Page 47 - Transformation Report

Support Programmes (DSP) provide small group interventions The University also has academics participating in national
to guide academics through their postgraduate research capacity-development initiatives such as the Future
by offering support in proposal development, research Professors programme, the Teaching Advancement
methodologies, and data collection. Those that complete at Universities Fellowship, and the Higher Education
the programmes have a high success rate for completion Leadership and Management (HELM) programme. In
of their qualifications (>70% on past data), although we still addition to the above national initiatives, the University’s
struggle to achieve a greater than 50% completion rate for Early-Career Academics Advancement Programme (ECAAP)
the programmes. In addition, many workshops have been aims to facilitate the professional development of early-
held, including “writing for publication”, research ethics career academics by instilling skills, knowledge and abilities
preparation, and orientation workshops for postgraduate that are required to advance their academic progression.
students, to name but a few.

Faculties are all engaged in wide-ranging interventions to diversify the academic staff profile, such as the following:
• Business and Economic Sciences (BES) Faculty filled 30 vacancies since 2018, of which 24 appointments were
from designated (A, C, I) groups.
• Education filled two vacancies in 2020 with African incumbents, increasing the overall percentage of Black African
employees to over 40%.
• Engineering, the Built Environment and Technology (EBET) Faculty historically has had a low staff turnover which
has impacted negatively on its ability to achieve equity targets. In 2020, the faculty had 20 academic vacancies at
various stages of recruitment and concerted efforts are being made to advertise as widely as possible to attract
candidates from designated groups. The faculty has various strategies in place to support a growing group of early-
career academics to become the next generation of academic leaders.

• Health Sciences Faculty, by mid-July 2020, had 59% of its academic staff from designated groups. Mentoring
programmes such as the Interprofessional Health Research Network were implemented to ensure that emerging
scholars are guided by senior academic staff.
• Humanities Faculty advertised positions associated with the nGAP and vacancies in the Departments of Visual
Arts and Sociology and Anthropology. Ten new academic staff members joined the faculty in 2020, bringing new
ideas and contributing to transformation.
• Law Faculty endeavours to appoint Black and female academics whenever vacancies arise, seeking to attract top
Black candidates as part of the next generation of academics, particularly in the area of ocean governance and
marine law. The Faculty’s Postgraduate Associates (PGAs) programme is thriving and approximately 20 PGAs are
appointed annually, most of whom are Black LLB graduates who are registered for an LLM or LLD qualification
within the faculty. The PGAs also assist as mediators in GBV cases at the University.
• Science Faculty have strategically embarked on concerted efforts to attract employees from designated groups.
Of the 31 permanent appointments made in the faculty for the 2019 – 2020 period, 19 (14 academics; 5 PASS)
were from designated groups.

The University set aside additional funding in the academic resource allocation model (RAM) to fill academic vacancies across
all faculties and this assisted in alleviating high student to staff ratios. This has become standardised as a built-in factor into
the RAM, which allocates more funding to faculties where the academic full-time equivalent (FTE) student to staff ratios were
above average for contact universities. The University invested R50 million in the academic resource allocation model (RAM)
for faculties in 2019 to enable them to fill academic vacancies. The ratio of FTE students to permanent instructional/research
FTE employees decreased from 28:1 in 2018 to 27:1 in 2019 and the ratio remained at 27:1 in 2020, which was lower than the
national average of 30:1 in 2019. Largely, the FTE student to staff ratio remained the same or declined in all faculties except in
the Faculty of Education, where it increased from 29:1 to 35:1. This was due to the high growth rate (11.2%) in enrolments in
this faculty from 2019 to 2020. It is widely accepted that lower student to staff FTE ratios enhance teaching quality and improve
student success, which may have contributed to the increase in student success rate in 2020.

47 TRANSFORMATION REPORT