By Karla Cloete
Edited by Tasmiyah Randeree & Imaan Moosa
We sat down with Professor Denise Zinn to hear her insights from three decades of working in education.
“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
— Shirley Chisholm, American politician, educator, and author
Rarely do you get a chance to speak to someone who’s sat at as many important tables as Professor Denise Zinn. The 64-year-old Cape Town-born professor, now a resident of Port Elizabeth, was formerly the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Teaching and Learning at Nelson Mandela University, and is currently the Programme Leader for the Women in Leadership Programme at Universities South Africa’s Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) division.
As a young woman, Prof. Zinn didn’t see herself going into teaching; she envisioned a career in medicine, so she undertook a B.Sc at the University of Cape Town. When she didn’t get into the medical program, she found herself in education and quickly realized she was born to teach.
(2014) NMMU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Derrick Swartz is joined by Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Teaching and Learning Prof. Denise Zinn (left) and Lorraine Lawrence (right). Photo: Life at NMMU Blog
She taught high school students for 12 years in Port Elizabeth. In teaching, she felt she used little of what she had been taught during her university studies and instead found herself drawing from the teachers she had as a high school student at Livingstone High School in Cape Town.
During this time, she learned that education is inherently political and that a well-rounded and holistic education means exposing students to the arts, as well as encouraging physical activity. She says:
Our job as teachers was to build and nurture the potential of the students to be the best human beings they can be.
Human beings are able to rise above adversity and be innovative and creative. As a teacher, you need to build and nurture that sense of agency and resilience in your students, and exercise it yourself.
As a veteran academic and key player in shaping a new generation of teachers, she considers that in the South African education system:
Not all schools are created equal.
The inequalities run so deep that merely providing equal resources and funding cannot address the huge deficiencies that many schools suffer in comparison to others. Failing to redress these systemic shortcomings borne out of our country’s turbulent history hinders any form of progress towards equal education.
“At present 80% of our country’s schools – the infrastructure, teachers, and children – remain under-served. Instead of providing more to teachers and schools in these conditions, they were made to cut back – to accommodate terms and conditions set by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, based on research done in first-world conditions. Including reducing and redeploying numbers of teachers, increasing teacher:student ratios, and increasing class sizes to an average of 40.
“In reality, the average hides the fact that in classes taken by everyone – such as languages and others perhaps requiring less specialized teaching – often have upwards of 60 students to one teacher in a class. Good learning cannot happen under such conditions.”
Apart from providing basic infrastructure and decreasing class sizes to accommodate language barriers and learning difficulties, the aid of ‘para-educators’ — such as unemployed matriculants or university students — is needed to help manage these problems arising in the classroom.
Providing technology resources will also facilitate proper training in digital literacy for staff and students.
After spending nearly a decade in the education system, Prof. Zinn says she believed our country was ripe for change. She wanted to make sure this change extended to education.
She received a Masters in Language and Literacy and a Doctoral degree in Teaching, Curriculum and Learning Environments at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. During this time, she served on the Harvard Educational Review board and taught at several universities in the US.
It was time to educate myself to do more, and to train and educate teachers in different ways to build a new educational dispensation. Chris Searle’s book, written in the early ’80s at the height of liberatory optimism in Angola after freedom was won there, was called ‘We’re Building the New School’. I felt we could do the same in SA.
Upon her return to South Africa, she moved into higher education. Her track record speaks for itself, spanning almost three decades in several leadership positions in the higher education system.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Nelson Mandela University
Executive Dean for two terms, one at Fort Hare and one at NMU
Senior Lecturer at Rhodes University and Programme Leader
She has served on numerous boards including the Universities South Africa (USAf) DVC Academics’ Forum, Education Deans Forum, Educational Support Services Trust, the Umalusi Council, Nelson Mandela Centre for Rural Education, Equal Education, and HERS-SA, to name a few.
Prof. Zinn says she never had an explicit interest in leadership, yet without her knowing she’d always found herself in leadership roles since her days as a young woman: prefect, head girl, founder and chair of the SRC, founder and chair of the EP high schools drama association, and actively leading in civic and community organizations when she was a teacher.
All her time and work lecturing and acting as an educational consultant taught her a lifetime’s worth of lessons. The more time she spent in senior leadership, the more conscious she became of the power of leadership to initiate and implement. She nurtured this potential by enrolling in courses and doing research into leadership; how leadership could shape both people and institutions.
She declined the position of dean at Fort Hare when it was first offered to her because she was not sure she could do it. Two years later when the chair was found empty again, she felt ready to take her seat at the table.
You might have recently read my fellow content writer Humairaa Mayet’s article on the gender gap in universities. We also wanted to ask Prof. Zinn about this glass ceiling that she and other women academics may have hit their heads on.
According to Prof. Zinn, the reasons we see so few women higher up in leadership positions in education are complex and multifaceted.
The story begins here. Women and men entering into academia as junior lecturers, in their mid-twenties with their honors and master's degrees in tow, are expected to teach big classes and churn out research in order to ‘earn their stripes’. The next step is getting their doctoral degrees which require a great deal of dedicated research time. Here, Prof. Zinn believes, is where women face disadvantages.
Given the continued patriarchal conditions, mores and beliefs that exist in our society, women take on the bigger responsibility or burden of home and childcare.
While men in this stage often move from being supported by their own parents, particularly mothers (or grandmothers or guardians) to being supported by their partners, women take on additional responsibilities on top of their workloads and expectations related to setting up home and family.
When you are a wife, mother, and an academic simultaneously, each role comes with its own privileges, joys, and responsibilities. Unfortunately, due to the unequal distribution of labor at home, many women with such aspirations struggle to move into leadership without the prerequisite doctorate.
Prof. Zinn says institutions of higher learning fail to account for at-home responsibilities women have outside of their careers, in both practicality and policies when they do not provide support like childcare to women, and limit the cut-off age for postdoctoral opportunities and applications to 35.
Claudia Goldin, a professor in economics from Harvard, notes that this problem is systemic in a recent interview with the New York Times:
“In practice, the man is often the designated career maximizer, while the woman sacrifices career advancement for the sake of family. Both are deprived. Men forgo time with family; women forgo career.”
This not only impacts a young academic’s career but also the way they view the worth of their own contributions to the field.
There, probably most veiled but palpably felt, is the culture of patriarchal or masculine norms that pervades academic spaces, which places women’s ways of being, knowing, and doing constantly on the back foot, unaccepted, frowned upon, questioned – creating an imposter syndrome and sense of not truly belonging in the space of higher education leadership.
Photo: HERS SA.org
Contributing to this is the internal, psychological sense of being not sufficient, not belonging, and being an imposter, from which so many women suffer, and consciously have to counter.
So, when we want more women in leadership positions in higher education, the solutions Prof. Zinn proposes are as complex and multifaceted as the problems.
This includes policies that are cognizant of women’s life and work cycles, childcare, rescinding age caps, and introducing flexible working hours that accommodate for research after hours and during the workday.
In addition, the inclusion of funding should be allocated to build capacity, coaching, and awareness for both genders. Most importantly, mentorship opportunities should be made accessible and abundant to young women.
The [hardest challenge] will be to raise awareness about the insidious ways in which the male-oriented culture and norms in higher education dominate, and that alternative, more inclusive thinking, practices, and norms need to be deliberatively named and fostered.
Getting a seat at the table is hard work and doing the job is even more so. Women are often underestimated no matter how qualified they are.
“Women are treated differently. They are not taken as seriously; their credentials have to be exemplary and near to perfect to be considered for the same positions; they are often not listened to; they are challenged more often and they are treated more often with disrespect by students and even some staff.
“They are often expected to adopt a mothering role towards students and staff. This is not expected of men. When women are assertive or even firm, they are considered aggressive; they’re expected to always be smiling and soft.”
Women offer a range of dynamic and diverse perspectives, ideologies, and praxes — in addition to their “natural and unique sensibilities and awarenesses” — from the ways in which they are socialized to the “complex environment” of higher education. For these reasons, it’s important to have more women at the table who can challenge and change this archaic system.
Prof. Zinn says since women make up half the population, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be equitably reflected in leadership.
“The missing equitable percentage of women in university leadership deprives the university of the potential women offers into these spaces. Leadership, in general, is diminished by their absence, even though this is not necessarily recognized because the system is so used to working with a majority of males in leadership.”
Prof. Zinn is proof of the progress being made in higher education. Her hard work and accomplishments are astounding and she is an exemplar of the women before her and an example for younger women to learn from.
If we stay on the right track, generations of women to come will not have to fight the same fights and make the same sacrifices to be where she is now.
It’s time to effect the change we have long been striving for. In the words of Elizabeth Warren: “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.”
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