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Professor Derrick Swartz has been appointed as the next Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The announcement was made today (17 August) by NMMU Council chairperson Judge Ronnie Pillay. Prof Swartz is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare. He will take over the reins from Dr Rolf Stumpf, who was appointed as NMMU’s first Vice-Chancellor following the merger of the PE Technikon and the University of Port Elizabeth, incorporating the PE campus of Vista University, in 2005. Prof Swartz will take office at NMMU from 1 January 2008. His appointment, on the recommendation of a representative appointments committee convened by the university Council, was endorsed today by the key university structures of the Institutional Forum and the Senate, and approved by the Council.
“I am pleased that a person of the calibre of Professor Swartz has accepted the position. He comes extremely well recommended with a known affinity for the country’s constitution and its values. He is a prodigy who has been described as capable of taking the university to the next level in relation to its vision of becoming a fully world recognized institution,” Judge Pillay said. Prof Swartz has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare since 1999 and has been widely credited with the university’s academic renewal and financial turnaround, setting the institution on a path of recovery, growth and sustainability. Outside the university, he has played a leading role in transformation and change management in South African higher education in recent years. Prof Swartz is originally from Port Elizabeth, where he worked as a high school teacher in the city between 1982 and 1985. He then worked as a community researcher and project coordinator in the city’s northern areas and was an active political leader during the State of Emergency after 1985, building a network of youth community organisations in the region that led to the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF). During the early 1990s he worked and studied in the United Kingdom, where he made significant contributions to thinking around the management of a post-apartheid civil service in South Africa. He established various capacity-building programmes and exchange visits to the UK for individuals earmarked as future civil servants in post-apartheid South Africa. He founded the Fort Hare Institute of Government in 1995 and built it into the leading public management institute in the Eastern Cape, securing major funding and international partnerships. He was appointed Professor and Chair of Inter-Governmental Relations at Fort Hare in 1998, and as Vice-Chancellor and Principal in 1999. Prof Swartz has actively contributed to change in South African society on a wide front. He was a member of a presidential review commission appointed by then President Nelson Mandela to investigate the functioning of the South African public service in 1996/97. He is a member of the SABC Board, the Liliesleaf (Rivonia) Trust, and the board of Higher Education South Africa. He has served on a strategic advisory team for the Eastern Cape Premier and as a board member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Prof Swartz, 46, has a BA degree from the University of the Western Cape, and MA and DPhil degrees from Essex University in the United Kingdom.
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