CHET - Wynberg

The seed for a Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) was incubated in what Dick Fehnel called the ‘coffee grounds of Braamfontein’. During that percolating period of the mid-1990s Braamfontein was being rejuvenated by the anti-apartheid NGOs, in close proximity to the post–apartheid development aid agencies, and the still politically incorrect but ever present, Wits University. The idea for CHET received its political approval in mid-1996 at a Magaliesburg retreat which was attended by a plethora of ‘new heavy weights’ – Sibusiso Bengu, Blade Nzimande, Sipho Pityana, Nasima Badsha and Naledi Pandor. From the very start there was a negotiated tension between two possible configurations for CHET – as a capacity-building agency (the funder view) and as a  

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policy/research organisation (it was evident that policy development was not going to end with the National Commission on Higher Education). As with the outcome of the ‘implicit bargain’ between the African National Congress and the National Party in the early 1990s, CHET’s work would be both empirical and symbolic. The first tranche of funding for CHET from the Ford and Kellogg Foundations arrived prior to the completion of the NCHE. Thus, in order for the Executive Officer and the Research Director of the NCHE to complete the NCHE report and establish CHET, the first offices were located close to the NCHE offices in the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) building in Pretoria. CHET was launched with the moral, and some infrastructure, support from the then president of the HSRC, Rolf Stumpf.