2016 Annual Report

The events in 2015 and 2016, catalysed by #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and #Shackville and other student movements, required stakeholders at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to begin dealing more urgently with the multiple struggles of poverty and discrimination that face our students on and off campus.
In early 2016, a deliberate focus was introduced at the university to co-construct a University of Cape Town that embeds transformation in its changing identity. The culmination of more than two years of dialogue and consultation, the UCT Strategic Planning Framework 2016-2020 is an acknowledgement of the need to shift our understanding of what transformation at UCT means.

The strategic focus on transformation builds on the best of UCT’s present and past, while interrogating the historical values and assumptions that inform our institutional culture, and our ways of knowing, seeing and teaching. The interrogation of coloniality should therefore lead us to addressing practices which are experienced as exclusionary by marginalised identities within UCT and imagining alternative practices, epistemologies, policies and systems, which advance social justice, enable different ways of ‘being’ and contribute to
sustainable development.

The Strategic Planning Framework (approved by Council in December 2016) details five broad strategic goals that effect improvements in the areas of research, teaching and learning, internationalisation and social responsiveness while infusing all of these with the transformation agenda.