Johannesburg – In the afternoon of the last Friday of November 2021, Mr Tilson Manyoni, the chairperson of the Council of the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), telephoned to inform me that the council had resolved to appoint me as principal and vice-chancellor of TUT.
After a long and heavy pause, I expressed my gratitude for the confidence of the TUT council in entrusting me with this great responsibility.
I am under no illusions about how challenging it is going to be to lead the leading university of technology in Africa.
But, what a privilege it is to be allowed to play a part in the ongoing transformation of this already highly esteemed institution.
I have accepted the responsibility with bold humility, but also with absolute determination.
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TUT has already proven that it has a key role to play in the production of the hustler graduates of whom I wrote last week.
Look around you and you will find TUT hustler graduates everywhere, in every sector, shaking and moving things forward. Becoming a hustler graduate is first and foremost an attitude of mind that says, I must find a job quick, but if I don’t, I will invent one.
From the first day of the first year, the potential hustler graduate targets work, not graduation, as their initial end goal.
Skilled enough to easily bag a conventional day job within or outside the discipline of their training, what sets hustler graduates apart is their ability to create work for themselves, including work that has never existed before.
Hustler graduates are shapers of work in the future and creators of the future of work.
More than two decades ago, when I landed my first academic job as a two-days-per-week research assistant, I had no clue what a hustler graduate was.
That job was but one of three jobs which I was juggling across the week at that time. In those days, I believed that my US master’s degree, of which I was most proud, was a licence to juggle. So I shuffled as many jobs as was necessary to put bread on the table. In my own small way, I was an anonymous hustler graduate.
You see, I am not that kid who was consumed with the single ambition of becoming an academic when he grew up. There were no tangible role models to nudge me in that direction. Not within my extended family in Limpopo. And not in my Soweto hood of Meadowlands.
But between my feisty maternal grandmother and my pedantic father, I was schooled in the ethic of salvation through hard work and the pursuit of perfection.
The closest I came to tangible academic expertise was from the Marivates, a family that boasted medical doctors, professors, teachers and school principals.
During my primary education in Valdezia, Limpopo, where the Marivates originate, they were held up as examples worth emulating.
But I and my fellow students surmised the Marivates had a special education gene. So how did I, a black South African, born and bred under the shadow of the apartheid system, end up burning the years of my youth on a PhD by the time I was 33, an associate professorship at 36 and a full professorship at 38?
I guess, deep down, I never believed the myth about the Marivate education gene.
The truth is, I drew and have continued to draw inspiration from their example.
Thanks to such inspirational educators as the late Curtis Nkondo and DZJ Mtebule, my principals at Lamola Jubilee Secondary School in Meadowlands and Bankuna High School in Tzaneen, respectively, I started to believe that through education, I could be anything I wanted to be.
Through the instruction and example of the likes of Dr Khoza Mgojo, Dr Simon Gqubule, Prof Bonganjalo Goba, Dr Jean-François Bill and Prof David Bosch, among many others, I fell in love with knowledge creation. So impressive was my research, teaching and supervision profile, the University of Natal leap-frogged me from lectureship at Unisa to associate professorship.
Two years later, Unisa hired me back as full professor.
Since then, I have served in such executive management positions as executive dean, executive director for research, deputy registrar, deputy vice-chancellor and adviser to vice-chancellor at three of our top universities.
Here I am today, willing and able to take leadership of the largest and most dynamic university of hustler graduates – the Tshwane University of Technology.
• Professor Maluleke is the principal and vice-chancellor-designate of the Tshwane University of Technology. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko.
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