On 10 February, 115 years ago in 1908 in a very different time, the University of Pretoria (UP) or TUKS (Transvaalse Universiteitskollege) as it was called then, opened its doors to 32 students and four professors at a house in Skinner Street, Pretoria, now Nana Sita Street.

Today, UP is a community of around 56 000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, of which 4 000 are international students from 36 countries, representing a wonderfully diverse range of cultures. We have seven campuses, nine internationally recognised faculties and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).

As we celebrate our birthday, we take pride in being a leading research-intensive university, ranked in the top 1% of universities worldwide in 13 fields. We are ranked in the top 100 universities worldwide in veterinary science, theology and law by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022, while our Department of Zoology and Entomology is ranked 45th in the world for its research and impact by the University Ranking by Academic Performance 2020/ 2021. Veterinary Sciences is ranked in the top 50 and is one of a kind in South Africa.

A phenomenal 70% of our lecturers have doctoral degrees and in 2022, UP's undergraduate students achieved an average of 85% and above. In these very difficult economic times, 97% of UP’s employed graduates started working within six months of completing their studies, and the University have well over 300 000 alumni working in 118 countries worldwide.

Globalised and future-oriented in our approach, we launched the Centre for the Future of Work in May 2022 to reimagine what the workplace of the future will look like. We have also invested in a range of robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to offer our students 21^st century immersive learning experiences, such as a virtual mine for our engineering students.

Equally essential to the future of work is entrepreneurship – recognised worldwide as a critical component of higher education today. A free online entrepreneurship course is available to all our students, while our business incubator, TuksNovation, provides world-class technology development and entrepreneurial support for start-ups.

Digitalisation defines our world and over 95% of our undergraduate programmes are online to supplement face-to-face learning. All our campuses have WiFi and we are the first university in Africa to implement Blackboard Ally to make digital courses more accessible to all students. In addition, we have a new and growing offering of 100% online postgraduate qualifications, starting with public health and public management.

In every sector we are producing strong, well-educated, well-rounded leaders, which our country and world urgently needs in these times of disruption, uncertainty and global challenges as expressed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Africa Agenda 2063, and South Africa’s National Development Plan. UP treats these challenges as a priority, with education innovation and research as the bedrock of sustainable development. As the UP’s Vice-Chancellor says: “Show me a country where the people are uneducated and unskilled and it is a sustainable country. There is none and there is a good reason for this. Funding education is the sustainability of our society.”

UP’s 2022 – 2026 Strategic Plan is focused on accelerating the growth of a thriving, sustainable university through the maximisation of operational efficiencies, cost-containment, the optimisation of all income streams and the growth of partnerships collaborations and transdisciplinary alliances. This includes local and global academic institutions, research networks, industries, communities, governments and non-governmental entities.

International collaborations

UP’s current international profile consists of 230 institution-wide international partnerships with collaborators in more than 50 countries across six continents. We are a member of the prestigious Worldwide Universities Network, a global higher education network of 24 leading comprehensive research universities.

At number of recently established transdisciplinary collaborative platforms at the University serve to co-create new knowledge that translates into solutions for society. These include:

• The Future Africa Campus – a transdisciplinary research hub that aims to become a pan-African space for thinking, research and learning to tackle the seemingly intractable, complex, complicated and intersectional continental problems;
• Engineering 4.0 – a collaborative hub for Smart Cities and Smart Transport;
• Innovation Africa @UP – integrating natural and agricultural sciences, technology and innovation; and
• Javett-UP Art Centre – focusing on the importance of Africa and its art.

In February 2023 we hosted the United States-Africa University Partnership Initiative (UPI) Summit at the Future Africa Campus. The summit was a platform to share experiences and lessons from the US State Department’s investments in collaborative projects between African and United States higher education institutions. It also explored approaches to expand these partnerships to create a more sustainable impact on society in the post-COVID era.

In January 2023, the first partnership of the year was the launch of the Maarif Centre for Turkish Studies (MCTS) at UP. Turkey is one of South Africa’s largest trade and investment partners in Central and Eastern Europe, and South Africa is Turkey’s largest trade and investment partner in sub-Saharan Africa. The two countries closely cooperate in scientific research.

Community engagement and student support

At UP, about 30 000 or 45% of our students are directly involved in community projects and practical work as part of their curriculum. And more than 130 of our student organisations are involved in voluntary social responsibility projects.

Community engagement and social responsibility is a core role and responsibility of higher education, and this is a global trend. Currently, UP is the only African university on the global University Social Responsiveness Network (USRN) – an international group of the top 15 universities in the world in this field.

We have several high school learner engagement programmes in disadvantaged communities to ensure that greater numbers of matric learners achieve access to UP and other higher education institutions.

To track student performance at UP and identify students in need of assistance, we have student success dashboards and we have a comprehensive programme to support the academic, social and psychological development of our students from the first year.

UP pursues a thoroughly holistic approach to education, which includes sport, art and culture. The University is Africa’s premier sports performance university, with many of our athletes succeeding on national and global sport arenas. We offer a stimulating range of arts and culture activities including UP’s music programme, the largest in South Africa.

In synopsis, life at UP in 2023 is about excellence, perseverance, respect, creativity, innovation, diversity, growth, kindness, making a difference and making every day matter. And so, as we celebrate 115 years of UP, we see how far we have come from that little house in Skinner Street. Not in their wildest imaginings could the professors and students from that time have conceived of how UP would develop and evolve into the magnificent, diverse, global institution it is today.

Happy birthday UP!