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Tutu joins University of North Florida faculty
2003-002-5
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
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[Episcopal News Service]
In 1984, Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped a young friend named Oupa Seane flee from South Africa. The teenager had come of age under apartheid and later was jailed for fighting it. Almost two decades later, Seane, an adjunct political science professor at the University of North Florida, brought Tutu to North Florida for a lecture in 1999 and persuaded his old friend to return this spring for a semester as a scholar in residence.
'I've been here before and was thrilled by my engagement with the students. And there was a young South African on the faculty who twisted my arm a little bit,' said Tutu, now retired, who will be paid $76,000 for his work.
With 13,000 students, North Florida is hardly small, billing itself one of the 100 Best College Buys in America. But it does not have the prestige of a University of Florida or a Florida State, much less Harvard--an institution that granted Tutu an honorary doctorate in 1979.
David Kline, the university's interim president, hopes Tutu's name will help with fund raising and faculty and student recruitment by 'raising the intellectual environment.'
At North Florida, Tutu will teach a one-semester class focusing on his time heading South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body that investigated the abuses of apartheid in the mid-1990s, and three mini courses.
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