Masakhe 01 DIGITAL HIRES SINGLE - Flipbook - Page 14
After four years, Stevens felt the urge
to move abroad, buying three boat
tickets to England for his wife, himself,
and their three-month-old son.
Alan Stevens lived in London for
fifteen months and worked as a
quantity surveyor at a British firm.
Thereafter, the three of them toured
the Continent for three months in a
small fiat cub. He then decided to
return to the Western Cape to start
his own firm. Later, he ran into a
familiar face: James Rabie, the then
head of the department of Quantity
Surveying at UCT. The two exchanged
stories and Rabie offered Stevens
a lecturing position. Eventually
they became partners in a Quantity
Surveying practice.
“Lecturing was brilliant. I loved it,”
Stevens recalls enthusiastically. Still
to this day, decades later, he receives
e-mails from former students, now
scattered across the globe, requesting
his financial mathematics notes.
When Stevens joined the
department, there were only twelve
to fifteen students per class. This
allowed him to form a strong bond
with his scholars individually: “I knew
everybody. I knew them and their
girlfriends by first names.”
Only in his thirties when he started
lecturing, Alan Stevens found himself
relating to his young students. In all
his years of teaching, his favourite
memory remains the camaraderie
he fostered with his students. Every
Friday, after four o’clock, Stevens
would accompany his students to the
legendary Forrester’s Arms and have
a couple of beers with the class before
returning home in the evening. Despite
ISSUE 1
“I KNEW
EVERYBODY.
I KNEW THEM AND
THEIR GIRLFRIENDS
BY FIRST NAMES.”
the casual setting and the minor
age gap, most students even when
qualified still only referred to him as
Prof, depicting how much respect they
harboured for their lecturer.
During his time at UCT, Alan
Stevens was promoted from lecturer
to senior lecturer to associate
professor. Offered a teaching
position at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Stevens hesitated
for two reasons; Firstly, he could not
find it within himself to leave the
Cape; Secondly, UCT then offered
him a professorship. He declined the
Johannesburg position.
Eventually the Departments of
Quantity Surveying and Building
Management combined to form
the Department of Construction
Economics and Management.
Made head of department after
James Rabie retired, Stevens
states that he rarely hosted any
staff meetings. Instead, he made
an effort to know everyone in the
CEM department. Every week he
approached the different staff
members individually, asking if they
had any grievances to air. This form of
communication and attention allowed
the department to grow into a family.
Stevens decided to retire in 2001,
but really missed lecturing and
returned to continue lecturing parttime until 2015.
OCTOBER 2 024
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