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Prof Pearl Sithole heads up Academic and Research on Qwaqwa Campus

18 October 2019 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Tshepo Moeketsi

“Excellence is my main priority. For me, excellence means mastery of cross-communicable science and liberation of intellectual creativity that is free of mere complacency and acknowledging the right to analyse from where we stand. I am unapologetic about indigenous knowledge being the basis for scientific advancement.” This is how the newly appointed Vice-Principal: Academic and Research, Prof Pearl Sithole, sums up her vision and plan for academia and research on the Qwaqwa Campus.

She believes that the human mind is geared towards ‘seeking and constantly explaining itself in the service of innovative change.’

“With this service of innovative change fully realised, the Qwaqwa Campus will be able to produce students who can analyse, innovate, and solve real social and world problems. For me, this is the University of the Free State graduate I pine to see – and there had better be truth to the ‘free’ part of this intellectual soul! I see Qwaqwa as a site for this intellectual innovation catalyst,” she said.

Social anthropologist

Prof Sithole is a Social Anthropology graduate with both master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge in England. “I stumbled upon Anthropology as part of my three majors at the then University of Durban-Westville. This discipline confessed its previous conceptual sins in a way that inspired change! From the exploration of human origins, to economic and political developments, and that was Anthropology. I was just absolutely taken by its acknowledgement of the intellectual project being socio-culturally rooted,” she said about her chosen area of study.

“I have always been inspired by Archie Mafeje’s work. I was motivated by Bernard Magubane’s scholarship, and I marvelled at the rigour of Oyeronke Oyewumi and Marilyn Strathern in feminist discourse. I mention these, because they inspire intellectual passion in me and I eventually met them,” she added.

Higher education in SA

She believes the higher-education sector is succumbing to streamlining methods, uninformed processes, and very little impact. “Like in government, higher education should not suffer from reduction of people into statistics, interventions into annual performance plan targets, and planning and monitoring into sanitised expenditure against targets. I see the shortage of relevance, responsiveness, and humanness; as well as ‘being captured’ by the latest fashions of doing rigid academe as the major challenges of higher education in South Africa today. We need to liberate our own innovative potential. We really need to create space for Africa to be contributors and innovators of knowledge,” Prof Sithole, the author of Unequal Peers, said.

She is, however, optimistic about the future of higher education in South Africa. “The day that we will have our innovation systems and systems of defining excellence – liberated from merely kneeling before the altar of Westernisation – we will gain integrity both conceptually and instrumentally in terms of responding to a society that is waiting for higher education to solve societal problems. The solution is to let those who see this truth continue to produce the knowledge despite being less than pleasing to the average scientific oversight bodies steeped in conventional Western validation.”

Research interests

Prof Sithole was previously employed with the Public Service Commission as a commissioner, a position she held from 2015 to August 2019. Prior to that, she worked at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an Associate Professor of Community Development from 2010 to 2015, and at the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) as a senior researcher from 2006 to 2010. Her research interests and areas of expertise are governance, gender and development, analysis of social inequality, and the politics of knowledge production.

News Archive

Faculty of Law establishes unique panel of advisors

2005-11-11

Photo: Stephen Collett

Some of the panel members who attended the Collegium Iurisprudentium of the Faculty of Law at the UFS were from the left His Honorable Judge of Appeal Lex Mpati (Vice-President of the Supreme Court of Appeal), His Honorable Judge of Appeal Joos Hefer (former Chief Justice of South Africa), His Honorable Judge of Appeal Frits Brand (Supreme Court of Appeal) and Mrs Alet Ellis (lecturer at the UFS Faculty of Law).

At the back from left were Prof Johan Henning (Dean: Faculty of Law at the UFS), His Honorable Judge Faan Hancke (High Court of the Free State and chairperson of the UFS Council) and Adv Jannie Lubbe Sc.

The Faculty of Law at the University of the Free State (UFS) has established a panel of advisors comprising of all the honorary and extraordinary professors of the faculty.

“The faculty has been known for its excellent practice-orientated training as well as the involvement of law practitioners in the training of LL B-students,” said Prof Johan Henning, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the UFS.

“The faculty was greatly dependent on the services of advocate lecturers, full-time members of the Bar and Side Bar who lectured on a part-time basis at the faculty. For this reason lecturing in the faculty was mainly done after-hours to part-time students,” said Prof Henning.

With the shift in emphasis to full-time lecturing and the appointment of full-time lecturers, especially because of the increasing student numbers, the full-time LL B-programme and the increasing pressure on students for quality research inputs, a greater need for meaningful contributions of judges and senior law practitioners to the faculty was experienced.

“To comply with this urgent need, three honorary professors and nine extraordinary professors were appointed. This group of experts deliver an indispensable contribution to the practice orientation of the faculty by means of formal lectures, public inaugural lectures and guest lectures, direct lectures to graduate and post-graduate students, participation in research projects and the constant evaluation of lecturers, modules and the content of modules and learning material. The international exposure of students and lecturers is also promoted by their contribution,” said Prof Henning.
“A need to have the involvement of this special class of professors structured in a more organised way was identified and a decision was made to establish an advisory panel called Collegium Iurisprudentium. It is a privilege to us that all the honorary and extraordinary professors accepted the invitation,” said Prof Henning.

The panel will provide the faculty with continuous, distinguished, practice- orientated capability and capacity as well as international expertise, not only for direct inputs to students but also to advise lecturers about the curriculum, the compilation of the content of the LL B and M module, learning material and others, as well as to strengthen the research capacity of the faculty.

“The panel will also deliver a decisive contribution to the faculty’s preparation for the constitutional audit of the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) of the Council for Higher Education (CHE) that will take place in October 2006,” said Prof Henning.

The Collegium Iurisprudentium, which has been formally constituted, comprises of:

Appeal Court Judge J J F Hefer,
Appeal Court Judge L Mpati
Appeal Court Judge F D J Brand
Appeal Court Judge I G Farlam
Prof B A K Rider
Judge S P B Hancke
Judge A Kruger
Judge D H van Zyl
Adv S J Naudé
Adv J Lubbe Sc
Prof M M Katz
Prof R J Cook
Mr S van de Merwe
Mr W van der Westhuizen
Mr D C M Gihwala

Media release
Issued by:Lacea Loader
Media Representative
Tel: (051) 401-2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl.stg@mail.uovs.ac.za
11 November 2005

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