South Africa: When Business As Usual is Not an Option

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Johannesburg — UNTIL recently I was a professor and dean of a faculty in a large university in SA. That is, until the "T" word, transformation, hit, as was inevitable, and saw some of us taking the severance package to make way for individuals from targeted equity groups. I now have time to consider the paradigms and practices shaping 21st-century higher education. University education is under- going radical change. Take the engineering curriculum. At the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, engineering students take courses in music and poetry.

Why? Because tomorrow's engineers need to be empathetic and creative problem solvers. They must be sensitive to a wide range of issues, able to see the big picture and think across disciplinary lines. Georgia Tech's visionary president, Wayne Clough, a civil engineer by profession, believes that "the pursuit of science and technology is just as creative a process as poetry and the arts. Both require intensely creative people who can think outside the box, look at the same things everyone else sees and imagine something more, and put the pieces together in new ways."

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