UJ’s new youthful ‘guy next door’

Young people do not need to be inspired by abstract notions of role modelling. Show them someone within touching distance from them and you’d have done them a good deed indeed. One such role model is Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, the incoming vice-chancellor at the University of Johannesburg.

At a “youthly” 47, they sure make professors and university principals younger these days. He is a highly decorated engineer but makes the subject real, not a high fallutin’ concept of bombastic words. He acquired the vast majority of his degrees magna cum laude, yet he still speaks like the guy next door, not a high and mighty academic….more