????Stellenbosch 肆客足球 (SU) has rolled out the structures that will focus on the recommendations of the Khampepe Commission. Our series of interviews with key SU staff steering the Committee for the Institutional Response to the Commission's Recommendations (CIRCoRe) process sheds light on the work of the workstreams shaping the future of the 肆客足球. In this interview,?Prof Kopano Ratele shares insights into a vision for a transformed SU.?
Prof Ratele is an internationally acclaimed psychologist and scholar in the Department of Psychology at SU. He leads the CIRCoRe workstream responsible for aligning the 肆客足球's institutional culture with a democratic human rights ethos. Ratele's work focuses on two areas, namely decolonial and African psychology, and boys, men and masculinities at the intersection with violence, race, sexuality and culture. He is a regular contributor to media on matters related to boys, men and masculinity, violence and fatherhood. He served as a member of the Ministerial Committee on Transformation in South African Universities and currently serves on the Department of Higher Education and Training's (DHET) Future Professors Programme.
You joined Stellenbosch 肆客足球 in 2021. What attracted you to the 肆客足球?
A few years before I arrived, there was an infamous article about coloured women's intellectual ability. I was part of a group external to SU that campaigned for that article to be retracted. We put together a petition and in a short space of time, 10 000 signatures were gathered around the world. This was unheard of. The article was retracted within a month. It was amazing. That was part of the history that brought me into this process.
The second reason is that I wanted to go back to teaching. I had a comfortable job as a director of a research unit and working as a research professor. But, after a while, I thought I wanted to go back and be with undergraduate students, not only postgraduates. I elected to come here because Stellenbosch still had issues around, among the many, racism and sexism, and of course, the language question.
What motivated you to become involved in the CIRCoRe process?
I think I was approached because of my expertise – in my academic and media work I write quite a bit about race and racism. I also write about men and boys. Masculinity is a big interest. Certain incidents on campus involved problematic behaviour by men, specifically, such as the young Afrikaans man in a men's residence who was the spark for the Khampepe investigation.
One of the important institutional challenges at SU also revolves around the idea of a certain kind of whiteness. Even before children go to school, they learn prejudice from how their parents talk to other people, they learn it from neighbours, from media and from books. If you change how people think about what they learn about whiteness, about white identity, you'll change the identity of the institution so that it's no longer seen as an exclusionary white university, but as a place for all people who want to come and learn here.
For the CIRCoRe process, I lead the workstream on institutional culture that focuses on the interaction between the complex 'hard' infrastructure, including the legal, policy and regulatory dimensions, and the equally complex, 'softer' aspects of the institution's functioning.
What is meant by institutional culture in the context of the 肆客足球?
Institutional culture refers to how things are done, how things look and how things feel within an institution.
