Incoming vice-chancellor reflects on transformation’s lessons

When he formally assumes the position of vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape in January 2025, applied linguist, postcolonial literary critic and educationist Professor Robert Balfour is likely to be the first head of a university in South Africa who is openly from the LGBTIQ+ community.

An NRF-rated academic (C2 – established with an international profile), Balfour was an honorary professor of education in the School of Education Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) (1995-2008) and, later, dean of the faculty of education sciences at North-West University (NWU). Since 2017, he has been the deputy vice-chancellor (teaching and learning) at NWU.

In this Q&A, Balfour shares his experience of significant institutional change in two very different South African higher education institutions, and argues that transformation is more accurately represented as the growth of a society – not as an end destination.

UWN: Starting as the dean of education at the then University of Potchefstroom (now North-West University), describe your rise through the ranks and how it has equipped you for the top role at the University of the Western Cape.

RB: I am probably most well-known in the higher education sector for my work on language policy development. I was at the University of KwaZulu-Natal for almost 10 years. We were one of the first institutions to introduce a bilingual policy featuring an African language other than Afrikaans or English.

It was pioneering work, and I remember that one of the highlights of that time was a visit by the late intellectual Neville Alexander to the university senate. How inspiring it was to understand the links between transformation, language, access to education, the success of our students, and a racially integrated society.

That UKZN experience laid the foundation for the work I did at NWU where I led the language policy revision and development process, during which we focused on introducing Setswana and Sesotho as languages of teaching and learning.

That work has been ongoing since our first policy revision in 2018. I became deputy vice-chancellor at NWU in 2017 so, indeed, the work that I did in scholarly terms at UKZN was influential in my time as dean of NWU, and then, I think, contributed directly to the transformation and change processes at NWU under the vice-chancellorship, first, of Professor Dan Kgwadi and, currently, Professor Bismark Tyobeka.

UWN: Transformation is a recurring theme in your career. How far along is South Africa’s journey in this regard, and how did transformative experiences shape your leadership style?

RB: It’s a journey that is far from complete. For example, languages are crucial to education success on just one level. We’ve 12 official languages, but English remains a predominant medium of instruction (predominant that it is, alongside Afrikaans, which remains in use in a minority of South African schools as a medium).

Despite a thriving print, media and popular culture, African languages, as languages of teaching and learning, remain underutilised and their potential is insufficiently explored.

In terms of leadership style, having left the humanities, I joined the then University of Natal faculty of education at a sensitive time. The university was concluding its incorporation of Edgewood College of Education. Then followed the 2004 merger of the University of Natal with the University of Durban-Westville (UDW).

At one point, I was the acting head of a school and played a part in the coming together of the new faculty of education at UKZN. From the privilege of working with UDW and [University of] Natal colleagues, I learned how important teamwork and collaboration are in developing a new culture and a successful change process for faculty, staff and students.

It was an incredibly exciting time. Working with people, rather than holding onto assumptions about people and places, was a crucial insight that allowed us to contribute to a new institution focused on transformation, redress, social justice and high academic standards.

In those years, Professor Renuka Vithal was dean, and Professor Malegapuru Makgoba was vice-chancellor and, as many opportunities as there were, there were many challenges to be addressed by the new faculty.

UKZN is the major role-player in teacher education in the province, and it was necessary to “show up” by providing relevant and excellent programmes as a new university.

In those years, my focus on rurality in education, school partnerships and participatory methodologies emerged as foci because we recognised that curricula developed in isolation of the contexts in which teachers had to function risked being irrelevant.

I consider myself fortunate to have been entrusted to be part of the leadership team as head of one school in that faculty. Looking back on that now, I’m proud of that period.

When I came to NWU, I was able to add momentum to that same transformation journey, albeit with different colleagues and under other circumstances.

You’ve pointed out that this is a transformative journey; it has no end destination. There’s a good reason for that: it’s very much about growth – the growth of our society, the growth of our levels of awareness in terms of deep issues concerning inequality, inequity and how that makes a difference to a person and a group’s chances in life, at success, with opportunities … How ‘difference’ still makes a difference!

Although North-West University had similarly undergone a merger in 2004, it differed from UKZN’s. NWU then had three campuses operating with high levels of autonomy from each other, which made it difficult to achieve a unitary culture and an aligned programme offering.

When Kgwadi became vice-chancellor in 2014, he committed to a unitary institution focused on academic quality and social justice, where access and success were aligned. It was a momentous change and opened the door for the university to transform its teaching and learning, student life and campus demographics from where it was to where it is now: more representative, with tangible steps to integrate better.

UWN: You spoke about working with teachers in rural areas. What pleases you most about those experiences, and how much of what you’ve done at UKZN and NWU will follow you in the future at UWC?

RB: It is quite a deep matter to reflect on because the commitment to people is ethical and complex. In education, it’s a moral commitment because our responsibilities as educators are to uplift each other and learners.

Beyond that, our responsibility is to fundamentally change the trajectories that our histories put us on. Race and gender ‘binarisation’ has been incredibly damaging to people in our country, and we see it in the polarisation between groups within society and our sector.

We see it also in the very assumptions that are brought into play around, for example, access to resources, historical legacies of advantage, historical legacies of disadvantage, and how those impact in fundamental ways that change the experience of how you learn, how you teach, and what your chances are of succeeding.

Regarding the work done with teachers around South Africa, I think what has been most inspiring for me is understanding the importance of agency, autonomy and professional development in creating stories of success in environments where you would least expect it owing to the circumstances and histories.

In the early years at NWU, we set up the Partnership of Hope agreement with the Provincial Department of Education (DoE). It functioned all the years I was dean, providing regular continuing professional development opportunities in collaboration with the DoE around the North West province.

It was wonderful to contribute; this leads me to think that what is inspiring about South Africa is that we have proved to ourselves we can create success out of an incredibly difficult environment and set of circumstances.

We know this needs a political and social will to keep momentum and sustain resilience, which I think we sometimes take for granted in the post-COVID environment. We’ve gone through a severe pandemic, and I think we assume that people continue to be resilient in the post-COVID-19 space, their work, their commitment to education, and so on. However, we also see clear signs of the need for better support and integration of support for students.

UWN: It’s more than three years now, but please share how COVID-19 changed the education dynamic in South Africa, in particular.

RB: COVID-19 had an ambiguous impact. In retrospect, initially, when the pandemic hit and the hard lockdowns became a reality in education, we thought education technology would provide a ready means for a seamless transition from contact to online learning.

Many assumptions were made in our sector about what education technology could achieve in terms of aligning, for example, modalities such as contact and distance education.

The learning and experience point to an exacerbation of challenges concerning education inequities in our sector that pre-existed COVID-19. The assumptions made regarding the curriculum and learning were also revealed: we designed for students’ learning as though this happens in the same way and at the same pace.

So, what quickly emerged for NWU and our sector, for example, was the importance of carefully focused student support that took into account modalities, proximity to Wi-Fi, access to devices, space and time to study.

In brief, we began to understand the critical importance of context awareness, not simply the ‘context’ for learning off-campus but, in many ways, how context determines and limits learning. Deep reflection on COVID and its implications for the democratisation of the curriculum has to be explored in South Africa so that we can afford ourselves a more integrated or holistic view of how education technology could best be used in terms of self-direction, online collaboration and student support.

We moved into online learning, which was, in a sense, a stress test under the difficult circumstances of that pandemic. However, it is only subsequently that insights begin to emerge concerning, for example, the importance of tranquil and peaceful spaces in which to live and learn as students.

Education technology cannot deliver a seamless transition between learning modalities without carefully designed student support and a student-centred curriculum. It has been interesting to note that students with disabilities, for example, reported positively on the online learning experience during COVID-19 and had a sense of empowerment in that experience because the curriculum was self-paced. In other words, they could control better how much they learned and how frequently they learned, and it was self-directed.

UWN: Addressing inequalities, tackling student debt and dealing with fees must rank high on the list of priorities for any university leader. What are your thoughts?

RB: Student debt seems intractable, and its intractability rests in how the economic relations of debt are configured within a neoliberal economic framework. If education is a commodity and must be ‘priced’ as such, then the assumption that its costs must be met and cannot exceed the capacity of people to pay for it makes sense. And if most households cannot afford education except through incurring debt, we create social and economic problems, which have other costs.

Student debt, as noted with NSFAS [the National Student Financial Aid Scheme] and how it becomes unmanageable, is a towering edifice for young people. In the context of unemployment, household impoverishment is not only an economic problem, but also a social one.

It’s not only a South African phenomenon. We’ve seen that indebtedness has also galvanised students in the Global North to object to it. #Fees Must Fall is the most obvious example here in South Africa of a rejection of the tenets of our model, but that it was a global movement suggests a profound problem with how governments have shaped the ‘education economy’.

We must commit as civic and government leaders to finding better solutions. A university cannot resolve the matter of student debt on its own. Even a sector on its own cannot solve this for itself: it needs a social compact in which the funding of education is prioritised, an ethical commitment to addressing the problem of student debt and how that comes to be shaped, the conditions on which it comes to be formulated.

I want to contribute to those discussions, and the university should become a place where government, community and academia come together to re-envision solutions that include student housing and our communities.

UWN: What excites you about the task ahead at UWC?

RB: I recognise that gender inequality in our environment, perhaps even beyond our environment, in the Global South, is a profound social, economic and political challenge.

This is an ethical responsibility for the university, the sector, and our nation. For example, in the statistics on domestic violence, violence in general, in our communities, it is women and people from the LGBTIQA+ community that are most affected.

As an institution, community, professionals, citizens and society, we have an ethical obligation to invest in, redress, and restore the community. This begins in homes, schools and communities, but crucially, every home is also where prejudice comes to be resisted or reinforced.

Of course, I am looking forward to contributing to the education process at the university. I see that it is a profoundly consultative process to agree on and commit to plans to recognise and redress disadvantages, especially when it comes to the opportunities and support provided to women and members of the LGBTIQA+ community who have historically been made marginal in institutions and organisations.

Fortunately, at UWC, there is, in several faculties, an emerging scholarship concerning issues of gender disparity and gender-based violence in society, the role of microaggressions, and violence in the workplace and beyond, from which to draw.

We must do so much, but we can only be impactful by doing it together.

* This is the first of a two-part interview with Robert Balfour.