Rhodes University Research Report 2017 : a year in review

From Foreword by Dr Sizwe Mabizela, Vice-Chancellor: Many of the goals of our recently completed Institutional Development Plan have to do with retaining and improving our research and scholarly contribution as a university, and ensuring that we not only generate dependable knowledge, but that the knowledge that we create has a positive impact on the social and natural world around us. In summary, our goals are to 1. Maintain and strengthen our general formative degree offering and the research, teaching, and community engagement nexus which enables our students to access powerful knowledge; 2. Enable access to all academically-qualifying students and provide them with conditions which allow them to flourish as critical and engaged citizens; 3. Maintain and strengthen our unique institutional niche as a research-intensive university outside a major urban area; 4. Ensure financial and environmental sustainability practices through good governance, leadership and management; 5. Attract, nurture and retain staff of high-calibre and maintain an inclusive, welcoming, affirming and positive intellectual environment; 6. Provide relevant and appropriate academic infrastructure, equipment and facilities to support our academic project; and 7. Promote Rhodes University as an institution for the public good in local, provincial, national and international contexts. The plan calls upon all of us to re-imagine our University as one in which sustainability permeates every aspect of our academic endeavour, including an elevated sense of awareness and responsibility of our graduates for building sustainable communities. It calls upon us to ensure that we are simultaneously locally responsive and globally engaged. It calls upon us to work towards advancing social justice and do all that we can to restore the dignity and humanity of those who were treated as lesser beings by the previous dispensation. And it calls upon us to remind ourselves that our university does not exist in a vacuum. It exists within a social, cultural and economic milieu, and has an important role to play in lifting the standard of living of our local community