Global universities gather in Cape Town for historic first

Cape Town is hosting the 14th annual Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, and for the first time in its history the meeting is being held on African soil. The three-day gathering opened at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on Tuesday, 29 September, under the banner “Knowledge, justice and futures: Universities in the age of intelligence”. Its hosts, the University of Cape Town, ranked as Africa’s top university, and the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol, have drawn higher education leaders from around the world to a question with everyday stakes: what do universities owe the societies they serve?

For ordinary citizens across the continent, those stakes are not abstract. Africa will, by the middle of this century, be home to the largest young population on Earth. Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer of Times Higher Education, told delegates that the continent’s laboratories, libraries and lecture halls will help shape everyone’s future, not only Africa’s. Choosing the Mother City, he argued, was not a symbolic gesture.

“The future of higher education will not be written only in Oxford, Beijing and Bristol,” Baty said. “It will be written here too.” He added that no serious conversation about the future of global higher education can happen without Africa at its very centre.

The summit’s theme points directly at issues that reach far beyond campus walls. According to Baty, the age of intelligence refers not just to artificial intelligence, but to a period in which the value of knowledge itself is being tested: tested by mistrust, and tested by inequality of access. Those are conditions that determine who gets to benefit from research and learning, and who is left behind. His hope, he said, is that delegates can hold two things at once: ambition for research that changes lives, and collaboration that keeps flowing north and south equally.

Professor Mosa Moshabela, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, opened the summit by reaching for an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” He explained its relevance by pointing to the togetherness required to convene a meeting of this scale, and to the pressures pulling the world apart: geopolitics causing division, fragmentation and polarisation, the temptation to close borders and keep others out, and marginalisation even within higher education itself.

Moshabela was candid about the challenges Africa faces. He agreed with Baty that the continent’s fast-growing young population is guaranteed to contribute and impact the world positively, but noted that education, employment and economic opportunities remain limited. What matters, he told delegates, is using the summit to find ways to mitigate and overcome those constraints. He framed the search for solutions as deliberately wide in direction.

“We are looking to learn from many of our colleagues across the globe. Colleagues from Europe, from the Americas, colleagues from Asia,” he said. “We will look to the west, we will look to the east to find answers that can help us uplift the students we serve, uplift our societies and communities, and uplift our continent.”

Meanwhile, the collaborative spirit that carried the summit to Cape Town was months in the making. “We [UCT] are very proud [to be co-hosting the summit]. I also want to express my gratitude to our partner, the University of Bristol,” Moshabela said, adding that the two institutions had travelled the journey over many months to make the meeting happen. He expressed gratitude that Times Higher Education had recognised the importance of bringing the summit to the continent.

The opening session itself carried a distinctly local character, featuring an African musical performance by UCT’s South African College of Music, a reminder that the meeting’s host city is part of its message.

Professor Evelyn Welch, vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, described this year’s summit as a “very special one”, both for its location and because the global community of educators is beginning to have hard, challenging and optimistic conversations about the sector. She pointed to the role of voices beyond academia, noting that industry partners as well as regional and civic partners will add valuable input to discussions on the sector’s responsibility and accountability to develop bright futures and deliver justice in the age of intelligence.

Welch reminded delegates that the world faces an array of challenges, and that institutions and the higher education sector cannot face them alone. Her closing thought captured the gathering’s wager: “But somehow I can see that by coming together we will not just achieve more, we will become so much more.”

For the students, communities and societies that universities ultimately serve, the conversations in Cape Town over these three days will test whether that optimism can be turned into fairer access, better opportunity and futures shaped with the continent, not merely for it.