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12 October 2021 | Story André Damons | Photo Unsplash
Bring your blood and get a free doughnut. The Faculty of Health Sciences is conducting a blood drive this week and encourages everyone to roll up their sleeves and donate blood.

The Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS) is conducting another blood drive at their office in the Francois Retief Building this week (12 – 14 October 2021), and will be rewarding each donation with a free doughnut.

The faculty is challenging every doctor, nurse, and pharmacist, every paramedic, radiographer, and technician to roll up their sleeves and lend an arm to donate a pint of blood. If every health-care worker joins the donation and donates blood four times a year, there would never be a blood crisis.

The Faculty of Health Sciences invited the South African National Blood Services (SANBS) to the UFS this week to provide all students and staff the opportunity to donate blood at their place of work and study.

The Mental Health Awareness Campaign of the UFS Faculty of Health Sciences has included a community service component in our efforts to raise awareness of mental health issues since 2020. This is in light of increasing evidence that altruism and volunteering provide significant benefits to mental health and feelings of well-being. As all our staff and students know the vital importance of blood, we decided to focus on the SANBS as our partner to provide a quick, convenient opportunity to feel like a real hero by donating blood every three months, while enjoying a free snack.

October is Mental Health Awareness Month – we would like to invite all staff and students on campus to participate in this life-giving event.

Details for blood donation are as follows:

When: 12, 13 and 14 October

Time: 07:00-15:00

Where: Francois Retief Foyer, UFS

News Archive

Transformation in higher education discussed at colloquium
2013-05-16

16 May 2013

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The University of the Free State hosted the Higher Education Transformation Colloquium earlier this month on the Bloemfontein Campus.

On Monday 6 May 2013 till Wednesday 8 May 2013 the event brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including some members of university councils; vice-chancellors; academics and researchers; leaders of student formations and presidents of student representative councils; transformation managers; executive directors with responsibility for transformation in various universities, members of the newly established Transformation Oversight Committee and senior representatives from the Department of Higher Education and Training.

The event examined and debated some of the latest research studies and practices on the topic, as well as selected case studies from a number of public universities in South Africa.

Delivering a presentation at the colloquium, Dr Lis Lange, Senior Director of the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the UFS, said transformation in South Africa has been oversimplified and reduced to numbers, and the factors that might accelerate or slow the process have not been taken into account.

Dr Lange was delivering a paper, titled: The knowledge(s) of transformation: an archaeological perspective.

Dr Lange argued that “in the process of translating evolving political arguments into policy making, the intellectual, political and moral elements that shaped the conceptualisation of transformation in the early 1990s in South Africa, were reduced and oversimplified.”

She said crucial aspects of this reduction were the elimination of paradox and contradiction in the concept; the establishment of one accepted register of what transformation was and it is becoming sector-specific or socially blind. This means that the process was narrowed down in the policy texts and in the corresponding implementation strategies to the transformation of higher education, the schools system, the judiciary and the media, without keeping an eye on the structural conditions that can influence it in one way or another.

Dr Lange said the need for accountability further helped with reduction of transformation. “Because government and social institutions are accountable for their promises, transformation had to be measured and demonstrated.”

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