Pretoria - Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Unisa Professor Puleng LenkaBula has assured that the institution would continue to demonstrate the kind of leadership that enabled it to surpass its academic expectations.
Speaking at the official academic opening ceremony for this year, she said the times of great uncertainty were still upon South Africa, especially those brought forth by Covid-19, the constant challenges in the political, social, economic, and health systems or eco-systems.
These uncertainties were not happening only in this country, but globally, she said, necessitating the need for institutions of higher learning to act in an agile manner to ensure that the university would not only be celebrating 150 years now, but remain sustainable for the next 150.
“In order to contend with uncertainties as a university, we have chosen to adapt to working smart, to create the kind of intellectual future we want, in line with the idea of adaptation, creation, and co-constructing the future remembering that we as Africans cannot just draw on the future that others have framed for us but we must invent it”.
Under the theme, Reclaiming and re-imagining Africa’s intellectual futures beyond Covid-19, LenkaBula said they understood that the pandemic was not definitive of the future and that as moral agents through their research, knowledge, and engaged scholarship, they had to determine how they contributed to the future that Unisa must inspire, aspire to and co-construct.
She added that they also had to listen deeply to students, staff, and communities within which they served around the meanings they would like to shape through knowledge.
She said as they commenced with the 2022 academic year, they continued to be mindful of the university’s ongoing transformations whether in the knowledge systems, digitalisation, overcoming the challenges of apartheid and its residues, and even in a humanising knowledge environment were becoming important aspects to focus on.
“I would like to appeal that we as a university must continue to demonstrate the leadership that enabled us to surpass all our expectations in 2020, as attested to by our colleagues.
“We hope the thriving Unisa that we experienced 2021 notwithstanding the challenges that students, staff, society would like us to be attentive to, that we should forge ahead with our strategy that we would need to take responsibility of ensuring that the 10 catalytic-niche areas become the defining moments and inspiration for that translation of research, engaged scholarship, teaching, and learning but also for the formation of students as intellectuals.”
LenkaBula said she was pleased that, as promised during her inauguration, to commit to working with everyone to recentre the university to its core mandate of the academic project despite the challenges around high- attrition rates, drop-out and drop-off and pushed out, that was happening.
|This year, she said, the university would accelerate the research, innovation, and engaged scholarship within the 10 niche areas – are marine, aviation, aeronautical studies, automotive, energy, space and square kilometres, 4.0 industrialisation, professionalisation of student affairs, services and support, digitalisation, feminist theorisation in the context of gender-based violence, people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQIA community.
Pretoria News