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ALUMNI E-NEWSLETTER | ISSUE 7/DECEMBER 2013
Contact the Alumni Relations Office: Tel: +27 21 959 2143 | Fax: 021 959 9791 | Email: alumni@uwc.ac.za | www.uwc.ac.za/alumni http://twitter.com/UWConline | http://www.facebook.com/uwcalumni
Alumni struggle acknowledged The 60s and 70s UWC Alumni Reunion in October was no ordinary event. It was a weekend for the University’s founding graduates to reunite and swap stories with old friends, some sad, some wonderful and funny. But the event also gave the institution an opportunity to honour the contributions of former students to the University and to society in general. In his opening address, UWC Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian O’Connell, credited the founding graduates of the University with having saved it from being merged with another institution. O’Connell told attendees that, when UWC was R140 million in the red about 10 years ago, the government’s National Working Group on the restructuring of higher education concluded that it could not function on its own and recommended that the institution be merged with the then Peninsula Technikon
(Pentech). UWC's management opposed the merger, arguing that it would erase UWC's historical role in the struggle against the apartheid regime. O’Connell said to the former students: “You saved UWC because the core response of this university to the National Working Group was ‘just look at our legacy, what we did in the 1960s and 1970s. How dare you take away our name and that history?’” O’Connell added that, through the efforts of these alumni and the generations that followed, UWC far surpassed its origins as an apartheid-era 'university college for coloured students' to become the premier trainer in South Africa in the fields of teaching, nursing, dentistry, physiotherapy and pharmacy and a leader in many fields of research. UWC’s first black rector, Prof Richard van der Ross, expressed “extreme appreciation” for the event and called on alumni not to forget the ancestors who “brought us to where we are today”. PAGE ONE
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