Associate Professor Lis Lange’s term of office began on 1 February 2018.

Profile

Lange joined UCT from the University of the Free State (UFS), where she has held the same position. Before that she headed UFS’s Institutional and Academic Planning and Research Department from 2011 to 2014. She was an executive director for the Higher Education Quality Committee in the Council on Higher Education (CHE) from 2006 to 2010 and was acting CEO of the CHE from 2007 to 2008. During her service in the CHE, she secured funding for research projects on higher education from the following international funders: Fulbright, Nuffic, Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation.

Lange was born in Argentina and is a permanent resident in South Africa. She earned a BA(Hons) in history from the University of Buenos Aires in 1984, an MA in African studies from El Colegio de Mexico in 1988, and a PhD in history from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1998.

Lange’s research interests focus on the philosophy and politics of education. She has done research on change in higher education as well as on the meanings and possibilities of the notion of transformation, especially at curricular level. Her current work is on higher education curriculum and pedagogy in the context of the call for decolonisation of the curriculum.

She has participated on a number of national task teams of higher education, including

• University Fees, Council on Higher Education, 2016
• Transfer of the Colleges of Agriculture from the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries to the Department of Higher Education and Training, 2016
• Funding of Higher Education, Department of Higher Education and Training, 2012
• Consensus Group on the Humanities, South African Academy of Science, 2009–2010
• Quality of Academic Journals, South African Academy of Sciences, 2006–2008.

Lange is the author of White, Poor and Angry: White working class families in Johannesburg (Ashgate, UK, 2003) and co-editor with Leonhard Praeg of #MustFall: Understanding the moment (UKZN University Press, forthcoming 2018). A small sampling of the policy research she has conducted on South African higher education includes, among other reports

• “Teaching and learning beyond formal access: Assessment through the looking glass” (Higher Education Monitor, No 10, 2010)
• “Access and throughput in South Africa: Three case studies, 2006–2008” (Higher Education Monitor, No 9, 2010)
• “Postgraduate studies in South Africa: A statistical profile” (Higher Education Monitor, No 7, 2009).

Portfolio responsibilities

• Teaching and Learning