A worker's son who pushed UJ into a new era

You can understand why Professor Ihron Rensburg might be a little bushed. The job of a university vice-chancellor in South Africa today is almost preposterously difficult.

It requires walking on water, or eggshells, or fire, depending on the day of the week.

Today, the widely respected vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg is announcing that he will step down in early 2018, after 11 years in the job. It's an unusually early farewell, meant to give UJ the time to find the right successor.

"At many of our institutions, these things seem to be a surprise," Rensburg says. "It's been a case of investing great effort and emotion and ambition, and one can only do it for so long. You reach a point where it's time for the next incumbent to come into play and bring fresh ideas. But I've been inspired. I've made my contribution, and I'm still making it."

block_quotes_start One result of #FeesMustFall was hundreds of millions of campus damage, but it was overdue - long overdue  block_quotes_end

Rensburg and his team have reinvented UJ since it was created in 2005, through the merger of Rand Afrikaans University, Technikon Witwatersrand and Vista University.

None of those three schools were hotbeds of scholarly inquiry - but since its formation, UJ has quadrupled its output of peer-reviewed research, poached a clutch of leading academics from loftier rivals such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, and built a R1-billion campus in Soweto, where potentially transformative research into primary education is under way. And it is a leading force in the national effort to open the doors of learning to the poor.

"Ten years ago, our first-year class had 8% of students coming from quintile 1 and 2 schools, serving the poorest in our nation," says Rensburg.

"That's climbed, by design, to 28% this year. Between 50% and 60% of our graduates are first-generation entrants. So when you come to our graduation ceremonies you will experience it: whole families from deep Limpopo, Mpumalanga, northern KwaZulu-Natal, informal settlements of Gauteng, coming to ululate and give thanks to ancestors who had anticipated this generations ago."

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Rensburg knows all about blazing that trail. Raised in the industrial neighbourhood of Korsten in Port Elizabeth, as the son of a shoe-factory worker, he was one of only 28 black students at Rhodes University in 1979 - among 2,800 white students.

It took a whip-around from his schoolteachers and weeks of holiday overtime in the Bagshaw shoe factory to stay fed and housed through his first year, before drug firm Merck gave him a full bursary to complete his BPharm degree.

After a decade of education activism, including spells in detention, Rensburg obtained an MA and then a PhD in education at Stanford University. He later served as deputy director-general in the Department of Education, and as an SABC executive, before UJ called.

He speaks with an air of implacable calm that must have proved useful during the feverish height of #FeesMustFall. On his to-do list is to help preserve the transformative legacy of that traumatic showdown, and heal the bruises it inflicted on the university community.

"It has been disruptive and stressful," he says. "One consequence was hundreds of millions of rands of damage to university property. It has also seen tens of thousands of careers delayed. But it was overdue - long overdue."

For Rensburg, the protests served to awaken university managers from a fatalist approach to budgeting. "The context was that fees doubled in the span of seven or eight years, because state funding declined ... When state income grows at 4% to 5%, and your costs grow at 7% to 8%, there's a 3% to 4% gap. In UJ's instance, on an operating budget of close to R4-billion, 3% to 4% is hefty. It's R120-million, which over seven or eight years is close to R1-billion.

"Our focus was on sustainability and viability, in the face of declining state funding. #FeesMustFall said: 'Whoa! Slow down! This is not your problem only ... it's a national problem.'

"I should say that we vice-chancellors did try to tackle that issue with government, but we didn't make any headway. Our state contribution to university education is 0.75% of GDP - and even our neighbouring countries invest 1.2% or 1.3% of GDP. But it took #FeesMustFall to bring it to national consciousness and cause deeper reflection in the cabinet. So I think we need to draw those positives."

block_quotes_start The transition from an African language to English as a language of instruction has not been good  block_quotes_end

After a major student protest in 2007, Rensburg's administration resolved to consult much more frequently with student leaders. But the fallists pushed them further, demanding a radically open mode of communication. "#FeesMustFall has also caused us to rethink how we engage, how we converse with students, with student leaders, with staff. And I'm hoping that will be a lasting consequence.

"Most of us had retreated into our council chambers and senate chambers, where decisions are made. It's not good enough. You need to converse out there. It was a case of 'Hey, talk to us - rather than via circulars and e-mails. Those are for the record, but in practice, talk to us.'"

The university has committed to insourcing all staff by June next year. Gardening staff are already insourced, with protection staff set to follow in October and cleaners in January. On average, those workers will earn double what they used to.

And a massive effort has been made to help the "missing middle" - students who are not poor enough to be funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, but not rich enough to afford their study costs.

"This year we received 11,000 NSFAS loans out of 42,000 undergrads. However, 19,000 applied ... That means we sat with a missing middle of 7,000 to 8,000."

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By drawing on its operating budget, expanding its SRC Trust Fund account and appealing to private donors, UJ has raised R64-million for the registration and initial fees of about 4,000 "missing middle" students this year.

It's a stopgap measure, while a new national system for the missing middle is developed under the leadership of former FirstRand CEO Sizwe Nxasana.

Rensburg is most proud of a promising new project: a model primary school at the Soweto campus education department, which will be used to train student teachers and conduct research into the early acquisition of language, maths and science.

"We all speak of teachers and their capacity. But we cannot avoid the fact that the transition from a home African language to English as a language of instruction has not been good.

I don't think we appreciate the impact of that. By age nine and 10, our cognitive capacity is established. You're not going to learn more in terms of language structures as a foundation for the acquisition of knowledge in later years."

From Grade R, pupils at the campus school are taught English intensively, while their home language - either Zulu or Northern Sotho - is also affirmed. One-way mirrors allow students to observe lessons. It's the first school of its kind in Africa.

"So this is what's possible when we are a little bit more forthcoming," says Rensburg. "The risk is that vice-chancellors, in the face of all these challenges, do what they know best, which is to retreat into the ivory tower. What we need is the opposite - stepping out."

amatoc@sundaytimes.co.za