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A convocation engages with the Senate and Board as the penultimate academic and institutional oversight bodies. It is about the direction and the future of the university, as much as the policies and parameters within which the institution must be run, writes Rudi Buys.
Some argue that universities are heading for disaster and their future hangs in the balance.
They point at an unending series of challenges higher education institutions face to defend this view – decreasing research funding, rising costs, worsening student readiness, difficulties of transformation, and political campus unrest.
The challenges add too much to the load so that universities have less time for actual knowledge work.
"They must attend to so many other issues that academics, administrators and students have less time for learning and research", sceptics of the future say.
In such a reality, the argument goes, the outcome can be little else than discouraged leaders, despondent academics and discounted students – an evil cycle that leads to only one outcome: the end of the good university.
Challenges are real
While this view may be overly dramatic, the challenges are real. How will campuses find solutions in step with how rapidly the challenges escalate? One way in which universities attempt to stay on top of the situation is to call on their broader community of former students, the alumni, to help.
The loyalty and connectedness of alumni therefore has become critical to the modern-day university, as have their voice in the future direction of an institution. Whereas the alumni office pursues loyalty and participation, a university convocation is a forum that orchestrates the voice of former students in university affairs.
At Stellenbosch University, the convocation includes everyone who gained a qualification from the university, as well as current and retired academics. As a former student and an academic, your membership of the convocation is implied by virtue of your involvement in the academic programme. You can't apply for it; it is a given. You can only resign your membership.
Convocations as a part of universities come from the original graduation gatherings at the oldest western universities, such as Oxford University. It simply referred to a gathering of those directly involved in the academic project, as it still does today. The difference, however, is that whereas the convocation historically referred to the graduation ceremony itself, a convocation today very intentionally refers also to the organised structure that represents the very broad academic community in the governance of the university.
The convocation, therefore, engages with the Senate and Board as the penultimate academic and institutional oversight bodies – it is about the direction and the future of the university, as much as the policies and parameters within which the institution must be run.
A secure future
Former students and academics consequently, through the convocation have a formal opportunity to co-author a future that is not disastrous but secure, with courageous university leaders, pioneering academics and engaged students. It is, however, a sombre reality that convocations often are dissenting voices in dialogue with universities, prioritising a single concern above all else and disputing institutional developments at every turn.
As a result, what convocations in broad terms must achieve, namely build the university, falls away, and the opposite unintentionally realises, namely, to discourage shared design of solutions. Such convocations emerge for two reasons, namely an exclusive membership and a single-minded agenda.
Where they fail to build an inclusive membership across diverse communities and generations of students, such convocations persist. If the elected leadership fails to engage with diverse members to build an inclusive agenda, such convocations develop. Lack of inclusive membership and agendas are, however, to my mind only symptoms of confusion of identity.
When a convocation and its leadership see themselves firstly as bridgebuilders that bring together diverse alumni and build inclusive agendas, exclusivity and captured agendas dissipate, and a vibrant voice emerges to co-author the great university.
- Dr Rudi Buys is the newly elected Vice-President of the Stellenbosch Convocation.
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