It all began in 1979,when historian Jane Carruthers received her Unisa letter of appointment informing her that she would begin working in the university’s history departmentin January 1980. Unbeknown to her and to Unisa, that moment would become the beginning of a remarkable journey, and a relationship that would span 32 years, impacting a diverse group of people in various ways.
Historian Jane Carruthers retires from Unisa.
In the last three decades, Professor Carruthers has seen Unisa transform from a university focused on tutoring and very little research, to one that has become a leading African open distance learning (ODL) university with a strong on emphasis on community engagement, teaching and research.
She has marked thousands of exam scripts and assessed many assignments, and not only has she pioneered the discipline of environmental history in South Africa, she has also become prominent internationally in this field. Being appointed to Fellowships in many organisations and universities worldwide, Carruthers has also compiled one of the most impressive curriculum vitae (40 pages), one that, according to Professor Russel Viljoen, current head of Unisa’s history department, “she can be very proud of, and one that I’m sure many academics envy”.
As one of South Africa’s first environmental historians, Carruthers has published widely on this topic, but she has also dedicated her time to other fields of research such as the history of science, colonial art, cartography and comparative Australian-South Africa history. She obtained her BA degree in 1966 from the University of Cape Town, where she also obtained her PhD in 1988. Her BA (Hons) and Masters’ degrees were obtained from Unisa in 1975 and 1980 respectively.
Carruthers says while she officially bids farewell to Unisa in 2012, her love for history, particularly environmental history, research and writing will not come to an end, as her plans for retirement focus largely on projects relating to these aspects.
“Retirement is a big step in anyone’s life – a readjustment in all kinds of ways – although perhaps for an academic obsessed with research and writing who can continue to do both, it is less of a severance from work and fulfilment than it is for many other professions,” she comments.
Carruthers on Unisa’s impact as an ODL institution
As she reflects back on her time and experiences at Unisa, Carruthers describes the university as an “extremely nurturing environment”. The opportunity, she says, to make a difference, to educate people – especially adults – who would otherwise not be able to obtain a higher education because they live in a remote area, or are in full-time employment, has been extremely fulfilling.
“Unisa’s teaching methods suit someone like myself who loves writing, because the written presentation of ‘lectures’ by way of study guides and brief group visits is demanding in a different way from a live presentation which is the norm at other universities. In addition, the chance to make a tangible improvement to a large number of lives through education and the acquisition of useful knowledge – whether or not the student completes the degree – in a country like South Africa is a privilege. The impact of the internet and web-teaching has been extremely exciting.”
Distance teaching, says Carruthers, also comes with the ability to plan one’s time, so that there are windows of days, and even weeks, in which to do research that would be impossible were one tied to a daily regular lecture schedule or if one had to find a substitute lecturer. “I have always tried to make the most of this flexibility, together with Unisa’s generous funding for conferences and study periods abroad. This benefit has also enabled me to contribute to many professional committees and scholarly organisations.”
There can also be no doubt that in the last three decades, Carruthershas impacted on, and shaped the lives of many students, staff and academics. “I have tried, and strived, to impact as many lives as I could, and have sometimes been successful. I have received many letters and emails along these lines over the years. This is the kind of reward that makes a professional life worthwhile and demonstrates that one is effective.”
Research at Unisa
Being one of the highest rated NRF researchers at Unisa (B1), Carruthers speaks on Unisa’s path going forward regarding research. She says during her years as an undergraduate at UCT, she learnt that “an institution is not a university unless teaching and research are an equal partnership, that creative thought and liberal views against racism and other forms of inequality are hallmarks of life, and that the intellectual community is a global one”.
“It was therefore very disappointing to join Unisa in 1980 and confront a very different and narrow philosophy that was masculine, Afrikaner nationalist, celebrated the parochial and that focussed on minutiae. I am therefore extremely pleased that government and the NRF have made it imperative that academic measurement – even at Unisa – is predicated upon measuring and rewarding research that reaches beyond the local. While student curricula at an institution like Unisa are necessarily constrained by resources, technology, and onerous administrative processes, individual and committed research and writing is how scholars take flight.”
Technology and the future of History
Carruthers says in recent years student numbers for history have declined everywhere and historical studies has been reconfigured. “It has become truly multi-disciplinary and, I think, this has expanded our understanding and resulted in stimulating new books and journal articles. One of the exciting projects that I have been involved in was as a commissioning editor of the Dictionary of Transnational History that has provided a benchmark for a fresh direction to the discipline internationally.”
Historians, says Carruthers, have been obliged to think more broadly and to consider innovative sources, new intellectual connections and forms of evidence. “I would also say that collaborative work is a hallmark of present historiography and that this will increase in the future. Lone historians in ivory towers are likely to become fewer. Multi-disciplinary and collaborative history makes possible thematic research agendas that span centuries and regions – a history of terrorism for example – of war and violence, of climate, of resource extraction that has gained us understanding, perspective and context.”
The internet has played a big part in modern historical knowledge and research – not only Google and Wikipedia but online journals and library catalogues, Google scholar, and citation indexes, says Carruthers. Other technology, she continues, like email, sms, Skype conversations with remote colleagues, endnote and similar programs, data management, document scanning and so forth will, I am sure, improve in the years to come and continue to transform both teaching and research.
“I would hope that historians in South Africa find a higher public profile in forthcoming years by reaching out to new audiences instead of bemoaning the loss of our traditional ones. There are only a few really good historians who work on policy issues, write for newspapers and appear on television or assist with historical movie series. We should be doing more. I decry historians who engage with the public either in terms of simplistic platitudes such as ‘heritage and the past are important’ but don’t expand on this, or by way of complex jargon unintelligible to a layman.
“We need to move on because both those approaches close conversations rather than open them. Moreover, because I have been exposed to many natural scientists and their work in my own recent projects, I have become aware of how little even eminent professional, well educated non-historians – scientists, bureaucrats, businessmen, sociologists and journalists – know about history as a discipline. Many, many people use history so we should be advocating good history, writing it, articulating it and positioning it as more than a random chronology or idiosyncratic selection from the past. We need more arguments, hypotheses and emphasise – and explain clearly – the importance of critically evaluating evidence. We professionals know all this but I am not sure that we convey it adequately and make others aware of the exciting, relevant discipline that it is,” concluded Carruthers.
Proof that once an academic, always an academic can be found in Professor Jane Carruthers’ plans for retirement (these are the activities she says she is most looking forward to):
- To continue to research and write for as long as I can, and I have a number of articles and collaborative projects in the pipeline for the next three or four years,
- I will be co-leader for a group of students from Melbourne, Australia, visiting Mpumalanga in January 2013 to learn about sustainability and sustainable development in southern Africa,
- I am writing a book on the history of scientific research in South Africa’s national parks that should be completed around the end of 2014,
- I will be presenting a paper at the Savanna Science Network Conference in the Kruger National Park in March 2013,
- I will give the keynote address at the Southern African Historical Society conference in Gaborone in June 2013,
- There is a ‘festschrift’ conference to be held in my honour in Munich during the European Society of Environmental History Conference in August 2013 and I will present a paper at the ESEH conference thereafter,
- I am organising a World Congress of Environmental History (around 800 delegates) at the University of Minho (Northern Portugal) in 2014, and
- I will remain on all the editorial boards and professional and scholarly committees that I currently contribute to.
