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ALUMNI E-NEWSLETTER | ISSUE 8/MARCH 2014
Contact the Alumni Relations Office: Amanda Philander-Hietala, Contact the Alumni Alumni Relations Relations Manager Office: Tel: +27 21 959 2143 | Fax: 021 959 9791 | Email: alumni@uwc.ac.za | www.uwc.ac.za/alumni http://twitter.com/UWCAlumni http://twitter.com/UWConline | http://www.facebook.com/uwcalumni
UWC: Building an impressive PhD legacy
81 Pursuing a Higher Design UWC was established to train lower to middle level civil servants and schoolteachers to serve a separated Coloured community. Fifty years on, it has become admired for its cultural diversity and is an internationally recognised research institution. According to the University web ranking, UWC is rated the sixth best in South Africa, seventh in Africa, and in the top 10% in the world for its scientific research. As Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian O’Connell often puts it, “the Nationalist Party government took from Coloured people the opportunity to develop competencies in maths and science by giving them schooling of low standards. Producing large numbers of postgraduate students in a wide range of disciplines was obviously not part of the design.” Since the late Frank Jones Quint blazed the trail in 1969 with his PhD in education, hundreds more have followed. The University saw its first female PhDs in 1991 when Wendy Joy Flanagan, Adele
Gordon and Aletta Elizabeth Todt graduated, while Charles Mandlenkosi Dlamini became the first black African PhD graduate in 1995. A record 81 doctorates were awarded in 2013. In addition, the University's state-of-the-art Life Sciences building attracted 96 postdoctoral researchers from around the world last year. Our staff and doctoral researchers have made significant contributions to science, including ground-breaking research in alternative energy, indigenous pharmacology and medical science. “These have changed the consciousness of the world about UWC," O’Connell says. "UWC is being recognised as a serious research institution. We have become a metaphor for what is possible without resources.” “This struggle university is a place to show the rest of the country that science is not alien to us. It is not something that belongs to white people, it belongs to us too but we were kept away from it.” PAGE ONE
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