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23 September 2019 | Story Xolisa Mnukwa | Photo Barend Nagel
Prof Puleng LenkaBula
“I want to establish a paradigm shift from community engagement to engaged scholarship, which will transfer science between communities and form reciprocal collaborations in order to create new knowledge, research niche areas, influences, and support systems to aid innovative and progressive teaching and learning processes at the UFS.” – Prof LenkaBula
The University of the Free State (UFS) Vice-Rector: Institutional Change, Student Affairs, and Community Engagement, Prof Puleng LenkaBula, recently visited the Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Germany to discuss a possible future collaboration between the two institutions.

This was inspired by their multidisciplinary approach to higher-education courses, which she aims to facilitate at the UFS in order to pioneer critical thinking among students to ultimately bring about effective and innovative societal problem-solving in South Africa.

Fulda University is an exceptional higher-education institution with the ability to develop and transform itself to purposefully improve its infrastructure, the quality of students, and studies offered by the university. Their different degrees are structured to intersect with the requirements of the progressive European economic environment.

According to Prof LenkaBula, Fulda University is an outstanding institution specialising in applied sciences and theoretical studies, which set them apart from other universities in the advanced European higher-education system.

Prof LenkaBula believes that the prospect of developing joint master’s and/or doctoral degrees between the UFS and Fulda University would expose UFS students to high-quality international higher-education systems. This will ensure that our students are provided with essential skills to become globally competitive and relevant in their designated career fields, and to become strong contenders in an environment characterised by globalisation and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR).
She referred to the global exchange of knowledge systems between the UFS and Fulda University as an opportunity for the UFS to improve the university’s global rankings through learning and participating in international collaborative approaches in higher education. 

“In order for our university to cease being seen as an ivory tower, it must be involved in producing knowledge that is beneficial to socio-economic and political development – not only for South Africa, but also for the rest of the world,” said Prof LenkaBula.


News Archive

Another L’Atelier feather in the university’s cap
2013-07-24

 

Pauline Gutter, winner of this year’s Absa L’Atelier competition
Photo: Supplied
23 July 2013

"Dagbreek: Die Dagbreker" - interview with Pauline Gutter (YouTube)

A former Kovsie won the Absa L’Atelier competition – South Africa’s most prestigious art competition – for the second year in a row.

Pauline Gutter, who completed her BA Fine Arts degree at the UFS in 2003, is the second artist from the Free State to win the competition, which is in its 28th year of existence. In 2012, Elrie Joubert, another former Kovsie student from the Department of Fine Arts, won the competition as well.

As overall winner, Gutter receives a cash prize of R125 000 and six months’ residency in the studio apartment Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France.

Her winning entry, Die huweliksaansoek, is an interactive work consisting of a 1.8 m high association-rich obelisk, an engraved plaque, a small TV monitor and a farm-line handset. A video of a bull standing in a crush while semen is being drawn from it, is displayed. The viewer is invited to listen in voyeuristically. The soundtrack for the text is composed of statements and comments made by participants in the programme “Boer soek `n Vrou”. The question highlighted by the work, is, “does a farmer choose his future wife in the same way he breeds his stud animals?”

Pauline says her association with the farm, principled parents and strong family ties serve as inspiration for her work. To express her artistic voice in a contemporary environment is to be a close observer of society, she says. “It’s to ask questions which confront the viewer in a provocative way.”

Her advice to new artists is “hard work, sustainability and commitment. Keep looking until you find the place where you fit in.”

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