On Monday, April 28, JSC President Barbara Murphy spoke with a group of JSC faculty, students and staff about her recent sabbatical trip to South Africa to study post-apartheid higher education.
Speaking in the new 1867 room in Dewey with the aid of a PowerPoint slide show, Murphy began the presentation with an aerial photograph of the long meandering lines of South African voters in the country’s first democratic election in 1994. It was then, she said lightheartedly, that “Black South Africans learned how to vote and white South Africans learned how to wait.”
Murphy explained why she chose South Africa for this sabbatical visit. She wanted to know how the higher education system had changed since the end of Apartheid. She was curious as to how a country so steeped in segregation would go about re-inventing every social institution and, more specifically, how to rebuild the higher education system after having just thrown out.
She gave background information about Apartheid and the way it was eerily organized and disseminated in South Africa. She listed many of the landmark laws that were enforced to create the apartheid, starting in 1949 with the law banning all mixed marriages. A 1950 law required all Black South African men to carry a passbook with their basic information, and in 1959 the Extension of Universities of Education Act segregated the higher education institutions into four groups: whites, coloured, Africans, and Indians. Murphy said that with this act, higher education became “one more thing that Apartheid owned…Every possible institution was subject to apartheid.”
She spoke about Nelson Mandela and the trip she made to Robben Island, 12 miles off the coast of South Africa, where Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 24 years of incarceration. She mentioned that being a cultural tourist is a “very interesting experience” and at many times an uncomfortable one, noting as an example her visit to the Townships, a crowded residential area consisting of shacks
that South Africa is calling “informal housing,” instead of slums. Although there has been an increase in housing projects around the Cape Town area, it is simply not enough to meet the housing demand of low-income families and remain in stark contrast to the housing of the middle and upper classes.
These contrasts are everywhere, Murphy noted, and are especially apparent in the school system. She showed a picture of a high school attended by black South Africans. It was a small one-floor, crowded building, surrounded by nothing but what looked like desert and lacked many of the basic necessities we are used to in the public schools in the United States.
She then showed a picture of a school attended by mostly white students and, as she said, it looked like Eden; it was a large, gated, multiple-floored building surrounded by lush greenery and security guards. Public schools in South Africa are still allowed to charge a fee and this is one of the reasons why schools, though not by law, are still segregated.
She visited several colleges and made correlations between those universities and Johnson State College, mentioning that often they had similar concerns, like that of retention and student success rates. She was somewhat surprised by the attractiveness of the architecture and the size of the buildings and campus areas she saw. Indeed the pictures showed beautiful campuses with happy students, large recreation areas, and student space. She noted that perhaps if our country put in the similar efforts to make money for higher education a serious priority US campuses could be doing the same as those in South Africa.
Murphy said that what surprised her most was, “…To hear some people recounting some good things that happened during apartheid. For example, a few educators I met recalled the passion with which teachers taught school, the commitment to educating a generation for the post-apartheid world. They talked about how content-rich the educational experience was. I met two people who worried aloud that children immediately post-apartheid were being told more to ‘feel good’ about themselves then to be participants in a rigorous educational experience. I also met someone who appreciated how strongly self-governing some of the township councils were, how groups took on the responsibility for their community well-being.”