Breaking into a free state of mind: Rationale and evidence for ‘study abroad’ out of rural South Africa
Jonathan Jansen
Breaking into a free state of mind: Rationale and evidence for ‘study abroad’ out of rural South Africa, In: WP Wahl and R Pelser (eds) Leadership for Change: Developing transformational student leaders through global learning spaces, Durbanville, AOSIS Publishing, In press
3.1. Introduction
When I was first appointed as Rector of the University of the Free State (2009), I spent much of the first 3 months trying to understand this century-old institution which was founded exclusively for white, Afrikaners in central South Africa. Having studied and worked only in universities inside large metropoles, one of the first things I noticed was how isolated the institution was. Bloemfontein is a city that also serves as the judicial capital of the country but within minutes of leaving the central areas, large farmlands came into view on all sides of the City of Roses. This was certainly true for all the smaller cities of the Free State from Kroonstad and Parys in the north, to Bethlehem and Harrismith in the east.
The next thing that struck me was how conservative the area was when it came to race relations. In fact, the University was in the middle of a major emotional, psychological and political trauma following the racial abuse of five black workers by four white students, an event that was video-recorded and circulated via social media. I have no doubt that regardless of my curriculum vitae, I was appointed as the first Black Rector of the UFS because of this crisis. Segregation was near absolute in the student body; in fact, it was the university’s attempt to create interracial residences that led to the racist video as a form of protest against integration (Buys 2018; Jansen 2016; Van der Merwe & Van Reenen 2016).
South Africa was horrified by the racist video and the question that was asked in many different ways was: how could young white men who were little children around the time of Nelson Mandela’s release carry within them such bitterness and hatred towards Black people? Were they not the so-called born free generation who had escaped the lived experiences of apartheid either as masters of the white race? Of course, the advent of a non-racial political democracy does not coincide perfectly with the advent of non-racial thinking in the general population. Young white South Africans are burdened with what I called ‘knowledge in the blood’ which is the very deep understandings they hold dear about themselves and others (Jansen 2009).
For these young people growing up in a Black country under a Black government, the past was glorious, the present calamitous and the future dark. Such knowledge was learnt through conservative institutions of white socialisation including homes, churches, schools, cultural organisations, sporting bodies and more. White youth might have been born after apartheid but many of them harboured profoundly negative views of Black people and felt increasingly hopeless about their social and economic futures in a country where, for the first time in centuries, they no longer held political power.
What finally caught my attention in addition to the rural character of the province and the conservative race relations of its people, was the traditional structure of the economy. A largely agricultural province, the Free State was known as the breadbasket of South Africa. What this meant was that farmers and labourers constituted a vital and intimate part of the rural landscape. Every white man seemed to own a farm somewhere in the province. What this meant was that traditional roles of the master and servant were played out daily on the farms. The white farmers were relatively wealthy, educated and propertied while the black labourers were poor, often illiterate and landless. It was the white students from these farms who would come to study at the university where their parents and grandparents once studied with their friends and families. Those students would for the first time encounter black students as equals, if only in the sense of sharing registered student status, and for them the adjustment from a natural position of baaskap (being a master) was difficult especially for young white men.
The encounter of white and black students on this rural, conservative campus was flammable. It was also the context within which one of the critical interventions to address such dilemmas was born – the study abroad intervention known for a long time as the F1 programme.
3.2. Why study abroad?
There were three reasons why I decided to propose a study abroad intervention – personal, intellectual and political. On personal grounds, I was a beneficiary of overseas studies. I know first-hand how my conservative, evangelical Christian outlook was transformed into a more generous faith simply by living and learning among students from all continents. I was able, for the first time in my life, to meet white men and women who fought against apartheid from campuses and communities beyond the borders of South Africa. For the first time, I developed a strong Pan African solidarity when I met African scholars of distinction from Ghana to The Gambia who mentored me in a foreign country. I learnt to be suspicious of my own certainties and to value ambiguity in life and in learning. Study abroad changed me.
On intellectual grounds, the research literature pointed consistently to the positive value of study abroad (Movassaghi, Unsal & Göçer 2014; Petzold & Moog 2018; Tarrant, Rubin & Stoner 2014; Xu et al. 2013). Those positive benefits include intercultural understanding, personal growth, academic completion, global mindedness, tolerance and interpersonal skills. There was therefore strong evidence, beyond my personal experiences of study abroad, that such a financial investment would generate strong gains for a university with limited resources but great potential for overcoming the troubling legacy of its racial past.
On political grounds, I knew that what we needed to do was break students out of their settled patterns of living, learning and loving. To students, black and white, even if they were raised after apartheid, segregated lives seemed completely normal. When the decision was made to racially integrate the residences there was resistance from both sides. White students did not want it because of their learnt racism; they did not want their living arrangements invaded by black students. Black students, on the other hand, came to resent what some called ‘forced integration’ because they were simply tired of the racial harassment they had to endure at the hands of white students.
What is worth noting is that unlike the white English universities, bonds of loyalty to a university ran deep within the white Afrikaans campuses. Often a student would choose not only a residence but a particular room in which a grandparent or parent once stayed.
What was true for living together was also evident from the arrangements for learning together. Most white and black students attended racially segregated schools; a minority of black students attended former white schools in the Free State province and the adjoining Eastern Cape province. For the latter, those schools were still emphatically white in terms of dominant learner enrolments, teaching staff and of course school culture. On campus things were not much different given that the historically Afrikaans universities accommodated black students in English classes and white students in Afrikaans classes; there were small numbers of Afrikaans-speaking black students who attended the Afrikaans classes and some white English-speaking students who attended the mainly black English classes. But for the most part, living and learning was initially a segregated experience for most of the UFS students.
As in any segregated spaces, there are always those who challenged the settled arrangements. A few student couples decided to love and some also married across the colour line as documented in my book, Making love in a war zone: Interracial loving and learning after apartheid (Jansen 2018). In the segregated residences there were some determined white students who decided to stay in black residences as well as a few courageous black students who placed themselves in white residences. But those switching decisions came at a cost to these pioneers of a new campus and country. Still, the brave example of the few simply amplified the obvious for the many: that the segregated university residences were no different from what apartheid had enforced as normal. Put differently, even if the university was now desegregated, the classrooms and dormitories were by no means integrated.
It was therefore a matter of political strategy to launch the Study Abroad programme as a way of giving students access to what was possible by placing them in unfamiliar contexts. But this had to be planned meticulously because our research has shown that physical proximity between black and white students on the presumption of formal equality can be explosive without careful deliberation on how to bring historical enemies together in peacetime (Jansen 2018).
Our first decision was to organise the Study Abroad students into small, manageable groups. These small groups were each led by a facilitator from the university who had been thoroughly prepared for the task. Then, of course, each group had to be racially diverse so that they travelled together, shared dormitories in other countries and conducted assignments as a group. The students too were prepared over several months for participation in the Study Abroad programme.
There was one critically important element of the design thinking that was crucial to the transformation of the university in the wake of the racial atrocity of 2008. These students, once exposed to this broader world, would return to become part of the core student leadership that would lead the change process at the university.
This, at least, was the assumption that future student leaders would emerge from this programme and because the first year students were targets, they would still have two or more additional years (depending on degree) on campus and longer if they pursued postgraduate studies. After all, these undergraduate students were selected for their leadership potential on and beyond their campus lives.
3.3. The placement
The reality of Study Abroad from the perspective of a poor country and a campus with strained finances is that your placement decisions tend to favour universities in countries that can provide co-funding for your students. Our students were therefore placed mainly in the USA with a few in the Netherlands, Thailand and Japan. The USA was an ideal setting because of comparable experiences with race, slavery and segregation as described so vividly in George Fredrickson’s (1981) classic work, White Supremacy: A comparative study in American and South African history.
The Free State students were further placed in universities in which UFS staff had prior experiences (such as Cornell) or where inter-university partnerships already existed (such as Minnesota). Placement destinations included the large research universities such as Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Minnesota, New York University and the University of Vermont but also smaller liberal arts colleges and universities such as Clark, Appalachian State, Virginia Polytechnic and Edmonds Community College. Many of these institutions offered some degree of financial support from student accommodation to free lectures which made the programme affordable for the UFS. In each of these 2-week study programmes issues of race, diversity, social change and leadership were consistent themes in seminars, discussions and guest speaker inputs. Throughout, students were engaged with American students, also from diverse backgrounds, to deliberate on these difficult topics.
The Study Abroad experience was designed to be reciprocal in nature so that every 2–3 years, students and staff from the placement countries would in turn come to the Free State for a global conference where they would in turn learn about these challenging topics on South African soil. The 2012 Global Leadership Summit, for example, had as its theme ‘Transcending boundaries in global change leadership’ where familiar topics of race, reconciliation and social justice enjoyed prominence.
3.4. The outcomes of the Study Abroad experience
There are various research reports available on the Study Abroad programme which give particular attention to the student outcomes (Kamsteeg 2016; Walker 2016; Walker & Loots 2016). These largely qualitative studies are generally positive and helpfully nuanced in their accounts of the student experience. A white male student reports of the programme that:
It made me think differently, cognitively and emotionally. I now think and act differently, because I feel that I need to be more informed … I have changed and learned to put myself in uncomfortable positions, I take myself more out of my comfort zone. (Kamsteeg 2016:5)
A white female student shared a room with a black student on an overseas F1 placement and recalls that:
… [T]he biggest thing for me is that one night we went to the gym together and then we decided to borrow clothes from each other and only afterwards I had her clothes on and I noticed I have a person of a different ethnic group’s clothes on … Coming from a farming community … a child born out of that and making a total 360 turn, that was a big experience for me. (Walker 2016:16)
A black student observed ‘a change in some of the people from before we went and after we came back’ (Walker & Loots 2016:59). To be sure, there were the necessary and inevitable struggles to find each other during the first days of the international leg of the programme involving decisions such as which language to speak from a menu that included English, Afrikaans, Sesotho, isiZulu and other languages represented among the travelling students. There were also reports about the switching of rooms despite the arrangements for diversity in room allocations abroad.
What I wish to reflect on, however, are more subjective leadership observations during my tenure at the UFS as Vice-Chancellor responsible for the Study Abroad programme.
The first observation is that the programme had a visible effect on our students. Most of them had never travelled outside the country and some never left the province. One memorable event was travelling to the rural, largely black campus of the UFS in the eastern Free State where I asked returning students about their experiences. ‘Well, I returned and ran home from the taxi rank’, said one student. ‘I woke up my mother and told her that I had something very important to say’. The mother greeted her excited son who promptly announced that based on his overseas experience, ‘Not all white people are bad’.
For many of the more conservative students, the immersion came as a shock. One such placement experience would be shared often among students and staff. At New York University, there was a particularly energetic lecturer who immediately engaged students around LGBTQi issues. Some had no idea what the acronym stood for. Others had regarded the subject as beyond the pale; race was difficult enough. For a minority of the South African students who were gay or transsexual it was as if a world opened up in which they could at last be recognised. Every year, the students placed at NYU were invited into deliberations on race, class, gender and sexuality in ways that broadened their minds to possibilities beyond the normative commitments to stable identities from their colonial and apartheid pasts.
It would be naïve to think that immersing black and white first-year students in a Study Abroad programme would easily collapse the distances or dissolve the barriers created by 18–20 years of segregated lives. A guest lecture that I had to deliver at Cornell University happily coincided with a placement visit by UFS students to this beautiful campus in Upstate New York. At breakfast I noticed something quite disturbing at the time. Two white first-year women students sat tightly together in one corner of the room as if something ominous was about to happen to them. This was the exact opposite of what we had intended, that students would begin to reach out to each other in non-threatening environments far from the social judgments and personal awkwardness that come with crossing borders back home. And yet, as already suggested, it was unreasonable to expect inter-racial communion so early in their studies. What we could hope for, more realistically, was that over time these immersion experiences would at the very least lead to a change of mind on the part of these young South Africans.
Our best ‘teachers’ for subsequent years of the Study Abroad programme were the alumni, those students who had first-hand experience of living and learning outside the country. They were knowledgeable, enthusiastic and confident student leaders who could respond to student queries in ways the staff could not. Their testimonies offered powerful vindication of the programme but more importantly prepared new candidates for what they could expect when away from home. It was these students who became leaders in their residences, leaders of campus programmes and also leaders in the structures of the Student Representative Council (Walker & Loots 2016:62).
One of the positive outcomes of this programme is that a few students returned to our partner universities either on short visits or for further studies. Some of them received financial assistance from the receiving institution while others worked to raise the funds to return. This was a crucial element in the programme because it helped cement the relationship between institutions. Similarly, individual students from abroad also came to South Africa on return visits. However, these numbers of returning students were very small largely because of affordability concerns.
One added benefit of the programme was that UFS staff were also exposed to broader learning than what most of them had been accustomed to. Many of the staff who accompanied the students were themselves from the rural Free State and even though they were generally more open-minded than others, the programme had real educational benefits for them as well. Even as they led students and facilitated their sessions at home and abroad, staff too were exposed to new and challenging ideas from the programme’s core curriculum. Students graduated, staff stayed on and therefore they became critical assets in the institutional memory of the programme and also in the transformation drive of the university.
3.5. A critical assessment of the Study Abroad (F1) programme
As indicated, the various research and evaluation reports confirm the overall positive effects of the Study Abroad programme. From a leadership perspective there were however concerns which the programme sought to address in various ways but remain worthy of reflection.
To begin with, a study abroad period of 2–3 weeks was admittedly too limited an immersion period for students; evidence suggests that the duration of such programmes matters (Dwyer 2004). Put bluntly, this was all we could afford given the foreign exchange rate that favoured the USA and Europe by a factor greater than 10. To compensate for this limited time away, the programme design included intensive pre- and post-visit educational activities. Before leaving, the students were prepared intellectually, socially and emotionally for what an immersion programme would entail. On their return, students engaged in debriefing and development activities that prepared them for the task of leadership in the university.
The limited number of students was also a concern because the intake seldom exceeded more than 70 or 80 students per annum. On the one hand, this made the programme highly selective and only the best students were chosen for their leadership potential. But for a university with more than 25 000 students spread across two main campuses, the number was limited. One way of compensating for the size of the programme was to involve more campus students and student leaders in the UFS-based activities.
A serious limitation of the programme was the placement destinations. The university destinations were, as indicated, typically in the USA and Europe with two Asian universities involved. It would have made a significant difference to include universities in Rwanda where the experience of traumatic memory and the model of reconciliation offer powerful insights for post-apartheid South Africa (Mawhinney 2015) or Brazil where politics of race still loom large in citizen consciousness (Telles 2006). The difficulty was costs because any placement in African countries would have escalated the financial demands of the programme given the limited capacity of the hosts to accommodate South African students who are generally regarded as better-off, in relative terms, to the neighbours north of the Limpopo. In addition, the logistical demands would simply have been much more intense given the problems of communication and infrastructure for large travelling groups of students.
An important criticism from inside the university was the financial implications. Could such funding not have been spent on other areas of greater priorities given that the university had in earlier years been forced to lay off staff to balance the budget? This concern could not be taken lightly. The response from our leadership team was that this was a critical investment that was required in order to deal with the trauma of the 2008 racial tragedy and the ongoing racial friction on the campus. To deal with institutional racism would require several strategies such as the required integration of the separate black and white residences and the transformation of the institutional culture of the university through the introductions of new symbolisms (Jansen 2020). As part of a package of transformation initiatives, the preparation of student leaders through the Study Abroad initiative was in fact critical to the future stability of the university.
A concern raised by some departments was the intrusion into the normal academic programme. This would require fine-tuned scheduling with overseas universities and special arrangements for the travelling students within the UFS. Fortunately, most of the academic heads in the various departments accommodated the students with assignments and examinations. Nonetheless, a programme of such ambition could clearly not be launched without consideration of the implications for curriculum management.
In this regard, there was a critical balance to be maintained between the programme’s design integrity (unbroken duration as well as pre- and post- trip education) and the accommodation of programme pressures (finances, mainstream curriculum). We were not unaware of the fact that the integrity of the programme was critical to the quality of its outcomes (Hudson & Morgan 2019).
At the same time, the university leadership made the case for academics to think of education much more broadly than simply meeting the requirements of Physics I or Introductory Sociology. That set of arguments would become part of the next set of transformation demands on the academic community at the UFS, the compulsory core curriculum for all incoming first year students.
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