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Motion of Confidence in UFS Leadership

29 March 2021 | Story Lacea Loader

The Council of the University of the Free State (UFS) confirmed the following at its meeting on 19 March 2021:

1. Its support of and confidence in the leadership of the Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, Prof Francis Petersen and his team, and duly recognises the efforts and results achieved at the University during the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the current nationwide student protest on the payment of student debt.

2. In this context, the Council also distances itself and deplores the statements made by the leadership of the Institutional Student Representative Council (ISRC), on national television on Monday 15 March 2021, as it pertained to the demand for the immediate resignation of the Rector and Vice-Chancellor, and the statements pertaining to the Chancellor, Prof Bonang Mohale, and Chairperson of the Council, Dr Willem Louw. The Council notes that Mr Katleho Lechoo, President of the ISRC subsequently retracted the utterances.

3. The Council strongly affirms its confidence in the relationship between the leadership of the UFS and the ISRC and expresses its appreciation for the University leadership’s commitment to continuously engage with students about matters of concern to them. The Council furthermore encourages positive and constructive engagement by the ISRC with the University leadership, as this contributes to shared-understanding of the challenges faced by the South African higher education sector and the governance of the UFS.

News Archive

International human development practitioners gather at first HDCA conference in Africa

2017-09-18

The first HDCA annual conference on African soil was held at
UCT from 6 to 8 September 2017.

The Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) is a global community of academics and practitioners that seeks to build an intellectual community around the ideas of human development and the capability approach, and to relate these ideas to the policy arena and justice in the world. The association promotes research within many disciplines, ranging from economics to philosophy, development studies, health, education, law, government, sociology, and more. Members live in over 70 countries worldwide.

The HDCA’s conference is held annually; in 2017, the 17th international conference was held in Africa for the first time. Hosted by the Universities of Cape Town, the Free State (UFS), and the Western Cape, and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the meeting was held in Cape Town from 6 to 8 September 2017. The conference attracted outstanding global scholars, such as Profs Ravi Kanbur (Cornell), Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht), and Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), among many others.

The conference theme was Challenging Inequalities: Human Development and Social Change, a particularly apt topic in the wake of Stats SA’s latest Poverty Report, which shows growing poverty and inequality in South Africa. Prof Melanie Walker, Director: Centre for Research on Higher Education and Development (CRHED) at the UFS, outgoing vice-president of the HDCA, and a member of the conference committee, led a group of researchers from CRHED, ten of whom were involved in presenting papers, while two former PhD students also presented their research. Overall, the quality of papers was very high, with Prof Nussbaum remarking that this was ‘the best HDCA conference’ she had attended.

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