A!: What are your thoughts about the extent to which female students are now outperforming male students?
JJ: That’s fantastic, but there’s more to the numbers than simply the fact that numerically there are more women. It’s partly that men are dropping out and partly that not a full proportion of women are participating. There’s still a huge amount to be done to genuinely have gender parity in school, in university and in society.
A!: What do you think of the Oversight Committee proposed by Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade Nzimande, to ensure universities’ compliance with government’s transformation agenda?
JJ: It is extremely dangerous to have a government trying to regulate an autonomous space under the right-wing charge of accountability. Instead of treating people in higher education as idiots or as some recalcitrant set of conservatives who are trying to undermine transformation, we really need to re-establish the trust between universities and the broader society. We have a solemn obligation to deal with the past, but also an obligation to deal with the future. The worst thing you could do is to have a government that thinks they can regulate universities into order. So I think that committee is a bad idea; I’m hoping that it goes away.
A!: Is affirmative action necessary in higher education?
JJ: We have an obligation to make sure that universities don’t have any barriers to the full diversity of human talent, but the notion of equity is something you must never try to regulate through political interference or artificial quotas. What we need are the best people, and they come in all colours. In a country with our demographics you can get it right if you look for both equity and excellence as if they were the same.
