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USIU-A VC Inauguration Address, April 7, 2016
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Chancellor Dr. Manu Chandaria, members of the Board Trustees, the University Council, and the Management Board, students, faculty, staff and alumni, thank you so much for your warm welcome to USIU-Africa. I feel deeply honored and humbled by the trust and opportunity youhave bestowed upon me to join this exceptional university and contribute to its future growth as a center of teaching and learning, scholarship, and public service.
Cabinet Secretary for Education, Science and Technology, Dr. Fred Matiang’i, the Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court, Dr. Mutunga, distinguished guests, friends, family, and fellow vice chancellors thank you for coming to grace this special occasion as we celebrate USIU-Africa’s remarkable history, open a new chapter, andcommit ourselves to its future.
I am deeply indebted to the enduring legacy left behind by Professor Freida Brown. She has been incredibly generous and gracious with her support and advice since I joined USIU-Africa. Herwork over the last two decades was phenomenal. The university is what it is today, an institution with world-class academic programs, facilities, faculty, staff, and students because of her extraordinary vision, leadership, energy, and passion, to building “a premier institution of academic excellence with a global perspective.” These are the attributes that attracted me to USIU-Africa and make the universityan institution of choice for thousands of students, staff, and faculty.
During the past three months, I have come to appreciate more keenly what makes this university so special. I would like to single out four, namely, a strong sense of community, pursuit of academic excellence,promotionof students’ career preparedness and community engagement, and commitment to a robust culture of strategic planning.
The transformative power of community
From the numerous meetings I have attended with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and Board members, I have come to appreciate the premium placed on community, one united in the common pursuit of the transformative power of education. It is a community that is immensely proud of the university’s history and achievements, while at the same time candidly aware of the current challenges and changing contexts of higher education, and eager to embrace theopportunities around us. It is a community alert to the inertia of silos and the immense power of working together. Everyone and every group in the university sees itself, rightly, as a stakeholder; our respective roles are intertwined threads of the tapestry that makes us the distinctive institution we are and will continue becoming. We will be as successful as we cultivate and cherish our interdependence.
Our university’s shared sense of community is all the more remarkable given the fact that we hail from all corners of Kenya, Africa, and the world; from the country’s 47 counties and 73 countries around the world. This is one reason I am so proud to call USIU-Africa home, a place that treasures diversity and inclusion; an institution which holds a beacon to the possibilities of cultivating a common humanity from our splendid diversities of nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, religion and other social markers.In an age where conflicts in one part of the world are radically altering societies thousands of miles apart, our multiculturalism has yielded and cemented strength in diversity—a strength that is so essential not just in this city or country or continent, but everywhere in the world, where being different is considered poisonous.
Our enduring commitment to global understanding and multicultural perspective, one of the five core values of our mission, is embedded across the curriculum and experienced in co-curricular activities. When I was invited to join a Malawian student dance troupe during the annual Culture Week festival, a few weeks ago, I was dancing not just to celebrate rhythms from my youth, but the very freedom of self-expression, that our different cultures do not drive us apart, but bring us together.
This is the Africa I relish, the Africa and the world we all should aspire to nurture. Given my personal and professional background I am a walking embodiment of the transformative potential of multiculturalism and support and mentorship from people I was not related to by blood, ethnicity, or nationality, but connected through our common humanity and shared values. I was born in Zimbabwe, grew up in Malawi, and have taught for nearly 35 years in a dozen universities in four countries on two continents.
I am not a stranger to Kenya. I did my PhD dissertation on Kenyan economic and labor history, during which I spent a year at the University of Nairobiin 1979-80 and lived in Umoja. In the 1980s I taught for about six years at Kenyatta University—not far from where we are gathered. I owe my intellectual growth and trajectory to the generous mentorship I received from some of Kenya’s most renowned historians and intellectuals including Professors Bethwell Ogot, William Ochieng’, Gideon Were, Godfrey Muriuki, Karim Janmohamed, Micere Mugo, Alamin Mazrui, and Dr. Willy Mutunga. When I left Kenya in January 1990, little did I know I would be called upon to make a much larger contribution to higher education in this country and on our beloved continent.
The pursuit of academic excellence
Over the past three months, I have also learned much about the high value USIU-Africa places on the pursuit of academic excellence. The university seeks to promote higher order thinking among students, the ability to collect, analyze and evaluate information and formulate conclusions. We want students regardless of their major to develop and demonstrate the ability to think critically, analytically, and creatively. We set high expectation because students cannot be expected to rise to low expectations.
It is this commitment to academic excellence that has brought USIU-Africa to what it is a today. I will ask you to take a step back for a moment and picture the world that Dr. Rust and others of like vision saw when he signed an agreement forming a brand new Africa campus of the United States International University in 1970. USIU-Africa joined the multi-campus system that extended from London to Tokyo, as far as Mexico City and San Diego.I believe he was looking to plant a new vision in a continent and country that was ripe with possibilities.
Kenya was then only 7 yearsold as an independent country, the same as the Organization for African Unity, the predecessor of the African Union. The only other university in Kenya then was the brand-new University of Nairobi. If there was a place in Africa to plant a flag, it was Nairobi. President Rust wanted to make the vision of a global educational experience a reality right here in Nairobi.
Looking back 46 years later, Dr. Rust was a true visionary. What sustained this brave experiment in private higher education was unwavering commitment to academic excellence, reinforced by operational excellence and service excellence, to building a first rate university. Kenya as a country, East Africa as a region, and Africa as a continent haveundergone massive economic, social, and political changes since then.
Powerful global forces from demographic explosion to disruptive information technologies to globalization have transformed the character and nature of higher education. It is our responsibilityas universities to navigate these changes and challenges as strategically and creatively as possible, without compromising on quality education. Like my predecessors who built and led this remarkable university, I believe academic excellence is an educational, economic, ethical, and existential imperative.
Promoting career preparedness and community engagement
I have also been gratified to learn more about USIU-Africa’s other core values. From its inception the university has always sought to produce graduates who are liberally educated and professionally prepared. This entails mastery of knowledges in their respective fields through both formal study and various experiential forms of learning such as internships and field experiences. We seek to cultivate among our students a sense of being part of a community and a desire to be of service to it by giving them opportunities to participate in community service, citizenship, or social action projects.
The need to produce well-educated, highly trained, innovative, and entrepreneurial graduates has never been greater than it is now. The confluence of challenges and opportunities continue arriving at our doors with ever increasing intensity and urgency. The fast pace of economic change and demographic growth has outpaced many social services such as education. I believe the academy is not just at the heart of thesevast transformations it should lead the transformations, help in devising solutions to our developmental problems. Many of the ills facing our continent, so eloquently covered in the local and international media, have been researched on right here in our universities.
Many of our most brilliant minds in the hallowed halls of academia in Zomba, Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra, Cairo, Casablanca,and Nairobi, not to mention Africa’s global Diaspora,have written extensively on solutions to the challenges that surround us. The problem then is not in the diagnosis; it is in the application, in the translation of research into evidence-based policies and decision-making. As universities we must be part of the agenda of fosteringintegrated, inclusive, innovative, and sustainable development. This requires forging close collaborations and mutually respectful and beneficial partnerships between the academy, industry, government, and civil society.
As a rising Africa renegotiates its place in a world of declining western influence and increasing economic dominance by the emerging economies—many of whom are found in Africa—it behooves us to lead the way in deciphering how, when and where these important forces can be harnessed for the benefit of all, for the masses of Africans.
As the 21st century unfolds, both Africa and higher education will become more important than ever. By 2050, the continent’s population, on current trends, is expected to grow to 2.4 billion, or 25% of the world’s population from the current 15%. By 2100, Africa’s population is expected to skyrocket to 4 billion or 40% of the world’s population. Africa will have the world’s largest and youngest labor force. But if we are to turn this into a demographic dividend, rather than a Malthusian nightmare, we must create high quality human capital. The time to do so is now, before it is too late.
That can only come from massive investments by governments, the private sector, civil society, and universitiesin high quality, diversified and coordinated tertiary education systems. The demand for higher education in Kenya and across Africa is huge. While we have made considerable progress in expanding opportunities to our bulging youth populations, demand vastly outstrips supply. As a continent our gross enrollment ratio for tertiary education is only 12%, compared to a world average of 33%, and more than 60% for the developed countries. But massification without commensurate growth in resources—human, physical, and infrastructural—is a recipe for mediocrity, which amounts to fraud against young people, our greatest institutional treasure, and robs our economies of their potential for broad-based and sustainable growth and development. Education is too serious an enterprise for our young people, societies, economies, and policyshortcuts and shoddiness.
Thus, the knowledge societies and economies that Africa needs must be underpinned by skilled human capital produced by our universities. As universities we must also make the necessary effortsto turn around the brain drain that has characterized African academic engagement with the West. Research and innovation must become central pillars of the 21st century African universitybecause it is only then that the students leaving our institutions can become agents of change and drivers of progress.
We also need to be mindful of the other challenges facing African higher education—access, affordability, accountability, and autonomy. Universities need both institutional autonomy to innovate, and accountability to the public that they are producing quality graduatesfor today and tomorrow and for an increasingly transnational world. They do this well when they prepare students for lifelong learning, which entails cultivating intellectual curiosity, creativity, and integrity. Such learning is difficult to measure. Many of today’s jobs were not there 20 years ago; the jobs our students will do over the next 40 years of their active working lives have yet to be invented. Universities perform best and contribute most to the common good when they are allowed to be accountable both to the present and the unknownfuture by being centers of serious inquiry and exploration, of research and critical thinking, creativity and innovation.
USIU-Africa will continue pursuing robust engagements with government agencies not just for reasons of regulatory compliance, but more importantly to provide intellectual contributions to the developmentprocess. We will also continue to strengthen our linkages with industry to reduce the skills mismatch between graduates and the needs of the labor market. Such linkages also help promote experiential or active learning, a high impact pedagogical practice, and provide internship and employment opportunities for students, as well as research and development capacities for innovation for industry.In short, our external engagements are an indispensable part of investing in the future.
Commitment to a culture of robust strategic planning
I am fortunate that I joined USIU as the university was in the process of completing the new strategic plan and institutional review for the Kenyan Commission for University Education. From the plan and review, I have learned much about the university’s past achievements, present status, and future ambitions. Rarely does an institution get an opportunity to have an outgoing Vice Chancellor draft a strategic perspective reflective of the constituents’ expectations, and have the new Vice Chancellor interrogate it with the goal of enriching it with his aspirations for the university.
Our strategic plan for the next five years was developed through a collaborative and inclusive process that involved all the university’s constituents—students, staff, faculty, Board, and alumni. Befitting USIU-Africa’s unique and inspiring history, it is a bold plan, overarched by five goals. First, to provide globally competitive and innovative academic programs incorporating research and co-curricular activities for holistic education. Second, expand and efficiently manage the university’s financial and human resources to meet its capital and operating requirements. Third, improve human resource management using best practices. Fourth, expand, maintain, and optimize use of physical facilities and technology. Fifth, increase visibility and enhance quality services to internal and external customers.
As your vice chancellor, I commit myself to the implementation of our new strategic plan as we continue on the noble journey of providing the people of Kenya, East Africa, the continent, and the world, the best education available in an innovative, rigorous, and transformative way. I believe in our future because I believe in the talents,spirit, and passion of our students, faculty, and staff; because of our demonstrated capacity in the past to realize the dreams that may have initially seemed outlandish. I am confident we will attain the bold future we have set for ourselves, to build on our strengths, cognizant of our challenges and opportunities, and take our fine university to new heights as an institution that provides “education that takes you places.”
The Africa of 1970, when our university opened its doors, and the Africa of 2016 do share a very significant fact—that this continent is still a continent of promise, a continent of possibilities, endless possibilities. THANK YOU.