Media Credit: Michelle McCleary/The Daily Campus University of Fort Hare Vice Chancellor Derrik Swartz recieves a warm welcome in the Visitors Center Monday.

By Michelle McCleary

On Monday, a delegation of 12 South Africans crammed into a small conference room in the newly built Visitors Center with about 30 UConn officials and students in order to “put faces behind the names” of their new American partners.

As part of a linkage between UConn and the University of Fort Hare (located on the Eastern Cape of South Africa), the two universities are currently in the beginning stages of a relationship that officials hope will be mutually beneficial for both institutions.

The visiting delegation kicked off a week-long visit at UConn with a Chancellor’s Forum. Fort Hare’s Vice Chancellor Derrick Swartz, who is heading the delegation, received a warm welcome and says he hopes this week’s visit will help highlight “strategic points of convergence of interest.”

He added that a week-long tour of the university should shed light on some ways in which both universities could “narrow down manageable, but mutually beneficial propositions.”

Ironically, UConn’s Chancellor John Petersen, who was supposed to chair Monday’s Chancellor’s Forum, was unable to attend as he was still en route from the Women’s NCAA defeat in the Final Four. Ron Taylor, vice provost of multicultural affairs, presided over the event in his place.

One of the main goals of Monday’s forum was to meet with many of the UConn officials, with whom the only prior contact had been by e-mail or over the phone. Members of the two universities have been exchanging ideas since March 2000, and two small delegations of UConn representatives have visited Fort Hare, first in July 2000, and more recently, this past February; but the linkage is still in its beginning stages of development.

“There is a foundation, but it’s putting the pieces together now,” said Amii Omara-Otunnu, a UConn associate professor of history and executive director of the partnership. “We need to identify some of the priorities, and then the task is to identify how to implement some of those priorities.”

Their visit ultimately has been made possible by the UConn/African National Congress partnership. UConn and the ANC signed an agreement March 1, 2000 that, among other things, provides for a link between UConn and the University of Fort Hare in order to focus on comparative human rights.

South Africa’s human rights struggle focused on the struggle for racial equality in a nation whose 1948 constitution prevented non-whites - the majority population - from holding office, voting, working in certain occupations, and intermarrying with whites. All state institutions, such as educational programs, were segregated by law. That ended in the early 1990s when Apartheid was overturned and the way was cleared for the democratic election in 1994 of Mandela as president.

However, one backlash from the end of Apartheid was a dramatic decline in enrollment in Fort Hare, the very university that Mandela and most of South Africa’s current leaders attended. Students who previously could only attend Fort Hare, because of the color of their skin, now had the opportunity to attend any formerly segregated university. The result was that Fort Hare lost much of its enrollment.

Meanwhile, the “fragile”democratic South African government has been grappling with the many organizations and institutions seeking financial aid, Swartz said. In the rush for aid, Fort Hare has become less of a priority. With virtually no funds to market itself, the university has lost its competitive edge. Swartz, who was only recently appointed acting vice chancellor in 1999, says Fort Hare has begun the arduous process of restructuring.

“We’ve already collapsed the eight faculties into four academic faculties that now constitute the core areas,” he said. “We believe we can’t be good at everything and there are some things we’ve had to abandon.” With that, the delegates said one of the major obstacles that Fort Hare is looking to overcome is a poverty-stricken freshman class.

“Our freshmen especially come from very disadvantaged backgrounds, many have never seen the inside of a library, let alone a computer,” said delegate Raymond Olander.

The delegates also said that this economically disadvantaged group has a very high dropout rate, simply because they cannot afford to pay the cost to attend school. With the university in its fiscally uncertain state, it is now turning to UConn for possible solutions. Swartz indicated that he is hoping UConn can help show Fort Hare officials better ways to run their university as a business.

“Culturally, economically, we want to begin to learn from you if you’ve done it, and how successful you may or may not have been, and how you’ve done it,” he said. “You have succeeded at a system of managing such a diverse, complex institution, a multi-campus institution.” The agreement also means that UConn will be the sole repository for ANC materials in North America, giving UConn the opportunity to become a “world-class university,” as Petersen said in his most recent Chancellor’s Column.

UConn is working to develop a comprehensive Human Rights academic program, using the archival resources as one of its core building blocks. Omara-Otunnu and Swartz said developing a Human Rights program both at UConn and at Fort Hare is one of the many topics of discussion on this week’s agenda.

“We plan on using archival resources for scholarly work,” Swartz explained. “We need to infringe democratic values in our schools through an experience of those archival resources.” Following the conference, Fort Hare delegate and acting university librarian Yolissa Soul explained the impact of using the ANC archives as part of a comprehensive educational program. “One of the mandates by the ANC was to keep the archives alive,” Soul said. “That’s why it’s important for Connecticut to keep those archives alive.”

South Africa is still in a “healing process,” she added, and the archives are necessary as part of that healing process in order to rewrite history and include black South Africans in it. Currently, many schoolbooks being used today in South African classes are still the same ones used under the apartheid state, denying blacks a place in their country’s history.

There may be countless other opportunities awaiting the delegates this week as they tour the campus. One UConn student suggested taking advantage of the university’s extensive medical program, for the education and prevention of AIDS, which has reached epidemic proportions in South Africa. Swartz said while this had not been suggested before, ideas of this kind were what the delegation was hoping to share over the course of the week.

For more information about the UConn/ANC partnership, or the UConn/Fort Hare linkage, please call the UConn/ANC office at 486-0647.