A somewhat uneasy consensus exists on
most university campuses that something called "transformation" has to
occur. To this end, "transformation forums" have not only become a
standard part of their institutional furniture but it is now
recommended by the National Commission on Higher Education [NCHE] that
such forums become a permanent and powerful part of all universities'
governing structures. [The same is true of technikons but, for
simplicity's sake this article will confine itself to
universities.]
Liberal academics and students have tended to go along with this,
although not one in a hundred of the proponents of transformation can
say exactly what is meant by the term. More confusingly, no one seems
able to point out a university, either here or anywhere else in the
world, which has been successfully "transformed" and thus represents
the final state of this process.
Worse still, those campuses where transformation activists have been
longest in the ascendant are quite normally scenes of great strife and,
often, lower educational standards than would be acceptable elsewhere
in Africa, let alone beyond that. Similarly, the fact that it is
impossible to point to other good universities anywhere in the world
which are run by transformation forums or the like is too easily
dismissed, reminding one of the mother proudly pointing out her
uniformed son in the Army march-past: "There he is - and what's more,
he's the only one in step!"
Five types of university
When the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was first told of
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History
and the Last Man, she is said to have exploded: "End of history?
- beginning of nonsense!" Certainly, if we are to avoid talking
nonsense about South Africa's universities, we have to have a little
history, for they have had very different starting points and records:
there is no point in regarding them as all the same. There are, in
fact, five different models:
English-speaking liberal
universities
These universities were very much the cultural possession of
English-speaking whites, and enjoyed a genuinely liberal culture in
which there was room for the expression of a wide variety of views.
Their liberalism had its limits - although they resisted racial
segregation, their pre-apartheid history saw a fair amount of hypocrisy
over hidden but real racial quotas and a less than total commitment to
the liberal principles they preached. [The author, while serving on the
University of Natal students representative council in the early 1960s,
was threatened with expulsion from the university by the "liberal" vice
chancellor, EG Malherbe, for refusing to organise a segregated
graduation ball.] Nonetheless, their tolerance was real - they did
nothing to inhibit a flourishing left sub-culture, for example, which
produced several generations of leaders and cadres for the South
African Communist Party and a large number of black graduates.
These universities were constructed very much on the British model
with syllabi to match. Even in the 1960s one studied more British than
African history and English literature courses would feature not a
single African author. The point was - it was simultaneously true in
Australian universities - to retain strict compatibility with the
British system since many of the faculty had been trained there and
many of the students hoped to do a further degree there or in the
United States. Thus there was great emphasis on maintaining
international currency for the universities' degrees and scholarship,
with faculty conducting research and producing publications intended to
keep them connected to an international academic world beyond South
Africa.
Afrikaans universities
These were the cultural possessions not just of white Afrikaners but
of a National Party-Dutch Reformed Church-Broederbond nexus which
stressed a notion of Christian National education at sharp variance
with the culture of English-speaking campuses. The atmosphere was
considerably more authoritarian and it was taken as normal that student
leadership [organised in the Afrikaanse Studentebond] would accept the
dictates of their NP elders. Thus the ethos far more resembled that of
a high school, with SRCs playing the role of blazer-wearing prefects
and strict rules governing the behaviour of women students in
particular [no jeans, no smoking, no male guests, curfew hours
etc].
This in turn reflected the defensive and anti-colonial thrust of
Afrikaans culture. English-speakers, though a minority without
political power, conducted themselves with the confidence of a
traditional ruling class, enjoying open debate and disagreement,
tolerance of division and so on. Afrikaans culture, despite its ruling
status, lacked confidence and retained the more closed, parochial and
unity-enforced character typical of a minority group.
While a few of the faculty of such universities might have done a
degree at Leyden or Amsterdam, the overwhelming majority inhabited a
cultural world bounded by South Africa.
The intellectuals of such universities, in true South African fashion,
invented lots of prizes and awards which they gave to one another, but
it was a closed circle. There was no concern about the maintenance of
an entree into an international academic world and accordingly far less
stress on publication and research. Essentially such universities were
giant teaching factories -often at a very reasonable, though locally
set, standard.
Fort Hare
A class of one: a black university founded within a white
English-speaking missionary tradition. As a result liberal standards of
tolerance and pluralism applied and several generations of black
students -including Nelson Mandela, Mangosuthu Buthelezi,
Robert Mugabe, Joe Matthews and Robert Sobukwe - benefited from an
education far superior to that found in the tribal colleges. Fort Hare
produced really serious African intellectuals like ZK Matthews, and
brought them into contact with white liberals like Edgar Brookes.
Although a hotbed of political discussion, the atmosphere at Fort Hare
was tolerant and open. Some of its graduates went on to study or teach
in universities in Britain and the United States, although few returned
to Fort Hare to feed their international experience back into the
system. The university attracted black people from all over southern
Africa and thus had no particular ethnic colouration. Although now
assimilated into the historically disadvantaged university category;
Fort Hare's liberal history gives it a distinctive character.
The tribal colleges
Now re-christened as historically disadvantaged universities [HDUs],
the change in nomenclature tells a remarkable political story. When
they were founded by the apartheid government these universities -
Turfloop, Venda, Medunsa, Western Cape, Durban-Westville, Zululand,
Transkei, Bophuthatswana [now North West) - were vilified by the
African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress as illegitimate,
ethnically-defined and third rate institutions, not worthy of the name
of universities.
But as the number of their graduates grew and the ANC penetration of
their campuses progressed, they were re-defined as victim [and thus
progressive] universities. Originally controlled by Broederbond and
homeland administrations, some [UWC and UDW, most notably] have set out
to be "universities of the left" while Africanism of one variety or
another tends to rule in the rest. Typically, the HDUs have been
severely disadvantaged by lower levels of funding, chronic non-payment
of fees, the poorer educational background of most of their students
and by a mixture of student unrest and administrative problems: some
are now clearly near the point of collapse. Ironically, while their
connection to the international academic world is tenuous, an
increasing number of their graduates hold important positions in
government.
Distance education
The University of South Africa is the largest
degrees-by-correspondence university in the world and its success led
to the creation of the federal university of Vista, with campuses
around the country- Vista's students are wholly black and UNlSA's now
predominantly so, although UNISA otherwise belongs to the world of the
Afrikaans universities, headquartered in Pretoria with a largely
Afrikaans faculty and administration. Only the physical distance
between faculty and students prevents the clash between these two
cultures being even sharper than it already is.
Transformation: Some home
truths
Clearly, any attempt at transformation which fails to take into
account these very different histories and characteristics into
account, will fail. Equally, any strategy aimed at somehow melding
these extremely disparate institutions into the same end-state will
fail. Large differences between these institutions will always remain
and it is, indeed, desirable that this is so, just as it is in other
countries, for a diverse mix of universities can better cater to needs
of every kind. But that it is not to say that there is no need for
change.
Typically, protagonists of transformation have wanted five
things:
1. The decolonisation of university culture, with courses and syllabi
made more relevant to African realities.
2. More equal resources for universities, thus remedying the under
funding of the HDUs.
3. The admission of more black and brown students to make the total
student body more representative of the country's demography.
4. The creation of a comprehensive student loan scheme.
5. The appointment of more black faculty and administrators,
especially at senior level.
It is important to realise that these demands only make full sense in
the context of the historically white universities [HWUs], for there
have been no internal resistances to such changes at the HDUs for some
time. While the rhetoric of transformation may be heard at some of the
HDUs, it generally signifies a political battle of a quite different
kind.
And, to a degree which is seldom acknowledged, there is nothing new
about such demands within HWUs either: in practice most of these
changes have been under way for some time, usually beginning in the
apartheid era.
Thus courses and syllabi have been thoroughly decolonised and
reformed: in most cases there is little left to do. The funding
discrepancy between the HDUs and others has been reduced by the simple
[and disastrous] expedient of reducing funding for all universities.
The intake of black and brown students has been hugely increased and is
increasing year by year. A national loan scheme has been set up. And
there has been a push to appoint black faculty and administrators ever
since the late 1980s, with strong affirmative action policies in place
at most HWUs.
What has stopped these processes going further than they have has not
been a lack of will so much as three practical problems. Firstly, at
Afrikaans universities both the language and the predominant culture
have acted as a barrier to black entry at both faculty and student
level, though this has been overcome to some degree by the provision of
parallel English language courses.
Secondly, the demand for a comprehensive loan scheme must be taken in
conjunction with the poor prevailing rate of loan repayment and the
frequent demand by the South African Students' Congress [SASCO] for
education to be wholly free. In practice this means a demand for very
large amounts of money which are unlikely to be paid back at all. Funds
are simply lacking for this.
Thirdly, affirmative action hiring, even at pay rates far in excess of
those which comparable white staff can expect to earn, has been stymied
by the sheer lack of suitable candidates and the speed with which the
most promising black academics are picked off by business and
government.
As it is, it is by no means clear that this strategy is working. Very
large numbers of disadvantaged black students have been admitted and in
many cases the handicap imposed by the poor level of schooling
available in black areas has doomed large proportions of them to poor
results or outright failure, this despite the effective emergence of
two-track standards and such devices as "affirmative marking". Faculty,
particularly at the HDUs, complain that many of their students are
barely literate and even at the HWUs - which tend to receive the cream
of the crop - the intense efforts made at remedial education merely
attest to the size of the problem. If the pressure continues for more
and more under-prepared students to be admitted, the result can only be
falling standards and higher rates of academic failure.
The fact is that much of the money now being spent on higher education
would be far better spent on setting up a series of intermediate
remedial colleges whose sole purpose was to compensate disadvantaged
students for their poor school education by intensive remedial tuition
aimed at bringing them up to minimum university standard. Currently the
government is trying to get foreign donors to cough up R650 million to
fund student loans without being able to attest either that the loans
will be paid back or whether all such students will be seriously
educable at university level. It would make a far more appealing case
to any donor if the government were seen to bite the bullet, accept
what is inevitable in the long run anyway, and ask for help in setting
up remedial colleges.
Some of the rhetoric of transformation is so heady that it is
important to be quite frank about what can and cannot be achieved. The
example of the historical handicap of the Afrikaans universities is an
important one to note in this respect. From 1948 on, National Party
governments made strenuous efforts to ensure that any gap in standards
between Afrikaans and English schools was closed, and they also gave
heavily preferential financial treatment to Afrikaans universities.
Fifty years later the annual university league table reflecting
academic research and publication still puts the Universities of the
Witwatersrand and Cape Town at the top, with Pretoria third and the
universities of Natal and Rhodes still ahead of most of their Afrikaans
peers. Of course, in those years the Afrikaans universities produced
many individually brilliant scholars and researchers, but at the
collective, institutional level even two generations of effort under
favourable conditions have not been sufficient entirely to close the
gap between the Afrikaans and English-speaking HWUs.
The lesson is that there is no reason to believe that the HDUs will be
able to overcome their far greater heritage of handicap any quicker
than Afrikaans institutions did, and something of the same is bound to
apply to many individual black and brown South Africans as well. There
is some discomfort in acknowledging such inconvenient truths as these
but in the long run the pain which stems from ignoring them will be
greater.
The politics of
transformation
The cry for transformation is not emitted in a vacuum but comes from
campuses which have been the scene of intense political activity for a
generation. South Africa's campuses have always been over-politicised
compared with what passes as normal in most other countries, but the
process of politicisation reached its peak in the 1980s when both the
HDUs and the English-speaking HWUs were the scene of permanent and
intense mobilisation behind the United Democratic Front.
The fact that the ANC, PAC and SACP were banned meant that the student
movement, like the trade union movement, achieved a heightened
significance as a de facto surrogate, especially since campuses were
able to provide effective bases to these banned movements. Many student
activists forged in this atmosphere went on to achieve high office in
the government, the ANC, in non-governmental organisations and
elsewhere.
The unbanning of the ANC, PAC and SACP robbed student politics of much
of its significance at a stroke. The parties set up their own offices
and had no need of a campus base or of surrogates. But the period left
behind an aura of excitement and drama and it also left behind the
enviable memory of the extraordinary upward mobility achieved by the
earlier generation of activists.
The result today is a class of "struggle wannabes", determined to
enjoy the adrenalin of the "struggle", this time for an
impossible-to-define - indeed almost metaphysical - transformation.
What adds bite to this demand is that radical black students in the
1980s, despite being a minority on campus, found that over and over
again they were able to win their point by dint of their "legitimacy"
and by the hard-edged politics of mobilisation - strikes, littering
campaigns, sit-ins, damage to property and physical intimidation. In
the end this worked because campus authorities quailed at the thought
of the confrontation required to defeat "legitimate" minorities willing
to use such methods.
Today's radicals, knowing the weakness of the authorities, naturally
deploy the same methods, usually with similar success. What they have
realised is that by such means a minority can exercise majority power -
provided it can maintain a quasi-permanent state of mobilisation. But
if mobilisation is to be permanent then it cannot be for practical,
realisable goals, for these would be quickly conceded. It has to be for
impossible objectives - "pass one, pass all" or "no exclusions [no
matter what)". This impossiblism is often quite nakedly apparent, as in
SASCO's campaign against the NCHE report in early 1996, when SASCO
demanded that universities support their demand for the report to be
withdrawn, before it had even appeared and before they knew its
contents. The quest for a "transformation" which no one can quite
define - the pot of gold at rainbow's end - fits perfectly into the
politics of the impossible.
The politics of permanent
mobilization
This politics of permanent mobilisation in turn feeds on several
sources.
The first is strictly material. Education, particularly a university
degree, is seen as a pathway to a good job and thus to middle class
status. Once admitted to a university many black students feel that
such an outcome is now more or less guaranteed - and that that is the
meaning of liberation, that their time has come. Inevitably, a strong
sense of entitlement overwhelms any notion of a degree being
conditional on the fulfilment of various academic tasks and tests. A
university administration which attempts to insist on the validity of
those tasks and tests is thus affronting a potent force: hence, too,
the demands for "no exclusions", "pass one, pass all" and so on. The
point to be grasped here is that while the struggle thus unleashed will
be fought under the slogans of the radical left, the battle is actually
one for the "right" to a middle class status and income.
Secondly, this form of political struggle is effectively encouraged by
the general over-politicisation of campuses and by the fact that many
educational "progressives" see that politicisation as normal or are
still ideologically convinced that angry students are, in some
hard-to-define way, the representatives of the masses, of legitimacy,
and of the struggle. On top of that, they are plain scared of taking
them on. This sort of thinking is perfectly reflected in the NCHE
recommendation that permanent "institutional forums" [with
representation of students and campus unions plus other stakeholders)
be set up on every campus to "play a crucial role in co-operative
governance". The roles specified for such forums are:
1. Involvement in selecting candidates for top management
positions.
2. Identifying and agreeing upon problem areas to be addressed.
3. Interpreting the new national policy framework.
4. Setting an agenda for change.
5. Providing a mediating forum.
6. Participating in restructuring governance structures.
7. Developing and negotiating a code of conduct,
8. Monitoring and assessing change.
In other words, forums can do whatever they want. And whereas
university administrators have to juggle financial pressures versus
faculty demands versus policy pressures versus donor requirements and a
host of other factors, forums will be free simply to opine away. Such
forums have no duties, no competing pressures to reconcile - they have,
in the famous phrase, power without responsibility. As such they are a
recipe for trouble.
But the problem goes further than that. The NCHE also wants students
and campus unions [read: SASCO and NEHAWU] represented on Senates, so
that there can be no decision making body in the university where they
arc not present. SASCO will run the SRC, sit in the forum, on Senate,
on Council, on the national Higher Education Forum -and on just about
everything else. There runs through such recommendations the notion
that campuses are and must always remain theatres of intense political
activity. Students will have to act as full-time politicians, playing
endless representative roles, becoming, as it were, professional
"stakeholders". The notion that students are at university essentially
to study and that SASCO activists are typically among the academically
weakest students on the campus, wholly unable to spare the time for
such full-time political careers, is simply foreign to such
conceptions. It is more or less bound to happen that such activists
will fail their exams, will become candidates for exclusion, will
become the rallying point for further "no exclusion" struggles, and so
on and on.... Somewhat similar points may be made about the gardeners,
cleaners, cooks and clerical staff organised in NEHAWU.
The false microcosm
Underlying these intense political struggles is a notion which Deputy
President Thabo Mbeki gave voice to in a recent address to the
University of Natal in Durban. The transformation of universities was,
he said, important because the university was "a microcosm of the wider
society". This is, of course, quite untrue: in no country are
universities really representative of the whole society - the children
of the middle classes were as over-represented at Sussex, where Mbeki
studied, as they are at Wits or UCT. The faculty represent a peculiar
and rather bohemian section of the middle class themselves, while
campus workers are equally atypical of the working class as a whole.
Universities are, indeed, rather odd and special places: large villages
dedicated to a single set of activities with the emphasis on unforced
compliance by thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of young men
and women co-existing closely in a way they would never be expected to
do at home, on the factory floor or anywhere else.
Nonetheless, Mbeki's mistake is a common one, widely shared by
activists who, transparently, believe that just as we now have a black
president and government, so this change must be replicated at the
level of every campus 'microcosm'.
This symbolic identification lends further intensity to campus
struggles for it allows activists to see themselves as carrying through
the struggles of 1990-94. This is the reason why SASCO activists at
both Wits and Pretoria objected in principle to the notion of the vice
chancellorship going to a white, why in the name of democracy they even
attempted to prevent a white candidate from standing at all at Wits
for, if every campus is a microcosm, choosing a white vice-chancellor
over a black one is analogous to choosing FW de Klerk over Nelson
Mandela. This sort of reasoning is emotionally powerful - and complete
nonsense.
The same reasoning gives a very special importance to the appointments
to other senior administrative posts: the black campus president must,
so to speak, be seen to be backed by a black cabinet. The argument, the
tactics, the objectives are all frankly racial, even racist. Yet so
strong is this identification that if transformation means any one
thing, it is this. Naturally, this interpretation is gleefully
encouraged by the handful of possible candidates for such affirmative
action appointments.
The ancillary notion is that demography equals legitimacy. South
Africa's long denial of majority rule gives this notion its special
force but it is, in the university context, peculiar. At the University
of the Western Cape, for example, black students -though in a minority
on campus - have attempted to justify their dominance of the SRC by
arguing that they enjoy legitimacy because there is a black majority in
South Africa. Their coloured opponents have sought to justify their own
position by arguing that while that may be true, coloureds are the true
bearers of legitimacy in the Western Cape because there they have the
demographic majority. The one thing on which there is agreement - that
campus democracy is all about demography - is actually quite foreign to
the functions and raison d'etre both of a university and
democracy.
The politics of cultural
capture
This last argument gives pause for thought, however. While it may be
phrased in terms of demographics, the real crux of the matter is that
the various campuses are perceived by the various population groups as
their cultural possessions.
President Mandela has reportedly told black intellectuals that they
must not push their claims too hard at UWC: Africans have many
universities but UWC is the only coloured university. As so often, the
President shows a shrewder grasp of underlying ethnic realities than do
his followers. For the fact is that Afrikaners see Stellenbosch as
"their" university just as English-speaking whites see UCT as "theirs".
These cultural possessions are precious. Father and mother, son and
daughter went there; these institutions are worth fighting for.
And a fight it is. For what we are witnessing is the politics of
cultural capture - and this is bitter stuff. In the case of Wits, for
example, by pressing for affirmative action appointments, a large
increase in black students, the claim that only an all-black SRC is
"legitimate", by demanding no exclusions and (in effect) lower
standards, the SASCO-NEHAWU alliance is really just demanding that Wits
should be taken away from its English-speaking white constituency and
that it should become a giant Turfloop.
This is why, in white northern suburbs circles, one can hear that Wits
is "gone", that it is "lost": this is the bitter commentary of cultural
dispossession. Equally, the demand by black radicals that it is not
"acceptable" that Stellenbosch should have a white Afrikaner as rector,
that there must be no bias towards the Afrikaans language - these are
the prolegomena of cultural capture and are bitterly understood as
such. What is going on, in other words, is a struggle for the cultural
capture of one campus after another. Thus far only one group has truly
lost - UDW has ceased to be a predominantly Indian university, though
even there a desperate rearguard action is being waged by Indian
workers in the university administration, albeit under a radical
flag.
It is this struggle for cultural capture which makes the battle of the
campuses so fierce. Given the long history of group struggle in South
Africa and the tremendous sensitivities which exist over the survival
of different cultures and languages, it is tempting to call for a
degree of cultural protectionism - to say that Stellenbosch must be
left as an Afrikaans medium university, that UWC should be seen as a
predominantly coloured campus, and so on. But this does not solve the
problem - there are so many more Afrikaans medium universities than can
be justified by the 15% of the population to whom this is a first
language, and it hardly deals with the questions faced by the
English-speaking HWUs.
The liberal deal
There is, in fact, an inevitability about the liberal ideal of the
university - that it should be as open, tolerant and pluralist a
community as possible, that it should strive for internationally
acceptable degree standards, emphasise research and publication which
makes its scholars part of the wider academic world, and so on.
This means that both the crude politics of cultural capture and the
temptation to cultural protectionism have to be rejected. For example,
we should not want to preserve Wits as the cultural possession of the
white northern suburbs, but nor should we want it to become a giant
Turfloop. The only viable direction in which to go is towards a
liberal, culturally open institution in which the emphasis is shifted
from the navel-gazing politics of which group[s] can exercise veto
power on campus to the question of what functions South Africa needs
Wits to perform.
Historically, this university has provided the bulk of the lawyers,
doctors, engineers, businessmen and other professionals essential to
make the industrial heartland of Gauteng work. It is quite crucial to
the entire national economy that Wits continues to produce high
standard professionals to service this financial, industrial and
communications complex. This has to be a key national priority -
against which the parochial demands of symbolic politics on the Wits
campus should weigh very little.
Immediately, standing up for the liberal ideal of the university runs
counter to strong currents in our society, particularly in the curious
period of cultural revolution through which we are currently
passing.
To take an obvious example, it is close to accepted parlance on many
campuses that white males should be the least considered group for
jobs, student places, awards and so on. But if we really mean what we
say about wanting to build a non-racist, non-sexist society - and we
want to remain true to the liberal university ideal that all that
matters is academic study, research and achievement - then the
corollary is that a white male is as good or bad as anyone else. It
cannot be right to treat white males as a pariah group, particularly
when one is looking at a university system in which this group still
accounts for the bulk of the faculty, without whom the whole system
cannot work. No one doubts that it is important to have more black and
women professors, administrators, technical staff and students. But if
we make racial or gender targets our main objective we are not only
undermining the whole ideal of what a university is, but we could also
be undermining the key functions such institutions have to play.
We have to remember that the current period of over-heated campus
struggle will pass, that it will all seem very curious, even antique,
before long. We are going through a period of attempted cultural
revolution which has two main components. One is the conscious strategy
of the SACP (its chosen instrument being NEHAWU and SASCO] to obtain
hegemonic control over higher education in the belief that this will
give it the ability to forge a new 'organic intelligentsia' to carry
through 'national democratic revolution' to its next stage. The other
component is the spontaneous effervescence of post-liberation politics
which, despite the fact that SASCO depends on a COSATU subsidy, means
that much of what happens is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Moreover,
as recent SRC elections around the country have revealed, SASCO's
support is flagging. For black students are not fools and have other
ideas about their futures than simply being cannon fodder for the
politics of permanent mobilisation.
I began this article with a mention of how I was once threatened with
being expelled from university for refusing to organise a segregated
dance. For some time now you could probably have got yourself expelled
for refusing to organise an integrated one. Things have changed out of
all recognition, for the better and very fast. They will continue to do
so. It is a difficult time for those who work on a university campus
and the courage to stand up against
Sometimes overwhelming pressure is in short supply. But the tide will
turn. Through all the present difficulties our over-riding concern has
simply to be that our universities survive as liberal institutions able
to serve the country, its children and their children in turn.
Higher
education: the rocky road to governance
Robin Richards Project Manager Helen
Suzman Foundation
Education in South Africa is in crisis - indeed, those close to the
heart of policy formulation in the national education ministry admit
that current administration amounts to no more than permanent 'crisis
management'. While nothing may rival the parlous situation of many
township schools, higher education is certainly no exception to the
rule of crisis management: the sector is characterised by continual
outbreaks of campus unrest, repeated budget cuts despite increasing
student numbers, the lack of an adequate student loan scheme, falling
staff morale and rancorous disputes over 'transformation' in which the
battle lines often run along the fissures of race and language. And, as
with other sectors of education, basic questions of order, authority
and governance are at stake.
Establishing the NCHE
It was in good part such questions that lay behind the government's
decision to appoint a National Commission on Higher Education in
February 1995 under Professor Jairam Reddy, then vice chancellor of the
University of Durban-Westville, to advise the government on the
restructuring of higher education.
The commission's objective was to design a higher educational system
to "serve a new social order, to meet pressing national needs, and to
respond to a context of new realities and opportunities". It enjoyed
considerable resources: it was supported by a network of more than 100
local and international researchers, consulted other experts at home
and abroad, and received 123 written submissions -some of them, like
the Wits submission, major research reports in their own right.
The commission's interim report, a discussion document published in
April 1996, ran into widespread criticism for its lack of clarity on
many issues, a criticism which it attempted to take into account in its
final report, A Framework for Transformation, published in October
1996.
There is a clear tacit assumption that government will accept the NCHE
Report. The notion of the commission as an independent body, separate
from government, has been somewhat undermined by Reddy's immediate
recruitment to the education ministry to assist in drafting a Green
Paper on higher education, anticipated in December 1996, with a White
Paper to follow by early February 1997. The objective is, indeed, for
parliamentary legislation on the matter to be pushed through in the
session starting in February 1997. There is a strong sense of haste.
NCHE member, Brian Figaji, emphasises that "when the Green Paper hits
the wires, and stakeholders have not participated through the
parliamentary select committee hearings, it will be too late, they will
have missed the bus".
Such an ambitious timetable hardly allows for the possibility of
detailed alternative views to those expressed by the NCHE, so it would
be sensible to assume that what it proposes is pretty much what we will
get. Already arrangements are in hand to set up the separate branch of
higher education in the national education ministry proposed by the
NCHE, and advertising for candidates to head it has already been
undertaken. Oohn Samuels; the newly appointed deputy director general
of higher education, who was expected to head the branch has,
surprisingly, indicated that he will retire in 1997 for "health
reasons".]
All of which is rather
alarming.
Higher education is in a delicate and vulnerable condition and
government seems set to rush ahead with far reaching reforms - and yet
in many respects the government has put the cart before the horse, for
the central critique of the work of the NCHE is its lack of clarity on
key policy recommendations. One gets the worrying sense that government
may soon be passing on key policy decisions to the confusing plethora
of new and powerful advisory bodies proposed by the NCHE, thus creating
a large new national bureaucracy whose job will be to fire politically
correct messages down at university and technikon administrators. It is
far from clear that this will be of any help or use to the
administrators, embattled as they are in local campus disputes and
growing" cost pressures.
No map; no plan
The reason for this vagueness on policy is in turn attributable to the
absence of any strategic plan for higher education, matching national
educational and manpower needs against what the higher education system
currently produces and then seeing what incentives and reforms would
have to be put in place to meet those needs. Such an exercise would, in
most countries, be seen as the obvious way in which to approach higher
education reform, but the NCHE has not carried out such an exercise. It
calls for a rolling three year national higher education plan but
provides no detail or even any objective to which such a plan might
work.
Equally, the government lacks a national strategic plan for education
as a whole. The White Paper on education and training [1995) mooted the
idea of an education charter to galvanise stakeholder energies and draw
attention to the importance of education and training in the social and
economic development of South Africa, but that is where the matter
rests. A charter might be stirring stuff but, of course, what is needed
is a hard-headed planning exercise based on detailed data.
The NCHE report acknowledges that the first planning requirement is
for an information system which would continuously monitor the size,
shape and profile of higher education: at the moment we lack such data.
The NCHE would like the system to include performance indicators to
measure quality, equity and effectiveness. This would indeed be
desirable. What we seem likely to get instead is a highly contested and
time consuming appointment process for all the new advisory bodies to
be set up - a new fleet of coaches on the gravy train. Meanwhile
universities and technikons are bracing themselves for funding cuts in
1997 which could force them to lay off staff and spark widespread
unrest, a situation described by Professor Brenda Gourley, chairperson
of the Committee of University Principals (CUP) as "a
catastrophe".
Amidst all of this a whole series of reforms are taking place at local
and provincial level. In the Eastern Cape, colleges of education are
being integrated with the University of Port Elizabeth. In Gauteng the
provincial legislature has recommended a reduction in the number of
colleges of education from nine to four, and their conversion into
community colleges which will offer bridging courses and vocationally
oriented training. Finally; some universities (for example, Port
Elizabeth and Venda] are proceeding with amendments to their university
private Acts to facilitate internal changes of their own.
The problem of
governance
Writers on higher education governance typically differentiate between
the state control model, in which an all-powerful government allows a
minimum of autonomy to higher education institutions, and the state
supervision model in which government monitors relatively autonomous
institutions, usually nudging them along the way it wants by offering
funding incentives. The NCHE recommends a new model of its own, the
co-operative governance model. "This new approach", says the
commission, "shifts from a narrow concern with government to a wide
range of governance mechanisms which are concerned with the growing
rife of associations, different agencies and partnerships, and that
reflect the dynamic and interactive nature of co-ordination". In this
model, it adds, autonomous civil society constituencies work in
partnership with an "assertive government".
This, at least, is the theoretical rationale for the veritable jungle
of new higher education agencies the NCHE proposes to set up. These
include;
· The National Admissions Clearing
House
To disseminate information and advice to students and to assess
students' experience and qualifications.
· The Higher Education Quality
Committee
Comprising three sections responsible for institutional auditing,
programme accreditation and quality promotion. All higher education
programmes will have to be registered with the National Qualifications
Framework and the committee will use that framework to achieve quality
assurance.
· The National
Agency/Unit
To oversee human resource development and to develop a national human
resource policy framework.
· The Higher Education
Forum
A statutory body of higher education stakeholders which would be
consulted by the Minister on tertiary education policy issues,
· The Higher Education
Council
A statutory body comprising experts in higher education; to advise the
Minister on tertiary education policy issues.
· The National Development
Agency
An H&C sub-structure for academic curriculum development. It will
deal with research, policy development and evaluation, dissemination of
best practice (based on comparison of tertiary institutions], project
support, development and funding.
· Regional advisory
structures
To be established by the HEC to advise the minister on mergers,
rationalisations and the development of new tertiary education
institutions in the regions.
· Legislated institutional
forums
Advisory bodies similar to the Transformation Forums established at
many tertiary institutions in the 1990s. Such forums would become a
permanent part of campus life everywhere. The NCHE emphasises that
these will be "important governance structures that will play a crucial
role in co-operative governance".
· Student services
councils
To be set up on all campuses with equal representation of all
stakeholders in order to give students a more direct say over all
services provided to them, ranging from "the opportunity to evaluate
and comment on the contents of academic programmes to direct policy
making powers on the type of social services they receive and their
management".
This might seem a very large number of new bureaucracies - and as the
NCHE itself points out, many anxieties were expressed by education
stakeholders that the new agencies would be expensive, time consuming
and would soak up valuable academic manpower which could ill be spared
from universities and technikons. In fact the list above represents a
cut-down version of an even longer list, trimmed back by the commission
in response to such pressures.
Meanwhile, of course, a whole series of other bodies still exist - the
Committee of University Principals, the Committee of Technikon
Principals, the Advisory Council for Universities and Technikons, the
Certification Council for Technikon Education, and so on. While the
NCHE recommends that such bodies should lose their statutory status,
they will continue to exist, further adding to the dense alphabet soup
of tertiary education agencies. It is anticipated that government,
under pressure to reduce this bureaucracy, might amalgamate the HEC and
the HEF - but, as can be seen, this hardly answers the problem.
The commission also recommends that all university senates and
academic boards be restructured to include representatives not only of
faculties and departments but of student representative councils and
executive management [administrative staff], though it accepts that at
least 80% of senate members should be academics.
The drive to
centralization
The NCHE report dearly foreshadows a considerably greater
centralisation of power over higher education. This is clear not only
from the sheer number of new national supervisory bodies it wants to
set up but from the sweeping powers ft gives to the three most
important among them, the new branch of higher education, the Higher
Education Forum and the Higher Education Council.
Apart from advising the minister on all aspects of higher education,
the new branch will monitor the entire system, compile information
about it, manage all infra-departmental, inter-provincial and
international matters regarding higher education, provide the
secretariat to the HEF and HEC, tell all the other statutory bodies
which policy areas need to be developed and - quite crucially -control
the entire higher education budget, including financial aid to
students.
The HEF is to consist of 30 members;
- Government nominees of the ministers of education, health, finance, labour, agriculture, and arts, culture, science and technology (six members).
- Three representatives each of the Committee of University Principals and the Committee of Technikon Principals [six members].
- Faculty and student bodies [eight members].
- External stakeholders including business, labour, funders, research councils and professional organisations (six members).
The director general of the department of education or his nominee as
an ex officio member.
It would be surprising if government did not dominate such a body: the
HEF chairman will be directly nominated by the education minister, will
have a longer term than ordinary forum members, will be seconded by the
minister's director general, will have six other direct government
nominees and several other government employees in the shape of
research council members, and will have power to co-opt additional
stakeholders. Above all, the non-governmental members of the HEF will
mainly be supplicants for government money and will hardly be unaware
that the governmental nominees will be influential in deciding whether
they get it or not.
The forum's functions will be to debate higher education issues and
advise the minister of its views - and of how he should go about
choosing the members of the Higher Education Council.
The HEC will consist of seven members, all appointed by the minister
[after all the usual elaborate selection procedures endured by
Constitutional Court judges and similar worthies], three
representatives of other ministries, the director general of education
[or his nominee) and an executive officer also appointed by the
minister [who also appoints the HEC Chairman], The HEC is supposed to
be more expert than the HEF and is given power to advise the minister
on any area of higher education, but it too will be entirely
government-controlled.
On the all important question of funding for higher education, the
commission at first recommended such wide powers for the minister that
tertiary institutions were at first fearful that he might have the
power to determine the exact number of subsidised student places in
each instructional programme within any given field of learning.
The final NCHE report sets such anxieties to rest, but does commit
itself to the statement that institutional redress should be the key
criterion in the planning process. This suggests that the current
government funding formula, set at 85% of funding in block grants and
15% in earmarked funds, will change in order to upgrade physical and
financial resources at historically black universities.
The NCHE also stresses "flexible differentiation" -which means that a
university might offer a programme more typical of a technikon (or vice
versa] in regions where such a programme is not otherwise on offer. The
commission, in addition, wants universities and technikons to
incorporate a number of hitherto independent colleges of nursing,
education and agriculture. This is not a popular proposal: universities
feel it will be a financial burden to absorb vocational colleges which
are non-academic and truly different from themselves.
Moreover, in some cases absorption will require the establishment of
difficult to administer satellite university campuses, an extra problem
which hard-pressed university administrators could well do without. The
only apparent motive for this recommendation is to tidy higher
education up into uniform large units so as to make central control
easier.
Autonomy and academic freedom In any major national reform of higher
education - particularly one with the centralising tendencies
recommended by the NCHE - there is inevitable concern that academic
freedom and university and technikon autonomy could be
compromised.
The four rights basic to such a conception - essential if there is to
be an atmosphere in which scholarly work can thrive -are an
institution's right to determine who may teach, what may be taught, how
it shall be taught and who may admitted to study. Academic freedom is
not something of merely parochial interest to academics and students.
As Charles Simkins writes: "Academic freedom is one of the most
sensitive indicators of political freedom -there is no political
freedom without academic freedom."
The NCHE argues that the Constitution's Bill of Rights recognises
academic freedom in its clause on freedom of expression, and that it is
therefore under no threat. The proposed model of co-operative
governance clearly brings tertiary institutions into a much denser and
more complex relationship with central government, however, and the
commission's very strong emphasis on the accountability of higher
education to all manner of national priorities certainly sounds some
warning bells.
The NCHE suggests, moreover, that higher education institutions should
be included within the definition of "organs of the state" described in
Clause 239 of the new constitution, and that they will therefore have
to comply with the basic values and principles governing public
administration. National legislation will then ensure that tertiary
educational institutions adhere to these values and principles.
Moreover, the NCHE argues that academic freedom is an individual right,
not an institutional one - thus de-linking the concepts of
institutional autonomy and academic freedom.
In fact both academic freedom and institutional autonomy will clearly
be under pressure. Greater ministerial use of earmarked funds may well
force universities and technikons to adopt programmes and use their
resources in ways stipulated by government. At the same time, although
institutions will have a right to choose who they may employ, their
recruitment and selection decisions will be firmly guided by the need
to meet race and gender equity criteria closely monitored by the
plethora of new, powerful and centrally positioned bodies recommended
by the NCHE. At many points the commission stresses how higher
education will be closely watched, scrutinised, monitored - in effect
suspected - so that it complies with nationally enforced
criteria.
Enforcing correctness
Thus, the new branch of higher education will have to monitor the
functioning of the higher education system and write an annual review
of it. The HEF will have to "initiate proposals on issues of common
interest, such as capacity building, race and gender redress, etc". The
HEC will "monitor progress in all areas of redress and equity" and will
ensure that "gender and race equity and anti-discriminatory policies
are developed and monitored". Each institution will have to submit an
annual report to the ministry and part of that will have to be an
"equity report", charting progress towards these goals. On top of that,
there will be evaluation of an institution's funding proposals, and
criteria for approval of funding will be based on meeting national
goals, regional planning needs, national equity goals and so on. How
much real freedom an institution will have to recruit the faculty and
students of its choice at the end of all this, is a moot point.
It also seems likely that institutions will lose some of their freedom
to decide what they teach. Until now academic performance and quality
was assessed by the institution itself and by the market - institutions
with better academic records attracted more and better students and
faculty, and vice versa. Now, however, centrally managed agencies will
review and evaluate performance and quality within a framework
determined by an Orwellian construct known as the National Management
and Performance Indicator System.
Even that most local of activities, curricular reform, is not beyond
the NCHE's centralising drive. Although the commission stops short of
recommending concrete proposals for curriculum reform at the
institutional level, it nevertheless provides examples of principles
which should guide curriculum reform. Its criteria include: the
relevance of course content for national and regional developmental
needs, "Africanising" the curriculum, mechanisms to increase student
participation in curriculum development and restructuring, the language
of the curriculum, and the question of gender and race in the
curriculum.
Finally, there will be a limited number of subsidised student places
which are government controlled and centrally managed, across
institutions and in different fields of study. This will mean that
institutions will have to decide how to arrange their quota of
subsidised student places across the spectrum of courses and
disciplines they offer - and it will inevitably influence their
decisions on student selection.
Answering the wrong
question
There is a deepening crisis in higher education in South Africa.
Tertiary institutions of all kinds are faced with endemic political
troubles, with declining salary levels and morale among their faculty,
with the enormous pressures exerted by a whole decade of falling state
funding - and, on the other hand, by the need to accept ever increasing
numbers of less privileged students, many of whom require expensive
remedial and bridging education.
The funding crisis is very real. In response to large scale student
discontent the National Student Financial Aid Scheme was launched in
1995, with R300 million allocated to it in the 1996-97 state budget, it
was hoped that a committee chaired by Dr Nthatho Motlana would
supplement the scheme with funds raised from the private sector - but
thus far such funds have not been forthcoming and there is a shortfall
of some R650 million. Failure to raise this money is sure to result in
violent student protests which will do nothing to convince potential
donors and foreign funders that their money is being well spent by
investing in South Africa's higher education sector, At the same time,
many historically disadvantaged institutions, as the old "tribal
colleges" are now called, face imminent closure due to massive debts
incurred by students' failure to pay fees. These institutions do not
have reserve funds to fall back on and government will need to take
decisive action to address their funding dilemma.
The NCHE's recommendations do not address this crisis and do not pay
attention to recent international trends. For many other countries have
moved towards decentralising higher education, allowing institutions to
Find and match regional and market niches, and have forced higher
education to move towards more private funding and involvement with
industry via science parks and the like.
Instead, the commission proposes a series of large new national
bureaucracies whose main job seems to be to centralise control over
higher education and exert more pressure on already hard-pressed
university and technikon administrations. While there is still
considerable vagueness about many of the NCHE proposals, the number and
overlapping functions of the new bureaucracies it proposes, the
uncertainty as to how they will all relate to one another - not to
mention the long delays involved in making appointments to them - are
bound to slow down decision making and could virtually paralyse this
key sector. Without doubt the impending funding crisis will have to be
dealt with long before all these new bodies are in place.
Paved with good
intentions...
!t is, in a word, difficult not to feel that the NCHE has asked many
of the wrong questions and come up with quite 3 few wrong answers. Yet
the Commission's policies were founded on the bedrock of highly
laudable principles. Few can fault the emphasis on equity,
democratisation, development, quality, academic freedom and efficiency
in our higher education system. Yet to achieve these principles, the
commission proposes measures which are bound to be costly; which take
no account of the overriding current reality- the profound funding
crisis; which will slow down decision making; which will involve a
large scale and probably unworkable centralisation of power; and which
are likely to be detrimental both to institutional autonomy and
academic freedom.
There is nothing sinister about the commission: its ideas are merely
naive and parochial. But they could have evil consequences. There is no
sign that it even realises how contrary to international practice many
of its ideas are, or of how grotesquely interfering it is to attempt to
lay down to higher education institutions what size and shape of senate
they should have, whether or not they should have student
representation on it, and whether they should or should not set up an
"institutional forum".
The commission does not ask why governments in the rest of the
civilised world just leave such matters for tertiary institutions to
decide for themselves or why it is that universities and technical
colleges in the rest of the world have got on for centuries without
"institutional forums".
In effect the NCHE treats South Africa's conventional wisdom of
on-campus political correctness in the 1990s as a sensible framework
for permanent and root and branch "reform". This is exactly what the
apartheid government did by forcibly segregating universities in 19S7 -
a ludicrous and parochially minded measure which damaged
generations.
Nobody seems to have asked the obvious question of why highly
developed countries like the United States and Britain, homes to many
of the world's leading universities, have not found it necessary to
invent (or possible to afford] all the new "co-operative governance"
bureaucracies which the NCHE wants.
It is possible, of course, that all these costly new bodies may in
time just become a form of politically correct window dressing, with
all the real decisions taken somewhere else. But in that case, why
waste the money on them? And why divert large amounts of scarce well
educated manpower towards them? If there really is any gravy to spare,
the hard-pressed faculty, administrators and indebted students on our
campuses surely have first claim to it.
