The Office of the Vice-Chancellor and Principal brought one of the country’s leading higher education minds into MUT’s strategic conversations as the University looks to accelerate its research, innovation and impact agenda under IGNITE 2030.
This was evident at the recent MUT Lekgotla, where Professor Sibusiso Moyo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Internationalisation at Stellenbosch University, delivered a much-anticipated keynote address that moved the conversation from research ambition to practical possibilities.
Professor Moyo is no stranger to the challenge of building university research and innovation ecosystems. A mathematician by training, she holds a PhD in Mathematics from the former University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as a Master’s degree in Tertiary Education Management, which she earned with distinction from the University of Melbourne in Australia. She has published widely in the mathematical sciences, particularly in differential equations and their applications.
Her credentials extend well beyond her own scholarship, with experience in the same portfolio at DUT and attainment of awards from South Africa and abroad.
Rather than arriving with a prescription for wholesale change, Professor Moyo challenged MUT to look first at what is already within its reach, the quick gains that could strengthen research performance, visibility, collaboration and impact.
With refreshing humility, she acknowledged that some of the practices she proposed may already be taking place at MUT and may simply require tweaking, strengthening or scaling. Her message was therefore not that MUT needed to start again, but that the University should interrogate what it already has, identify what works and determine where relatively small interventions could produce disproportionately significant results. One of the highlights that got everyone looking at the big hairy ambition of research was the mention of each faculty having its own Pro-Vice-Chancellors, “a practice that is bearing fruit for them at SU, for a DVC RIE cannot be everywhere”, she said.
For Interim Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Rushiella Songca, bringing external thought leaders into spaces such as the Lekgotla helps ensure MUT continually tests its thinking against leading practice in the sector.
“The value of inviting respected voices into our strategic conversations is not for them to tell MUT who it should become. It is to help us interrogate our own assumptions, recognise opportunities that may already be before us and identify where relatively small changes could unlock much greater institutional value,” said Prof Songca.