Success for Whom? | Making Sure Every Student Belongs
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SU Student Success Initiative Series: Episode Seven.
Recorded on Thursday 3 September 2026.
Two students can sit in the same lecture hall, hand in the same assignment, and walk out with completely different senses of whether they belong there. This conversation asks whose definition of student success the university is actually working with, who is expected to change to fit it, and which students stay invisible inside it.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the seventh of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Prof. Deresh Ramjugernath, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of Stellenbosch University; Prof. Ronelle Carolissen, clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology and a past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa; Dr Wade Cafun, adviser in the Centre for Teaching and Learning; and Allison Mlitwa, Adviser: Quality Assurance in the Centre for Academic Planning and Quality Assurance.
What we cover in this episode:
- The Rector on the whole picture: Prof. Ramjugernath sets out what student success means institutionally, how the university contributes to it, and what he most wants students to take from their time here beyond the qualification and the graduate attributes.
- What belonging feels like, or fails to: Prof. Carolissen's research centres the psychosocial experiences of black students at historically white universities. She unpacks what decolonial and feminist work actually means when it reaches a first-year lecture or an assessment rubric — and how care shows up, or does not, in something as ordinary as feedback on an essay.
- Where transformation still goes wrong: Even with the right policies on paper, Prof. Carolissen argues, something is not landing. She names the one structural change that would move the needle at SU, as distinct from another awareness campaign.
- Whose success are we measuring? Dr Cafun asks whose definition of success is in play, who is expected to change, and which students remain invisible. He also makes the case that when a module produces poor results, that is often a signal about the curriculum or the classroom rather than about the students in it.
- Social justice inside a hard discipline: What 'discipline integration' looks like in practice, why it affects whether a student feels they belong in a subject at all, and where a lecturer in a technical field would start tomorrow. The underlying claim: inclusive assessment is just good assessment, done honestly.
- Data that gets collected and then ignored: Allison Mlitwa on how quality assurance measures whether inclusive teaching, learning and assessment is genuinely happening, the risk that equity data never gets acted on, and what a self-evaluation report would have to show before she believed it rather than ticked it.
- The blind spot: With a view across the whole institution, Allison names what South African universities currently miss in how they define and measure student success.
With A1 season under way, the panel also share their advice on test preparation and staying focused.
Where to find support:
SU website: https://www.su.ac.za/en/students/success
Recorded on Thursday 3 September 2026.
Two students can sit in the same lecture hall, hand in the same assignment, and walk out with completely different senses of whether they belong there. This conversation asks whose definition of student success the university is actually working with, who is expected to change to fit it, and which students stay invisible inside it.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the seventh of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Prof. Deresh Ramjugernath, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of Stellenbosch University; Prof. Ronelle Carolissen, clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology and a past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa; Dr Wade Cafun, adviser in the Centre for Teaching and Learning; and Allison Mlitwa, Adviser: Quality Assurance in the Centre for Academic Planning and Quality Assurance.
What we cover in this episode:
- The Rector on the whole picture: Prof. Ramjugernath sets out what student success means institutionally, how the university contributes to it, and what he most wants students to take from their time here beyond the qualification and the graduate attributes.
- What belonging feels like, or fails to: Prof. Carolissen's research centres the psychosocial experiences of black students at historically white universities. She unpacks what decolonial and feminist work actually means when it reaches a first-year lecture or an assessment rubric — and how care shows up, or does not, in something as ordinary as feedback on an essay.
- Where transformation still goes wrong: Even with the right policies on paper, Prof. Carolissen argues, something is not landing. She names the one structural change that would move the needle at SU, as distinct from another awareness campaign.
- Whose success are we measuring? Dr Cafun asks whose definition of success is in play, who is expected to change, and which students remain invisible. He also makes the case that when a module produces poor results, that is often a signal about the curriculum or the classroom rather than about the students in it.
- Social justice inside a hard discipline: What 'discipline integration' looks like in practice, why it affects whether a student feels they belong in a subject at all, and where a lecturer in a technical field would start tomorrow. The underlying claim: inclusive assessment is just good assessment, done honestly.
- Data that gets collected and then ignored: Allison Mlitwa on how quality assurance measures whether inclusive teaching, learning and assessment is genuinely happening, the risk that equity data never gets acted on, and what a self-evaluation report would have to show before she believed it rather than ticked it.
- The blind spot: With a view across the whole institution, Allison names what South African universities currently miss in how they define and measure student success.
With A1 season under way, the panel also share their advice on test preparation and staying focused.
Where to find support:
SU website: https://www.su.ac.za/en/students/success
