Our mission
Our mission is to be an outstanding teaching and research university, educating for life and addressing the challenges facing our society.
Educating for life means that our educational process must provide:
- a foundation of skills, knowledge and versatility that will last a life-time, despite a changing environment
- research-based teaching and learning
- critical enquiry in the form of the search for new knowledge and better understanding, and
- an active developmental role in our cultural, economic, political, scientific and social environment.
Addressing the challenges facing our society means that we must come to terms with our past, be cognisant of the present, and plan for the future.
In this, it is central to our mission that we:
- recognise our location in Africa and our historical context
- claim our place in the international community of scholars
- strive to transcend the legacy of apartheid in South Africa and to overcome all forms of gender and other oppressive discrimination
- be flexible on access, active in redress, and rigorous on success
- promote equal opportunity and the full development of human potential
- strive for inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration and synergy, and
- value and promote the contribution that all our members make to realising our mission.
To equip people with life-long skills we must and will:
- promote the love of learning, the skill of solving problems, and the spirit of critical enquiry and research, and
- take excellence as the bench-mark for all we do.
We are committed to academic freedom, critical scholarship, rational and creative thought, and free enquiry. It is part of our mission to ensure that these ideals live; this necessarily requires a dynamic process of finding the balance between freedom and responsibility, rights and obligations, autonomy and accountability, transparency and efficiency, and permanence and transience; and of doing this through consultation and debate.
This Mission Statement was formulated by a Working Group of the University Transformation Forum and was affirmed and adopted at a University Assembly on April 24, 1996