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The Long Journey Back to Campus

01 March 2022 | Story Prof Francis Petersen | Photo Sonia Small (Kaleidoscope Studios)

Prof Petersen_web — Prof Francis Petersen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State.

Opinion article by Prof Francis Petersen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State.

For the past two years, students in tertiary institutions have had to negotiate the choppy waters of emergency online tuition. In February, thousands of students at universities across the country will be returning to the shores of face-to-face learning. But it will require a process of reconnection that may take time and will have to be guided sensitively, says Prof Francis Petersen.

It is a fact of life that, in so many spheres, one’s journey is often as memorable – sometimes even more so – than one’s experiences at a destination. The South African education context is no exception. Many of us grew up with stories of parents and grandparents expanding at length about their difficult journeys to school ‘back in the day’. Some of the details of what happened inside the classroom may have faded over time, but the journey often remains etched in memory. Journeys that tell of sacrifice, of braving harsh weather and long distances – often on foot. A great victory already lies, after all, in the mere process of getting somewhere.

The Online Move

There is little doubt that online tuition was a vital lifebuoy for education during the pandemic and lockdown, and that it will form an increasingly important part of our future educational landscape. The huge digital divide that the move to online education has exposed, remains a most pressing concern that needs to be addressed urgently in order to ensure that students from all socio-economic sectors and both rural and urban environments can access online resources.

One consequence of online learning that is maybe not deliberated as frequently, is that it has essentially eliminated the need for a journey – in this case, the physical journey to a tertiary education campus. Once again, this fact comes with many perceived advantages: no transport costs, no travelling time, no risk associated with moving out of one’s comfort zone. Provided you have access to sufficient resources and connectivity (a topic for another time!), and provided you have a safe home environment conducive to learning (which many of our students sadly lack), it has become incredibly easy and convenient to access education – anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace.

But there are some aspects that can become complicated in the absence of a physical journey.

Because journeys imply a few things:

A Journey Requires a Deliberate Decision About a Destination

People go on journeys because they want to get somewhere. They decide where they want to end up and then take the steps necessary to get there. The physical journey to a place of learning, of course, also reflects a more figurative journey towards an envisaged career and a successful future.

Over the past two years, students have often reported feeling as if they were ‘drifting’ in the online environment, not always sure where they were heading, feeling a bit lost and disconnected. Maybe part of the reason for this lies in the fact that they were not physically going anywhere. Without this physical aspect of the journey, it can become difficult to plot yourself, and difficult to convince yourself that you are moving ahead and making progress.

A Journey Requires a Measure of Sacrifice

A journey also almost always implies sacrifice in some form. Whether it is getting up early to catch a train, a bus, or two taxis to university, incurring fuel costs or transport fees, or just strolling to class across campus from your residence – a successful journey requires discipline and planning. And it takes some form of sacrifice of time and resources.

Which brings me to the next point:

A Journey Requires Commitment

It takes commitment to make those sacrifices needed to complete a journey. And in turn, sacrifice fuels commitment. As human beings, we tend to treasure those things that were hard to obtain, and we do our utmost to hold on to them. The opposite of ‘easy come, easy go’, is equally true. It is often just as easy for students to opt out of online learning sessions, as it is to access it. And this is where the problem sometimes lies: commitment is not really tested or strengthened.

Gaining Courage from Fellow Travellers

Probably the most poignant aspect of the journey analogy, is the fact that it makes you aware of other travellers. The students treading the campus pavements with you, passing you in passages, walking with you into class, are a constant reminder that your journey is not a solitary one. Fellow travellers – and fellow students – reaching out to one another, sharing tips and experiences, make the journey easier for everyone. Interacting with others and knowing that we are not alone, is a vital part of what makes us human, what makes our journeys meaningful.

Dealing with Fear

Countless COVID-19 research projects from all over the world seem to point to one basic bottom line: the absence of physical interaction has taken a huge psychological toll on most of our students. However, psychologists working on our campuses report a significant increase in students seeking psychological help in the run-up to the restart of contact learning. They say some students find the prospect of returning to campus stressful and even terrifying. It is a move that will take them outside their new comfort zones. Many students relate how they have been living in an ‘artificial online world’ for the past two years – not only academically but socially too. Students who used to be very sociable have been spending their non-academic time behind screens too, engaged in gaming, streaming services, and social media. Two years was long enough to blur memories of what used to be normal. Long enough to entrench new habits – not all of them conducive to good mental health – which can take time to change. It was also long enough to desensitise students to what they really need and want.

Psychological Support for Students

The value of providing our students with different forms of psychological support during these unusual and uncertain times cannot be overemphasised. At the University of the Free State (UFS), the various support initiatives we have implemented and expanded over the past two years have undoubtedly contributed to the fact that we could complete the academic years of 2020 and 2021 successfully. Among these initiatives are a 24-hour toll-free mental-health careline as well as an e-mentoring programme that offers socio-emotional support to students. Data analytics revealed that more than a third of our students engaged in these support interventions, and we see it as a major reason that, despite all the obvious challenges, we still managed to improve our overall institutional success rate in 2020 and 2021.

Social Interaction a Basic Need

As tertiary institutions, we need to not only focus on what is convenient for our students at this time, but on what they actually need. And as human beings, we need social interaction. We need to read social cues, expressions, and body language, hear voice intonation, and where possible and appropriate, touch and feel. University life is, after all, about so much more than just attending classes. It is about engaging in sporting and cultural activities, about honing your interests, and finding new ones. It is about learning to collaborate and building networks and support groups, about forming friendships, and entering relationships. And sometimes, it is about just having fun.

Returning to Campus

Most universities are currently introducing some form of blended learning programme, combining online and face-to-face tuition. At the UFS, 67% of our modules on offer will be in a face-to-face format (at least in the early part of 2022), with the necessary COVID-19 protocols in place to ensure a safe environment for staff and students. As we welcome our students back on campus, it is vital that we as university leadership carefully and effectively remind them that their study years should be a holistic experience, encompassing different aspects of their being. We should encourage them to make use of the precious reconnection opportunities with those around them. And be patient as they negotiate their way in an old-but-new environment.

Let the journey begin.

News Archive

Open letter from Prof Jonathan Jansen to all UFS students

2014-02-22

Dear Students of the University of the Free State

In the past four years there has emerged a new consensus on the three campuses of the University of the Free State (UFS) about the things that divide us – such as racism, sexism and homophobia. Students and campus leaders have worked hard to develop this new consensus in residences and in the open spaces on campus. There can be no doubt that new bonds of friendship have developed across the markers of race, ethnicity, class, religion and sexual orientation. I bear witness to these new solidarities every day on the campus.

You chose a white student to head up the transformation portfolio on the SRC. You chose a black captain to head up the university’s first team in rugby. You chose a white “prime” as head of residence to lead a predominantly black men’s residence. You chose a South African woman of Indian descent as Rag Queen and last week, a black student from Cape Town as the men’s Rag winner—choices not possible and never made before in our campus history. Many of you have intimate friends who come from different social or cultural or religious backgrounds. You learn together, share rooms together, pray together and party together. In other words, in the day to day workings of this university campus, you have demonstrated to campus, city and country that we can overcome the lingering effects of racism and other maladies in this new generation. You have helped create a university community inclusive of people of diverse religions, abilities, class and sexual orientation.

I have said this repeatedly that from time to time this new consensus will be tested – when a minority of students, and they are a small and dwindling minority, still act as if these are the days of apartheid. And when that consensus is tested as it was this week, and as it will be tested in the future, only then we will be able to assess the strength and durability of our progress in creating a new South African campus culture of human togetherness based on respect, dignity and embrace.

The real test of our leadership, including student leadership, is how we respond when our transformation drive is threatened.

Let me say this: I have absolute faith in you, as students of this great university, to stand together in your condemnation of these vile acts of violence and to move together in your determination to maintain the momentum for the Human Project of the University of the Free State. We have come too far to allow a few criminals to derail what you have built together in recent years.

There will, no doubt, be unscrupulous people on all sides of the political spectrum wanting to milk this tragedy for their own narrow purposes. There will be false information, rumours and exaggerations by those who wish to inflame a bad situation to gain mileage for their agendas. That is inevitable in a country that is still so divided.

I ask you, through all of this, to keep perspective. Two or ten or even twenty students behaving badly do not represent 30,000 students; a minority of violent and hateful persons do not represent the ideals, ambitions and commitments of the majority. At the same time, let us be realistic – anyone who thinks you can drive transformation without resistance clearly does not understand the difficult process of change.

The events of the week remind us, however, that we still have a long road to walk in deepening social and academic transformation at our university. Yes, we have invested hundreds of hours in training and mentorship; we have created new structures – such as the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice – to capture the energy and imagination of students driving transformation; we have created many opportunities for students to study and travel on this and other continents to enable cross-cultural learning; we have established formal and informal opportunities to dialogue about difficult issues on and off campus between students and their leaders; and we crafted new curricula to enable teaching and learning on the big questions of our times.

But this is clearly not enough, and so I have decided on the following immediate next steps:

We will meet for several hours next week to think about how we can deepen the transformation of our university after this terrible incident.
We will arrange a University Assembly on the events of the past week so that we speak with one voice on human wrongs and to re-commit to human rights and we will continue with open forum discussions during the months to come.
We will review the entire spectrum of programmes, from orientation to residence life to the undergraduate curriculum, to determine how effective our interventions really are in reaching all students with respect to basic issues of human rights.
We will review our media and communications strategy to determine how far and deep our messages on human rights travel across all sectors of the university community. In this regard it is important that the campus be blanketed on a regular basis with our condemnation of human wrongs and our commitment to human rights.
We will commission the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice to review the events of the past week and make recommendations on how we can improve the campus environment so that all students are protected from harm inside residences, classrooms and in open spaces of the campus.
We will take the questions raised during this week into the academic community and to the general staff of the university so that all personnel also engage with our own roles and responsibilities with respect to campus transformations.
We undertake to make annual report-backs on transformation to all stakeholders in public forums so that students and staff and external communities can track the progress of the university on matters of human rights on campus.

I wish to thank my staff for acting firmly as soon as this tragic event came to our attention. We worked through the night to find and identify the perpetrators. We traced the two students and immediately handed them to the police. They were expelled. And throughout this process we offered counselling and support to the victim of this violent act.

The two former students were expelled and will now face justice in the criminal courts. It is hoped that in the course of time they will come to their senses and seek restoration and reconciliation with the student they so callously harmed. They are not part of the university community anymore.

That is the kind of university we are.

Jonathan D Jansen
Vice-Chancellor and Rector
University of the Free State
20 February 2014

Note: The use of the word ‘campus’ refers to all three campuses of the UFS, namely the Bloemfontein Campus, South Campus and Qwaqwa Campus.

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