Enjoying a taste of life in the North

Jan 14 2008 by Iain Laing, The Journal

Newcastle University’s new Vice-Chancellor has swapped the warm sunshine and stormy politics of South Africa for what many would think a relatively relaxing North-East. But Urmee Khan discovers the challenges he faces.

WHEN Newcastle University appointed the South African Professor Chris Brink as their new Vice-Chancellor the joke was that he had swapped his Stellenbosch wine cellar for a Newcastle brewery.

Professor Brink admits that he did indeed ensure he got a flavour of the region.

“I’ve had Newcastle Brown Ale – one of the first things I did when I got here was to ask someone to take me to a pub to have some Newcastle Brown Ale,” he chuckles.

And his verdict? “Interesting. It was very interesting, I could do with it every now and again, but it couldn’t become a habit. It’s a strong brew,” he says, giving it some thought.

Although Chris Brink is embracing the Newcastle Brown, he is a long way from his home town in South Africa. The son of a carpenter, he was born and grew up in a small rural town at the southern edge of the Kalahari Desert.

Professor Brink gave The Journal his first interview since he took up the demanding post at the end of last year.

Formerly he was rector and vice- chancellor of one of South Africa’s top universities, Stellenbosch.

The 56-year-old mathematician has a reputation as a reformer. Famously, Professor Brink attracted attention for his policies at Stellenbosch by increasing the number of black students under an inclusivity programme.

This at a university regarded as the intellectual home of the apartheid movement in the 1960s and 70s. He plans to maintain his reputation as a radical and in his inauguration speech he launched his vision of a modern university:

“The world is changing around us, faster than ever. The old economy launched by the industrial revolution is being superseded by the knowledge economy.

“We want to play a leading role in the economic, social and cultural development of the North-East. I am honoured to be given the opportunity of leading Newcastle University and participating in the development of Newcastle as a science city. We would like knowledge in the North-East to play the role that coal once did.”

Today, Professor Brink is sitting in his large and spacious office pondering the future of education not just in the region, but in the world.

“I think universities are caught up in a very interesting transition phase where the question about what higher education is for and indeed what universities are for is being asked.”

He speaks with enthusiasm about the ‘Knowledge economy’.

“For hundreds of years, universities have been engaged in knowledge to find now that knowledge production is related to economic benefit and you were valuable to society, not in a money point of view, and now universities are valuable from a money point of view and the impact of that is the main change.”

Sounds great – but is it really possible when a university education is now the experience of so many? Does Professor Brink agree with the government’s policy to expand education?

“First I must declare that I’m totally naive about British politics. So Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems – I’m still trying to understand them.

“So I’m not making any political opinions at all, but the idea of expanding participation is not unique. I’ve seen it twice before, in South Africa, after 1994 the official policy was called masification – to increase massively.

“And in Australia, in the 1990s, the federal government decided to expand to take on foreign students. So it’s not a unique situation and it’s the same question faced by universities here – how do you cope with social inclusion?

“I’m in favour of anyone who has the will and the inkling to go to university. I think in terms of developed countries, 50% is not an overly ambitious target.”

But for an academic university does it lower standards?

Professor Brink says: “If we want a good quality university then quality needs diversity.

“Whether it’s amongst your academics you need a certain mix – universities function well when there is a certain level of diversity.

“Maybe I can give you an example, in the medical school at Stellenbosch, by the time I had left more than 50% of students were black – a huge achievement in terms of empowerment – the medical school was very sought after.”

Professor Brink does agree, however, that there is pressure from business over what employers want from new graduates.

“What is quite common is the tension between what universities are trying to provide – what I call an education for life – in the sense of people learning not just knowledge but an approach to problem solving which will last a lifetime and the need for employers to have someone who can walk in on a Monday morning and be productive till Friday.

“That’s a well known tension and involves a bit of give and take. The fact is, in the job market most people need to keep learning new skills all the time.

“If you only want one skill then a person might walk through the door on Monday and be immediately useful – but do they have the capacity and capability to learn new skills when that job changes?”

Professor Brink’s own subject is, however, resolutely practical – maths and computer science. That’s the subject he did when he left his rural home to go to university in Johannesburg at the age of 18. He continued his postgraduate study in mathematics and philosophy at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, before being awarded a prestigious scholarship to Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in Algebraic Logic in 1978.

He moved on to become Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) in 1998 at the University of Wollongong in Australia, where he restructured the university’s activities in research, innovation and commercialisation and then his move to Stellenbosch in South Africa.

Strangely, it was only when he went to Cambridge that he became fully aware of apartheid in his native South Africa:

“My university days in South Africa was a very particular time. When I first went to Cambridge, it was the first time I had been out of the country and I had no experience whatsoever. I had more or less to learn to speak the language, I had no experience of going outside that South African peculiarity. Cambridge was quite a culture shock for me.”

“Kids like myself, Afrikaans kids, just had no idea really of what the real political and social issues were because all the media were so heavily government controlled. It was a peculiar time in society and as you travelled around the world and learned other things and time went by, you began to see how peculiar things were.

“But certainly, as a child, many of the things that kids now know, my kids understand, how society works – we had no conception. It was not part of your world. You had no vocabulary.”

Brink’s academic career has marked him out as suited to the challenges at Newcastle University.

Attracting students from diverse backgrounds is also a pressing issue for British universities, and Newcastle has faced similar challenges to Stellenbosch.

The North-East has the lowest participation rate in higher education in the country. Newcastle University operates a number of schemes to widen participation, including one that has increased the number of local students, who now account for almost 25% of undergraduates.

How will he change Newcastle University in the next couple of years?

“In the coming year my first job is to build a senior management team. Quite a few people who have played a part making the university what it is will be retiring, so we need to build a new senior management team and that is one of my responsibilities. Second thing – we have to be prepared for a big research assessment exercise, a huge national assessment. All universities have to make submissions, the last one was in 2001. Thirdly, what we call ‘reinventing the civic university,’ this is a civic university, it always has been.

It’s always had connections with the city and the region. This university was prominent in the industrial revolution, will it be again prominent in the knowledge revolution? That’s what I mean by reinventing the notion of a civic university, and that means will we be strongly integrated into what happens in the city ? I would like us to be again a civic university with a strong national and international profile.”

So, does he have any personal reservations about life in the North-East?

“We had dire warnings about weather in the North-East, but the combination of having a walkable city with anything you can ask for, transport, cultures – and 10 minutes’ away the countryside, really appeals to us. We love it in the North-East. The kids go to school across the road.”