Staff T-shirt handout: Wearing Vision 2030 with pride

Even in late autumn with temperatures hovering on the cool side, the offer to staff of a free branded University of Cape Town (UCT) T-shirt was too good to miss.

Over the week of 23 to 27 May staff were invited to take their staff cards to the Protea Bookshop on upper campus and collect a beautifully crafted cotton T-shirt. Each slogan embodied UCT Vision 2030’s massive transformational purpose: “Unleashing human potential to create a fair and just society”.

The first batch handed out on 23 May came with a pithy challenge for a Monday morning: “Your Time is Now #Unleash”.

The offer also came with an invitation from Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng to wear their T-shirts “with commitment and pride” when they pledged support for UCT’s Khusela Ikamva (Secure the Future) environmental sustainability support programme.

“This exciting project will see staff and students across all spheres of campus collaborate, seeing research evolve into implementation of real projects on campus.”

This is a transdisciplinary collaborative effort to establish UCT as a “living lab” and maximise its sustainability reach and impact. Sustainability is of one of three pillars of Vision 2030, along with excellence and transformation.

“This exciting project will see staff and students across all spheres of campus collaborate, seeing research evolve into implementation of real projects on campus,” Professor Phakeng wrote in a campus-wide communiqué.

In the corner of the bookshop where the T-shirts were being collected and signed for on the first morning, the big debate was around sizes – and whether crewneck or V-neck styling was more flattering. 

“Do I need a large or a medium?” one asked, as the assistants tried to appraise his girth under a lab coat.

And where would staff wear them? At work?

“And why not?” responded one staffer, her neatly packaged gift firmly tucked under an arm.