Ihron Rensburg sees the world as a global village.
"All challenges are shared," he said. "We are all human."
On Monday night, USC Rensburg, the vice chancellor and principal of the University of Johannesburg. This was the first in a series of forthcoming lectures which serve to highlight and promote leadership on both national and international stages. Rensburg’s lecture addressed the education crisis in post-apartheid South Africa.
He detailed the history and injustices of apartheid in South Africa and how various systems of racial segregation by the white Afrikaner minority oppressed black citizens for almost 50 years. This longstanding oppression, he said, left the higher education gap wide and predominately white.
Schools now, Rensburg said, “need to be driven by science, technology and innovation.” By doing so, they would allow the South African economy to “move up the chain.” As a result, the University of Johannesburg and USC have forged what Rensburg called an “urgently constructed” partnership that aims to make education more accessible for not only the people of South Africa, but also for Americans.
“Around 40 percent of our population lives in poverty,” Rensburg said. “Increasing tuition would look great to our [bank] accounts, but what good would that do our students? I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s realistic.”
For the most part, students at the University of Johannesburg are first generation college attendees.
“Because their parents have never seen the inside of a university, how are these students to know what the inside of a university looks like, how it functions?” said Rensburg.
With a poor elementary education program and undereducated parents, incoming freshmen to the university are at a major academic disadvantage.
“We have 2,600 tutors at our institution ready to work individually with anyone who needs it,” he said.
Rensburg’s personal goal is to minimize university failure and dropout rates. In his time as vice chancellor, he's seen pass rates at the University of Johannesburg go from 50 percent to 75 percent over the course of eight years.
However, accessibility isn’t the only trouble the University of Johannesburg is facing. A demographic and retention assessment uncovered that there were too few teachers per student. The teachers themselves weren’t fully qualified to teach, and therefore suffered from low self-esteem.
Rensburg said that the University of Johannesburg is honored to partner with USC but was quick to explain the nature of that relationship.
“It only works if it goes both ways,” he said. “Relations in educational opportunities are greatly strengthened in the interest of all parties.”
University President Harris Pastides also commented on the partnership, saying that it is not “a collaboration of the best programs we each have to offer, but programs based on accessibility.” Pastides said he wishes to further the educational outreach of both universities to their respective communities.
Rensburg also reflected on his time as a political prisoner — in 1989, he spent almost 12 months in solitary confinement.
“There are two things that can happen when you spend that much time with yourself,” he said. “You can go off the wall, or you can reimagine what your life can be.”
Rensburg opted for the latter and emerged from prison with a renewed sense of purpose. And on Monday, Rensburg was presented with the President’s Medal of Honor.
Recently, the University of Johannesburg was paid a visit by Harvard professors who were also interested in a partnership with the campus.
“It’s difficult,” said Rensburg, speaking on what he called the “massive” salary gap, “to know the pay differences between Harvard professors who are paid to study poor communities, and the communities that they study. Their salary is 1,000 percent greater than that of Johannesburg professors.”
And Rensburg said he doesn't believe that the South African government should be counted on to remedy the problem of plummeting test scores.
“That is not the state’s responsibility,” he said. He argued that the instillment of accountability in principals, educators and board members will have a dramatic effect.
Rensburg conceded that the road to universal South African education will be difficult and that progress will be slow, but he's confident that the people of South Africa, especially university students, will meet their full global potential.
“We are ready to rise up to the challenge,” Rensburg said. “We are ready to play our part.”