the world, the diversity in values and languages, and we proudly encourage and defend rigorous, vigorous debate.
It's interesting to see how our student body has changed over the years, as evidenced by our recent student elections. In the past, students lobbied on issues such as changing the menu in the cafeteria. Now students lobby in terms of political alignments. We have students who are Muslim, Jewish, left-wing, right-wing, and politically active. In the fall of 2011, the university mobilized to protest the news that the government was still denying a visa to the Dalai Lama—for a visit that was to include an address to our school.
At Wits, all national and international issues are recognized and voiced, but the debates usually occur in an environment of acceptance and tolerance. That's because we know that diversity goes beyond black or white. And we want to make sure that all races, cultures, and nations are accepted and welcomed on our campus.
Alan Rothberg is acting dean of the
Faculty of Commerce, Law & Management
at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg, South Africa
