Rhodes to research 'academic drift'

RHODES University has bagged a National Research Foundation grant worth nearly R700000 to study South Africa's fraught academic space.

The university's Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning will oversee the project.

This will see seven academics from across South Africa undertaking doctoral studies to probe the uneven nature of the country's 23 institutions of higher learning in terms of context and structure. Rhodes doctoral programme coordinator Professor Sioux McKenna, who is spearheading the initiative, said: "I applied for the grant at the end of November last year and heard back from the foundation at the end of February. - Xolisa Phillip