 And this was my first kind of experience of working in a university that attracted students who kind of came to the university primarily because it was an opportunity for them to get out of poverty. And that had a huge influence on the way I thought about universities. And you'll see that play itself out in this talk. In fact, I'm going to give today. And the second, of course, is the huge ructions that are going on in South Africa at the moment. And I don't think any of us from South Africa, at least, could be immune to the huge impact of this fees must fall campaign and the roads must fall campaign and so on. And again, I think that we have to try and think about that in a slightly dispassionate way just to try and understand what is going on there. And if you ask me what are the three or four things going on in these campaigns, the first one is just the whole issue around socio-political change. The idea that students around the world, when the opportunity arises, get out there and we all know what happened in South Africa in the 70s and 80s. Many of us were kind of galvanized to be active and so on as students at that time. Then the second, of course, is just the whole issue around access to high education, access to studies, massive demands for participation in high education. And then the third one, very much along the lines that Neil was talking about just now, but also raising the issues around pedagogical transformation. But slightly broader than that, in fact, I mean, the whole issue around kind of the transformation of the knowledge project, if you like, which includes the pedagogy. But just the whole issue around decolonization and so on, just a very complex terrain that I think many of us have been captivated by to some extent. So you see these two things kind of play themselves out in this talk. And as Jenny indicated, I really am not an expert in OER, so I hope you're not expecting me to provide kind of a detailed analysis of OER. But on the other hand, I'm very interested in that. So when Catherine's invitation came to me, it felt like deja vu because this is exactly the kinds of things that we were talking about 10, 12, 14, 15 years ago. She reminded me about the meeting in Addis. And by the way, when I saw this today, it was like, wow, it's like a dream like here. She was at those meetings too. That meeting in Addis that Catherine reminded me about was really a remarkable meeting, I think. And basically it was about the future of higher education on the continent. But it had some really remarkable people in it. Neville Alexander was there and Humbud Mandani and Toleramancu and a range of people who just provided fantastic input. But the issues were not that different from the issues we are discussing now and the issues that I'm going to be trying to raise. So it's issues around access, success, research, affordability, kinds of things that high education systems have to deal with at all times. Growth in enrollment at Kenyon universities, growth in the last year is 23%. The bulk of the growth was women, students, which is great. The sad news is that the national budget has only gone up for high education, has only gone up by 3%. So you've got 23% of the students in the system coming through the system, if you like. But I have to tell you that's a recipe for disaster. It's happened in South Africa. So unless something dramatic happens, there's going to be big issues there. The second is the whole issue around the skills deficit, barrier to economic growth in Cameroon. And by the way, that's exactly the same discussions happening in South Africa and elsewhere. And I think we have to spend a little bit of time today talking about high education in the context of the post school system. That it's not just about high education, but it's about that whole post school system. In Egypt, three students at the Benisuev University were expelled for painting slogans against Al-Sisi. Which is like fascinating. Then, I don't know how to pronounce this, but Khamis, I suppose, the Khamis ministers, those are Francophone ministers of high education on the continent, signed an agreement to harmonize curricula with a focus on ICT and digitization, a strategy for IP, and the strengthening of open and distance education. All very relevant. There's a new collaboration between France's HEC, the most prestigious school of commerce with Francophone African societies about high education leadership development. There's the big, going global conference that happened in Cape Town. And our minister, Minister Blade Zimande, kind of said that the route of high education is going to be around whether South Africa chooses kind of beneficiation against knowledge economy, which is a really ridiculous dichotomy. I don't know why he posed it like that. And our minister of science and technology immediately stepped in and said, sorry, that's a false dichotomy. Of course, but he raised the issue around regional integration, which was a buzzword in Addis, I remember speaking about that over and over and over again. And then the whole issue around the role of the humanities and social sciences, which is a passion of his, but which I think is a really big issue. I think that what emerged in the student campaigns now in South Africa is really an impetus for us to focus in on humanities and social sciences and to try to understand what role they're playing in the transformation of our society. Anyway, it goes on like that. And each one of these, by the way, really, by the way, the one that you might be really interested in is that there was a pledge made at the Global Meeting for a concerted, united front approach to open access and open education resources. And that's really interesting development there. And it goes on like that. And the interesting thing, of course, is that wherever you look around the world, in fact, there seems to be a growing impetus of student activity. So Japan, for the first time in the history of Japan, Japanese students are now taking on political issues in a very direct way. Germany, California, the US at least in California in particular, UK, Chile, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, China. It doesn't matter where you look, it seems, you know. India, by the way, is a huge rations going on there in particular around the new economic policies of the government, but also around the support for the anti-cast movements and so on. So lots and lots of student activities going on around the world. And the one that really stood out for me is an article by Ibrahim Wanda. And he just spoke in this article, speaks about how university governance around the continent continues to be captured for narrow political ends. And I think that that's something that we always have to be on guard against. Okay, so I'm going to take an approach which might be deemed to be a little bit out of step, I think, with the way high education is being thought about around the world. You know, for too many years, I think we've been talking about high education and the knowledge economy, high education and development, high education. I want to change that a little bit today. I want to make one little kind of quote from Nelson Mandela, which I think is one of the most profound things one hears about education. And he says education is the great engine of personal development. South Africa will know this almost by heart. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. But, you know, just the idea that education isn't simply about an expenditure. Like, you know, it's not about saying, you know, we have to do this. We have to do this because we are the government. But it's about social and economic transformation. It's about saying that education is at the heart of the transformation agenda. And then the Thomas Piketty just constantly reminds us that in unequal societies, the one way for inequality to be addressed or tackled is for strong social investment in education, and in particular in high education. So I want to just relate a kind of a personal experience. You know, we went through a strategy planning kind of process at DUT some while ago, and I know this is very neoliberal and all that, but you know, you have to do this now in South Africa. Universities are required to do this by the state to have these plans and so on. And, you know, there was a task team working on this, and lots of consultations, students were brought in, lots of discussion and so on. And then one morning, you know, I got up in a cold sweat, right? Because it suddenly occurred to me that if you took the draft strategic plan, which had already been approved by Senate and so on, if you took the draft strategic plan that had been assembled at DUT, and you changed a few words here and there, it would be exactly the same as a strategic plan for Harvard or Oxford or UKZN. It suddenly dawned on me that actually there was nothing in that strategic plan that was about DUT. You know, there was nothing in there that was about the particularities of this institution. Of course there were, you know, but not in essence. So I got to my office and just cancelled all the meetings and reconvened that team of people. And we spent a whole day just kind of talking. And two things emerged, you know, out of that discussion. The first one was that we had to think about what it was that was at the heart of DUT. What was the DNA of DUT, right? At Durban University of Technology, what was right at the heart of it? And two things emerged. The one was we had very special students. Most of them were underprepared from the schools that they came from. Most of them, it was a miracle that most of them got, that all of them got qualifications at school to come to university, that we had to focus on our students. That actually, students had to be right at the heart of what we thought the university was about. That we had to ensure that whatever we did at the university placed the students at the center. The second thing was engagement. Just the idea that you had to have a very, very close link with your context. That, of course, you produce, you know, knowledge about the global economy and for the global knowledge system and so on. But that the heart of the university really rested in its local context. And that it produced knowledge about its local context and took that knowledge into the global terrain, if you like. What is important about that, right? The important thing about that is that it allows institutions like DOT and systems like the South African system to enter the global knowledge system in our own terms. We're not kind of taking on a global knowledge enterprise, but we're designing our own. And I'm going to spend a short while just now just talking a little bit more about that. So I think that what I'm really suggesting is that, you know, when we went through this process two things emerged. One is focus on the students. Let's try to make sure that our system works for students. The second thing was to say let's try to understand how to design a university that's seriously engaged. By the way, it's not just engagement with communities, right? It's engagement with local industries, engagement with local government, it's engagement with local communities, it's engagement with the NGO sector, it's engagement with activist bodies, you know, in the terrain. So the idea was that this university would really seek a place within its local context as a place that local communities, local industry and so on saw as their university, you know. I really wanted us to be a kind of place where the parents of our students didn't think of the university as a place somewhere there where the students were being sent to be civilized, right? That actually this was a university that really reflected their lives. So in that sense, let me just, by the way, this wasn't dreamt up, right? So it reflected what the university was doing already but we were just trying to systematize that to some extent. So let me give you an example, right? A young biotechnologist by the name of Paul Mukwena decides that he would love to try and understand how fermentation as a food processing enterprise had evolved in the communities that he grew up in, right? How do you get at that knowledge, right? You can't go to your laboratory and say, okay, I'm going to put some chemicals together and see if this works. You can't do that. What you have to do is you have to go and speak to the people who did it, right? So what did he do? He assembled a team of students, all of whom had to be proficient in Zulu. Couldn't take somebody there who didn't understand Zulu because the women he was going to talk to were all going to describe what they were doing in Zulu. Strikes up a partnership with the local chief. The university had to sign a memorandum of understanding and so on because the chief wasn't going to talk to Paul Mukwena who was, he didn't recognize as like a senior person in the university. So I had to go there and meet with the chief and so on. The chief actually asked the students to speak. There was a master student there who happened to be in Gobo, surname in Gobo. The chief was also in Gobo. And when she spoke, she said, the chief said, what kind of a Gobo are you? You can't even speak our language properly. Of course, she had been to what we call in South Africa a model C school, right? So the story goes like this. So the group of students and Paul Mukwena interview four generations of women, ask the women to describe how they did fermentation. They then go back to the laboratory and they test each one, check to see how it was done, publish it. And a few weeks later, there's an email from China which says, hello, hello. We're doing exactly the same thing here. Can we collaborate, right? The point I'm trying to make is that that community through this process had its own knowledge validated through a scientific kind of enterprise. So this kind of engagement is really important because what it does is that it locates the institutions within their context, right? We have to begin where our students are. You can't start somewhere else and hope somehow that students will magically fit into your program. You know, again, I mean, my experience at the old University of Natal in South Africa was, you know, the physics department said, you know, sort of a job like to teach students who are not ready for this, you know. They must go somewhere else, right? Go to the Center for University Education Development and be tutored, you know, and then we'll deal with them. Or let's create a Science Foundation program. By the way, it was a great Science Foundation program. Diane Grayson created. But, you know, you can't do that anymore because now it's really the majority of our students. Those are our students, right? You have to start where the students are. Then you have to ask yourself, do we know our students? Do we know what they've come with to the university? Do we know what they don't come with to the university? Do we know what they are reading? Do we know what their socio-economic backgrounds are? And so on, okay? So it seems to me, at least, that there's a really major challenge for us to try to understand how to begin to adjust the student status. And one of the big issues, of course, is to try to understand how to begin to lever the big databases we have, try to understand how to kind of use analytics to get the kind of information that you require. More importantly, it seems to me that there might actually be need on an ongoing basis for ethnographic type studies that might kind of give us much deeper insights into how to begin to address the issue around pedagogical change and so on. Let's just turn to engagement for a moment. I think that, I've spoken about this already, and I don't want to spend too much time, any more time on it, but just to say that the issue of engagement is very much at the, you know, so the question really is, you know, when universities talk about their strategic plans and so on, you know, we decide, you know, we're going to either have two pillars or we're going to have three pillars. Teaching and learning and research, and some universities say three pillars, teaching and learning, research and engagement, meaning really community engagement. We took a slightly different approach. We said no, let's think about engagement as our pillar, and let's just see how that represents itself in our teaching and learning, in our research, in our, you know, outreach work and whatever else goes on at the university. So it's really turning things around a little bit. Now, I'm not suggesting that this should be the same for UCT and so on, but I'm just saying that for a university like DUT, this seemed like a much more positive kind of approach to take. Okay, so the one thing that really struck me last year during the upheavals and now the continuing upheavals is I had to ask myself, you know, just where are the defenders of the university? You know, where are the people who kind of really are going to stand up and say to the students, you know, who are running amok, excuse me, you can't do this, you know? By the way, there were no defenders of the university. And I want to just say that actually it's almost true in fact that one of the most, well, one of the most terrifying things I experienced was, you know, was having a meeting with parliamentarians whose starting point was that the cause of the violence was the universities. So you sit there and you get battered, you know, as a vice chancellor because that's the line that's taken, you know, that actually you are the cause. Students are just reacting to what you are doing. So just the whole issue around legitimacy of high education. You know, it's not something that we can just take for granted like we did in the old days, right? It's something that you really have to begin to work at and try to understand how to construct kind of activities and advocacy programs and so on that allows us to get at communities and parliamentarians and so on around the issue of legitimacy. Well, let me just say, I know Liz reads the New Yorker, I think it was under three or four weeks ago, there was this absolutely fascinating article about S. Devlin who's a designer of sets, right? Sets for big shows, okay? You know, Bruce Springsteen and so on, right? But not just that, she does sets of Shakespeare and so on. Now, is Devlin in this article, you have to read this article, it's an absolutely fascinating article, and she designs spaces in a kind of way which interplays light, space and perception, right? Light, space and perception. So now you have to ask yourself, well, actually, I don't know how many of you have been, I'm sure you've all been to a big concert, right? Kind of, I'm sure many of us in South Africa would have been to the Bruce Springsteen concert because, you know, we are that age generation. The first thing that strikes you is that the development of those sets can't be done by somebody in a department of entertainment, in a department of drama studies, you know? Because there's just too much of heat there, right? Too much of power and the lighting is just of another magnitude and so on. So the first thing that strikes you is, actually, this is not just about understanding light. This is about understanding, this is engineering, right? So the person designing this had better have a bloody good idea about light and all that and sound, but also about the engineering. Secondly, when you read this article, it dawns on you that actually the role of psychology is shockingly high. Just the interplay of light and space and perception suddenly kicks in and you suddenly realize that actually, you know, this isn't simply about having lights flashing and so on. This is about understanding the way in which people interact with light. The point I'm trying to make to you is that, you know, if a young person wants to be one of these set designers like S. Devlin, the bottom line is that this person has to be educated in three or four different fields, right? So the point I'm making is that we have to think about curricula in the future in integrated forms. I mean, the interesting thing is that the engineering fraternity now, for example, is now designing programs around urban engineering, for example, instead of mechanical and civil and so on. So urban engineers learn about engineering in the usual forms, but also they learn about urban planning and so on, you know? So it suddenly dawns on you that we really have to think about curricula when we're thinking about the future. Think about curricula which are much more integrated, which are much more kind of designed around employment and so on rather than imagine that what, you know, our traditional ways of training are going to be suitable. Let me just go to that Australian study around tomorrow's digitally enabled workforce. That's the title of the study. It was done by the CSIR in Australia. Tomorrow's digitally enabled workforce is what it's called. And they talk about, in this study, training people for the second half of the chess board. And what they mean by this is that there's an explosion in device connectivity, huge data volumes, huge computing speeds, rapid advances in automated systems. And now the question is, if you're training engineers or whatever, how do you take that into account? You know, what impact does that have on the curriculum? And it goes on, there's a whole big chapter on that. The second is this area around porous boundaries. It's what I spoke about earlier. And then there's the whole issue around what they call tangible intangibles, tangible intangibles. And it's about employment growth in the service industries, especially in education and healthcare, increase as we move into the knowledge economy, which increase these opportunities of employment in education and healthcare, increase as we move into the knowledge economy. Then there's a whole thing around kind of attitudes and mindsets to handle kind of dynamic, being in a dynamic labour force and so on. So, you know, meaning in fact that no young person is going to be in a single job, right? You're going to be in this world of work and you're going to be shifting from work opportunity to work opportunity. There's no possibility of any society in the world having high education systems which take the full load, if you like, right? You know, I was once at a meeting with our minister. I just share this with you because it was so funny. We were in a meeting with the minister and at the end of the meeting, the minister turned to the DG and the director general, you know, the South Africa's local, I'm talking about. And the director general, then he said to the director general, DG, do you have anything to say at the end of the meeting? So, Gwebs then stands up and says, he says, Professor Bawa, he says, you know, I was the chair, he's the other type. He says, Professor Bawa, he says, let me tell you about what happened to me this weekend. So he says, I was at home, you know, in the Eastern Cape and he saw some people building. So he says, you know, these people put four bricks, these were his words, right? They put four bricks and then they stood like this to see if the bricks were in a straight line. And then he said the most amazing thing. He said, see, Professor, your universities are not doing what they're supposed to be doing. So I said, what do you mean? So he said, you're not training the bricklayers to be able to do. You know, I just, I didn't even wait for the minister to allow me to speak. I just leapt up, you know, and I said, minister, there are lots of things universities can do, you know. The point is really that if you don't have a functional post-school system, the universities are going to be expected to do everything and they just can't be done. So we have to think very hard about the post-school system and to try and build the post-school system in a way that makes sense for each society. Here's something that's quite controversial, right? I think we have to do something about the boys. I think we have to do something about the boys. We have to do something about the boys. You know, in South Africa at the moment, the ratio is 58 to 42 percent, women to men, right? If you look at the graduation rates, it's even more skewed. The girls are doing better, the boys. Clear? But every single indicator of dysfunctionality in our society is coming from those young boys. The violence, the crime, the sexual violence. It's all happening from the young boys. I think we have to begin to ask ourselves what's going on there. I don't have the answer and I don't think it's a simple answer, but it's something that we have to begin to look at. And my last comment is to Neil. My last comment is I think that you should build the OER stuff into a social contract around high education and society. You know, it's not just about OER. I mean, I think it's about open access. It's about open data. It's about all of that, you know. But I think that that needs to be built into a social contract. Let me put it this way. There's a social contract in each society, in each country, between the people and high education. And I think that's where I think it should be built in. With that, let me say thank you so much and I hope that it was useful.