/ 12 June 2007

Research in crisis

How is a quality workforce to be developed and retained within the knowledge system?

Three sets of reforms in remuneration are required urgently. First, the remuneration scales of the academy as a whole have to be raised significantly. However, an overall increase in salaries is not in itself going to address the problem, because sufficient resources are not available. This raises the issue of differential remuneration.

There are South African precedents. In recent years a new Human Sciences Research Council management attracted quality social scientists by offering higher salaries than those offered by the universities. The result was that the institution’s productivity, as measured by peer-reviewed journal publications, increased substantially. The outcome was similar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal when a reward system tied to academics’ research codes was implemented.

But is increased remuneration for productive researchers affordable?

Studies indicate that globally the distribution of scientific production is not a normal one. Most authors produce at the lowest rate and very few authors at the higher rates. Thus, if remuneration is tied to productivity, it is likely to reward small numbers of researchers, thereby making it more affordable.

Finally, transformation, in the architecture of the academy’s remuneration scales is warranted. At present, these scales are structured to reward managerial more than core research and teaching positions. This sends a message that should people want to earn more, they need to consider moving to managerial positions.

However, reform of the academy’s remuneration system is, on its own, unlikely to enhance research productivity. Working conditions have to be restructured if a vibrant research culture is to emerge. Studies have indicated that South Africa’s academic workplace has become more onerous and stressful in the past decade.

Another challenge confronting leaders and managers of South Africa’s institutions is to advance towards a more racially representative knowledge system, without irreparably damaging its research productivity.

Almost all universities shifted their retirement ages from 65 to 60 in the hope of creating space for a more representative demographic profile. Staffing gaps are often left vacant because no suitable black candidate can be found. Premature promotions are common, leading to a lowering of the status of academic titles such as professor. Those talented and highly qualified black researchers often have well-rewarded options, which many exercise outside the research world.

It could be said that with the passage of time larger numbers of black researchers will be produced and the pressures to appoint black candidates at all costs will ease. However, South Africa cannot wait for the problem to resolve itself. There is an uneasy balance between equity and excellence in contemporary South African research. It is crucial that the country gets this balance right. It will not help the cause of equity in the long run if the research effort is so badly damaged that it enters a downward spiral.

It is particularly important to maintain existing expertise both for its own sake and for the sake of the training and support of an upcoming generation of researchers.

Institutional collaboration is another important factor in facilitating research.

In South Africa the mergers have begun to clear away some obstacles for institutional collaboration. Nevertheless, despite the many positive outcomes, the mergers triggered introspection and scrambling for certainty in an uncertain environment, which tended to divert attention from core activities, research included. With their internal structures still unsettled, they often find it difficult to collaborate with external partners.

This tendency for introspection and self-absorption is a reason, it would seem, for the low level of collaboration between universities and science councils. However, there are other reasons: while the move towards financial self-reliance and cost recovery is near universal in the contemporary academic world, it is particularly marked in the science councils. This economic model makes collaboration with universities difficult. It puts a premium on rapid results, and researchers’ time is rigidly costed, making it virtually impossible to mentor post-graduate university students.

Collaboration between research bodies is to be encouraged: it enables large projects to be undertaken, makes good use of skilled researchers and saves in personnel and other costs. However, it is questionable if it masks a decline in state support and provides a channel for the elaboration of research agendas over which South Africans have little control.

Management of South Africa’s higher education and research is another problem area.

In forming the new merged institutions, the posts of vice-chancellor were advertised. However, the practice with second-tier management has in general been to allocate positions to the personnel of the old institutions, carefully dividing posts rather than creating dynamic research administrations. These processes have various effects. First, the quality of management is deficient. Research managers, it is generally agreed, ought to know what the world of research consists of. Yet top managers frequently have very few academic publications. This is a worrying tendency. Arguably, opportunities were missed during the merger process to look carefully and critically at research administration in its totality.

At the centre of the academic system are deans. Always powerful, their bureaucratic position has, in one sense, been strengthened in recent years by the tendency to appoint “executive deans” who are line managers directly answerable to the vice-chancellor. Previously, faculty members elected deans who are, or were, more directly responsible, and therefore generally responsive, to the academic community. Yet the way in which the power of deans has tended to express itself has been through an elaboration of and concentration on administrative processes rather than on critical engagement with research and teaching.

A further weakness in academic management is the council system, which is meant to oversee the activities of universities and research councils, including their research, but has not been effective.

Though the quality of research management differs from institution to institution, large swathes of the system are badly administered.

This is not a trivial question: the wellbeing of the society is bound up with the ability to face and solve the questions that challenge it. A robust, well-supported, critical research system is the lynchpin of this process. The challenge now lies in facing up squarely to the many difficult and sometimes controversial issues.

This is an edited version of a paper titled Research, research productivity and the state in South Africa, by the HSRC’s Adam Habib and Seán Morrow, produced by the HSRC