CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

 

Vice Chancellor

Professor David Jambgwa Simbi was born on the sixth of June 1952 and did his primary and secondary education in Nyazura. He completed his secondary education at Solusi Secondary School in Figtree (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe) and preceded to Glenside Hospital were he enrolled for a course in Psychiatry from 1974 to 1979 while concurrently studying for an Ordinary National certificate in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry.

To mark the official beginning of the academic year is a very important step in the life of any university. In many university steeped in tradition, the event is marked by pomp and ceremony. Faculty and fellows parade in gowns and students including undergraduate students dress in formal academic attire. There would often be a guest speaker, an eminent personality whose words will encourage and inspire especially the new students and the institution parades its influence and achievements. Beyond the glitter, however, there is a more serious purpose. It is an occasion not unlike the graduation ceremonies where the university presents itself as an academic community bound together by a common purpose, a shared history and a common destiny. The history of the university is often narrated in order to inspire, its great moments are retold and its heroes, and achievers find their place in the scroll of honour. It is through occasions like these that the culture and traditions of an institution are shaped and reinforce,d.

There is hardly a community that is without rituals which form and shape its mores, never an institution which does not feed from its history and hardly a past which does not shape the present and the future. It was Karl Jaspers who said that a university was a community of scholars and students engaged in a common search for the truth. One might argue that the idea of a community of scholars and students is not the most salient feature of a distance education institution. The truth though is that even in the distance education environment the bonds between students and lecturers are strong. The student often brings considerable prior learning and experience, which occasionally throws light on the learning process and as such the relationship between lecturer and students, is interactive. The students may be physically far removed from the locale of the lecturer but the physical distance belies the strength of community between them. It is always important for the lecturers/tutors to receive feedback f from the students and to free students to let their own imagination and insights engage the subject creatively.

For over 50 years CUT has been fashioning this dynamic between teacher and student and has over the years devised learning materials that build on the intellectual capacity of the students and their experience becomes part of their learning tools. I acknowledge the work done by the Bureau for University Teaching (soon to become the Bureau for Learner Development) in this regard. The division for learner support continues to remind us of the centrality of students in our higher education project. With the establishment of a post of Dean of Students we can only hope to make good our promise to build a learner-centred pedagogy. I have no doubt that the recent accreditation by the Distance Education Training Council not only guarantees high standards of educational provision by CUT, it also constantly opens us to peer review and benchmarking against international norms. Our annual reports should help us to undertake a self-evaluation and ensure that we continue to earn the respect of colleagues, students and society at large.

We have also said that the academic community is engaged in a common search for the truth. Searching for the truth entails a process of discovery and innovation. It requires a dedication and a curiosity to discover the unknown and an eagerness to challenge ignorance. In our day and age we have come to understand that truth can never be finite. It is never complete. In other words one truth leads onto fresh insights and to a fresh discovery. There is hardly ever a truth once and for all time. Each era, each context discovers its own truths and these are often challenged by subsequent generations. At university it is correct to engage in a contestation of ideas and in engagement about interpretations and understanding of the past, present and future. It is precisely out of such a critical environment that we discover one another, our mutual interdependence and our common or shared values. At the beginning of the academic year we reaffirm these values and we re-commit ourselves to uphold them.

 

The year so far We began the year in spectacular fashion. As the year began, the university was facing a merger with Technikon Southern Africa and Vista University. According to the announcement by the Minister of Education on 4 January, the merger would have come into effect on 1 February 2002. At that date there would have been an interim Council which would have had no CUT presence and the new institution would have been named OLUSA. The Council of the University of South Africa vigorously resisted this and instituted legal action to set aside the Minister's announcement. This was done in order to preserve the integrity of CUT, defend academic freedom and institutional autonomy and to ensure that any future merger contemplated would ensue out of a consultative process and the interests of all parties would be taken into account. The Minister revoked his announcements on 23 January but maintained that the merger process will process under the auspices of the Working Group on Distance Education which his actions had effectively sidelined. The court process however is continuing. It is continuing even as efforts at reaching an out of court settlement also proceed. The legal action is continuing because two outstanding issues have not been resolved by the Minister's revocation: an agreed process for the establishment of the merger including the name of the new institution. It has become very clear that world-wide the arbitrary change of the name of CUT was highhanded and ill-advised. The SBL Alumni Association recently undertook a snap survey from SBL alumni who overwhelmingly rejected the change of name of CUT onto anything else.