Peter Vale

Incredulity: how else was one to react to the news that an American think tank had recently dished out a series of awards to other think tanks — including the locally based Institute for Security Studies (ISS). On a little reflection it is easy to see how this is possible. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt once remarked: "The trouble with think-tankers is that they don’t think!"

Notwithstanding signs of increasing commitment by the state, many worries continue over the future of South Africa’s higher education system. The elephant in the room remains the fact that the system is not reproducing itself. Many whispers in the corners suggest that the system may now border on being unsustainable.

A former vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University and a vastly experienced academic and administrator who has held senior positions in Australia, Chris Brink leaves our shores soon to take up the vice-chancellorship of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. In this interview, he is provoked him into some plain speaking by six wide-ranging questions about the local tertiary scene.

Despite the recent teachers’ strike, things have gone well for Naledi Pandor, the Minister of Education. But surely her predecessors will have told Pandor that dragons, far more fierce than some vice-chancellors, lurk in the gloomy waters around South Africa’s universities. After 10 years of "torrid government interference" in universities, Peter Vale offers six of the best to the new Minister of Education.

Over the past decade, South Africa has given up an astonishing number of stories about its dark past. Some places, we can be sure, will never reveal their pasts except, perhaps, in the novels that remain to be written. One place where stories have still to be told and which will not wait for the novels are South Africa’s universities. The links between political power and organised forms of knowledge come into focus at a Rhodes University conference this month.

Bowed down by race legislation in the old South Africa, higher education (HE) appears to be taking a political beating from the many, many demands of the new, as this personal anecdote illustrates.

The US needs to reconsider its simple-minded approach to the world.