Eighteen months is a brief chapter in the life of a university, but it can feel like a lifetime in the life of a Vice-Chancellor. When I assumed office on 1 January 2025 as the eighth Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), I did so conscious of the extraordinary institution entrusted to my stewardship. UWC is a university forged in struggle, sustained by conviction, and animated by a community of students, staff and alumni whose belief in the transformative power of education continues to inspire its mission. As I consider the journey since then, I do so with humility – mindful that every achievement has been the result of a collective effort.

From the beginning, I set myself two priorities. I wanted to listen and to understand. Before offering direction, I sought first to hear the University, its people, its histories, its frustrations and its hopes. I have not stopped listening. It has guided every strategic choice we have made since. For me, it is one of the most valuable leadership disciplines.

A Shared Vision

At my inauguration on 15 February 2025, I invited the University community to revisit and revitalise UWC's identity as “an intellectual home for the left” and how this legacy responds to the peculiar moral and ethical challenges of our time. This identity speaks to a living commitment to activism embedded in the academic project and in partnership with society. I also set out a framework for UWC as a University of Futures – our Collective Future. This includes future-ready curricula, living and learning environments that are conducive and fit for purpose, and a culture that puts people first while insisting on quality and belonging. Central to this vision is a deliberate transition from being a research-led university to becoming a leading research university.

These were more than words for a ceremonial occasion. Over the 18 months that followed, they became the scaffolding for the most consequential strategic work of this period: the development of a new Institutional Operating Plan for 2026–2030. Crafted through an extensive consultative process, including a series of Campus Dialogues that brought staff and students together to debate what we have come to call “The UWC Way”, the plan is now being implemented. It integrates our academic project so that learning, teaching, research and postgraduate education advance together. It is grounded, socially responsive and digitally enabled. It affirms UWC’s excellence, anchored in its space, place and circumstance.

The Campus Dialogues have surfaced a set of strategic matters that the community itself regards as unfinished business, among them the renewal of institutional culture and the quality of our living and learning environments. These matters are being carried into the implementation of the IOP and tracked through our institutional planning processes, so that what began as listening matures into accountability. If the dialogues have taught us anything, it is that strategy is most credible when a community can recognise its own voice in it.

Strategic visioning, however, is not only about producing a plan. It is about asking what kind of university UWC must become in response to the moral, social, technological and planetary challenges of our time. My inaugural address sought to establish a foundation for this work by returning to UWC’s tradition as a University for the Left, not as a fixed ideology or a nostalgic slogan, but as a continuing commitment to equality, dignity, freedom, rigorous scholarship and knowledge in the service of society. The 2025/6 Campus Dialogues enabled the University community to test, deepen and give collective expression to that foundation.

From this process, seven principles have emerged to guide our re-imagining of UWC: the academic project as a public good; a university that is genuinely open and welcoming to all; academic freedom, intellectual plurality and the recovery of marginalised ways of knowing; situated knowledge and reciprocal engagement with communities; learning from struggles for justice; the revival of political education as democratic inquiry rather than dogma; and, a “UWC Way” in which collegiality, transparency, fairness and ethical leadership are practised in everyday institutional life. These principles are not a finished declaration. They serve as an invitation to our campus community and our partners in the coming period to continue shaping a collective future in which UWC does not merely observe history but helps make it. This invitation also extends to our alumni, whom I was able to reconnect with in 2025 in the form of six encouraging alumni events.

Students at the Centre

Universities exist because of students, and the demand for a UWC education has never been stronger. Applications for the 2026 academic year far outstripped the available first-time entry places. By mid-February, all first-time entry targets had been met and, in many cases, exceeded. This is the first year in which we have successfully met postgraduate student targets. Behind this demand lies sustained public trust in what this University offers; leading it is a team of dedicated managers and deans who carry that public expectation and trust.

Over these 18 months, we have conferred qualifications on thousands of graduates at our graduation ceremonies, including a growing cohort of doctoral graduates whose numbers signal our postgraduate strength. We celebrated the first cohort of Mastercard Foundation Scholars to graduate from UWC. We also watched our students distinguish themselves nationally and internationally, from the Women’s Football team claiming a fourth national Varsity title, to student scholars representing South Africa on global platforms. The launch of the African Student Law Journal reminded us that student scholarship has a public life of its own.

We have also invested deliberately in the conditions for student success. The iKamvalethu Fund, strengthened in my first weeks in office with savings redirected from my own inauguration, continues to assist students whose debt threatens their progress and graduation. Orientation has been renewed and expanded, supported by a much larger peer leadership programme, and postgraduate orientation has grown considerably in reach. Curriculum renewal has continued across faculties, with programmes accredited and re-accredited in the health sciences and beyond, while our digital academic literacy programme and new artificial intelligence literacy training for staff and students are preparing our community for a changing world of study and work.

Care for students has also meant attending to dignity in its most practical forms. A corporate donation now ensures that female students have access to free sanitary products on campus – a modest intervention with a meaning far larger than its cost. Student accommodation has been expanded substantially, including through partnerships with private providers and additional bed spaces for postgraduate students. Accommodation, however, remains one of our most demanding challenges and its quality is a critical factor in well-being.

A University on the Move

 

One development captures our research trajectory more clearly than any other. In 2026, UWC was awarded several new NRF South African Research Chairs (SARChI), placing the University jointly at the top of the South African higher education sector in terms of the number of chairs it holds. These chairs span nanomedicine, digital health, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, among other fields, with the sciences and the broader social sciences and humanities represented in equal measure. Together, they showcase scientific excellence joined to social purpose. Our new strategic initiatives for this year signal the direction we need to take in our next phase of development and investment. They focus on youth and futures, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies, and entrepreneurship for a self-start economy. These areas are central to our growth as a leading research university anchored in social justice for Africa and the world.

Internationalisation has been a defining feature of this period. We adopted a new Internationalisation Strategy and advanced partnerships across Africa and with institutions around the world. These collaborations have created new opportunities for our students, staff and researchers, while reinforcing our commitment to African scholarship, South–South cooperation and meaningful global engagement.

It is people who define UWC. During this period, we took important steps to strengthen our institutional culture and ensure that our values are reflected in the lived experience of staff and students. Evidence from our Culture and Values Survey has informed a range of initiatives to support organisational development, equity and staff wellbeing. We also advanced inclusion by launching QueerDubs and continued to give public expression to UWC’s longstanding social justice mission.

The Funding Challenge

One of the most difficult realities of leadership at a historically disadvantaged university is the tension between maintaining the institution's financial sustainability and responding compassionately to students who have the ability to succeed but cannot afford to study. UWC, as does any university, must maintain residences, laboratories, digital systems, libraries, classrooms and student-support services. It must pay its staff, protect academic quality and invest in future growth. At the same time, we also serve students who fall outside the eligibility thresholds for state support, yet whose families cannot meet the full cost of higher education. When such debt accumulates, the consequences are borne by both the student, through registration delays, interrupted study, or delayed graduation, and the University, whose capacity to serve future generations is steadily weakened by an ever-growing debt book. This is not a contradiction that individual institutions can solve through goodwill alone. It demands a more coherent national funding settlement that recognises higher education as a public good, provides sustainable support for the “missing middle”, and does not compel historically disadvantaged universities to choose between access and institutional viability. I have argued this case more fully in “Student debt: We need to rethink how we fund education”, and it remains one of the central issues with which I continue to grapple.

Looking Ahead

While there has been much to celebrate, this period has also brought significant challenges. Student protests highlighted longstanding maintenance pressures in our residences and disrupted the academic programme. We responded with targeted interventions, strengthened engagement with students and government, and measures to protect the integrity of the academic year. At the same time, we continued to manage our finances responsibly, strengthened fundraising efforts, and invested in long-term infrastructure and sustainability despite a difficult higher-education funding environment.

Over the next twelve months, our task is to convert strategic direction into disciplined implementation. We will deepen UWC’s role as a public-good partner by clarifying the communities and publi

cs our scholarship serves; renew the academic project through curriculum reform, stronger undergraduate–postgraduate pathways, multilingualism and digitally enabled learning; and, strengthen the postgraduate value proposition by concentrating scarce resources on areas of established and emerging research excellence, while placing our Research Chairs and Centres of Excellence more centrally within the University’s strategy. We will continue consulting on developing proposals for three strategic initiatives, viz. an Advanced Studies Institute, a Global Centre for Youth and Futures, and a School for Entrepreneurship Studies, while giving renewed meaning to academic activism in the classroom, in scholarship and in community engagement. Alongside these ambitions, we must practise careful financial stewardship, build stronger relationships with alumni, donors and strategic partners, improve infrastructure and student living conditions, integrate our technological systems, support the arts and sciences, and strengthen UWC’s public-intellectual role. The measure of success will not be the number of initiatives announced, but whether our collective work produces a more coherent, humane, efficient and intellectually vibrant University.

One lesson has stood out from these experiences: UWC's greatest strength is its people. Listening remains at the heart of effective leadership, because lasting progress depends on the commitment, expertise and trust of our staff, students, alumni and partners.

The years ahead will demand courage, patience and continued investment in our infrastructure, research excellence, student success and institutional culture. Guided by our Institutional Operating Plan and the values that have emerged from our collective dialogues, we will continue to build a university that expands opportunity, advances knowledge and contributes to a more just and prosperous society. The work is unfinished, as it must be in any living university. But after 18 months, I am more convinced than ever that UWC “has what it takes” to shape the future.

When action is shaped by listening, impact grows, confidence deepens and investment follows. That investment occurs in different ways: in food security, good accommodation, safe surrounds, superb sport and outstanding academic life. We cannot rely on past merit or nostalgia to fix a future that already feels precarious. The years ahead will demand much of us. This year is already demanding more: 2026 is calling us to affirm our foundations if we are to fully realise the ambitions of our new IOP 2026–2030. We must renew our infrastructure, strengthen our research excellence, and patiently build institutional culture and trust. Remember that an oasis always seems like an impossibility until you test the limits of a mirage.

UWC is that wondrous place: it is a garden, the potential of which is enabling a whole desert to blossom. Join with us to help make that potential a reality.