摘要：The relative lack of black South African students registered for senior undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Biological Sciences, has long been an issue and remains an issue at the University of Cape Town (UCT). For example, the Honours and taught Masters courses in biological sciences have only a handful of black South Africans registered this year (2020). Research institutes are required to report on the numbers of black South African postgraduate students they are training, and transformation is a key component of a successful review. No-one has previously investigated the underlying reasons for the low numbers of black South African students doing Biological Science Honours and Masters courses at UCT including the highly acclaimed Conservation Biology course. I was Head of a Department in Biological Sciences for nearly a decade in the 2000s and I, like all other Heads before and after me have also failed to understand this issue from the prospective student’s perspective. There has been plenty of speculation on these matters but neither I nor anyone else in my department considered running the kind of exploratory survey that Prof Nattrass 1 ran last year.
