We arranged to interview Professor Adam Habib for SOAS World to find out more about the Director, his arrival at SOAS in the midst of a global pandemic, his views on SOAS and what it means to be alumni of our School.

It is late afternoon in early April. The sun is streaming through the windows on two sides of the corner office, where Professor Habib sits at the long board-room table. The temperature is surprisingly warm for the time of year, but this suits the Director as he is fasting for Ramadan and feeling the cold.

We began by asking Professor Habib about his background.

“I was Vice Chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I'd been there for eight years and was responsible for what was effectively a turnaround. The big mission of the university was to build a research intensive institution on the African continent.

The desire was to ensure that all of the great research universities are not solely located in the north. If we are serious about ensuring a more equitable world, then that has to manifest in a multiplicity of ways and one of the ways that it needs to manifest is in southern countries having a fair share of research intensive institutions.

We were enormously successful; we doubled research output, we grew the postgraduate student base from about 10,000 to 15,000, and research funds to around 200 to 250 million pounds a year.

It wasn't a tenure without its challenges. We had ‘FeesMustFall’, which was the largest post-apartheid student protest in the country, largely around free education. I found myself in an interesting irony as somebody who has always seen himself as a progressive activist, I had to manage the largest social movement in the history of post-apartheid South Africa.”

From this successful if turbulent time at Wits, we asked how and why he came to be Director at SOAS.

“As I came to about eight years in South Africa - you have two terms of five years – I began to think what else I would do. I would be too young to retire. I was approached about SOAS but I said that I didn't think SOAS would have the appetite. One of the challenges I have is that however well you establish the higher education system, however well you establish research universities, you have to confront inequalities and resources in global education, and that if I was going to be in the north, I would want to build an institution that was able to reimagine equitable partnerships, to think of transnational education on a transnational footing and to reinvent higher education for a new world.

We need to address climate change and inequality and you need local knowledge and global science in conversation with each other. How global technologies play out impacts in particular contexts in different ways. We may have a vaccine, but how it gets deployed in New York City or London is different to how it plays out in Singapore, Malaysia or Japan, and you need to be aware of the local dynamics to understand the consequences of policies or technologies, or science itself.

This requires rethinking higher education, it requires reimagining equitable partnerships and it requires not taking a short term view.”

Following an interview process, Professor Habib was selected as the new Director and faced some immediate challenges.

“SOAS was facing a financial crisis, but I think this was a reflection of a much deeper crisis; it had lost its purpose. I think our new strategic intention of a research intensive institution, one ensconced in postgraduate studies, one that could be financially sustainable and bring knowledge systems together through equitable partnerships has evolved into a new purpose.

If you want to be progressive, it's not about how many times you can quote Marx or Lenin, it's about how you change. How do you practice higher education in a way that progressively disrupts it for a new world? This is the heart of our strategic plan.

I came in the middle of a pandemic and it was an interesting eye-opener of the challenges and the contextual circumstances. This was an important element in allowing me to rethink the strategic plan. The pandemic was complicated in several ways: it complicated learning, it made it very difficult for students and it made it difficult for staff to respond to the challenges.”

Professor Habib then spoke about the mission and opportunities for SOAS.

“I think it's a really special institution because in many ways you can advance an agenda of getting knowledge systems to talk to each other. To build a universal global academy to go after the transnational challenges of our time. And that speaks to the real mandate - the mission, if you like, is Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

These are not simply areas of study, but the philosophical lens through which we want to understand the planetary questions of our time. You want to understand these from the perspective of the people of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the people who represent the majority of our world.

There are huge opportunities in the fact that the mission really speaks to the historical moment we are in, because all of our challenges are transnational: climate change, pandemics, inequality, social and political polarisation, water; all of these are global phenomena. But if you are going to resolve them, you need to find local solutions to global challenges, but local solutions with elements of global science and technology.

So there is a global response to these transnational challenges, but the global response needs to be sensitive to the contextual specificities of our world and that’s what SOAS puts on the table. It recognises that these are transnational challenges and this is an institution that is a global university, but it recognises that Africa, Asia and the Middle East have a set of contextual specificities and that these problems need to be understood in that context as much as understood in the universal sense.

I often say to vice chancellors in the UK ‘everybody in the UK talks about equitable partnerships, but as somebody who comes from Africa and was at the highest table of vice chancellors of the continent, none of us believed that there were any equitable partnerships in the UK.’ Could we pioneer a partnership that not only we think is equitable, but others experience as equitable?’ That's the mission, because that will also bring together knowledge systems in conversation about transnational challenges.

It's that bridge between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’, that bridge between Europe, and Asia, and Africa, and the Middle East. That bridge between the academy and those outside the academy, that bridge between the academy and policy, all of those things SOAS represents in its most potent way. Partly because it speaks to the very fabric, the very mission of this institution as it's evolved.

Equitable partnerships are hard to create. How do you create an equal partnership in an unequal world? That's the dilemma of our time. We’re pioneering solutions to that dilemma, that's what is underway, and that's what is at the heart of the strategic agenda.

That may be the very soul of our plan, but there are many other things. Part one of our plan is to achieve financial sustainability. Part two of our plan is to achieve a research intensity, part three is to enable a student responsiveness - perhaps that’s even more important, a primary part of our plan to address students’ concerns, needs, desires, and ambitions. Part four of the plan is to operationalise efficiencies. When your finances are stable then you can make magic happen. And that's what we'd love to do, to make magic happen at SOAS by ensuring that there's a financial stability.” 

Finally, we asked Professor Habib what it means to be a SOAS alum.

“I think it's somebody who’s immersed in the disciplinary field in which they studied and who has coupled that disciplinary knowledge with a contextual understanding of the region which they have studied. Someone who does that with a human empathy and a desire for social justice. It's creating the triangle between disciplinary expertise, regional understanding, and social justice orientation and human empathy. Bringing those three in a triangle of good.

It is what I think the world requires at this historic moment. And that's what the SOAS project is about.”