Philippa Garson talks to an adviser who is determined to help turn South African universities into world-class institutions
The drive by South African universities to become world-class institutions is endangered by the number of top administrators leaving their stressed jobs for greener pastures, according to a top American educator who has been advising these campuses.
Fred Hayward, consultant to the American Council on Education (ACE), lists 19 senior university administrators who have moved off South Africa’s campuses in the space of a year.
In particular, he says, vice-chancellors have one of the “toughest jobs in the country”, and unless they are given urgent financial and other assistance, they will be lost to higher education. They spend their time fighting the same old fires on campus instead of implementing plans to turn their universities into world-class institutions, he says.
He should know: he spends intensive periods in the offices of the vice-chancellors and rectors of 13 historically disadvantaged universities and technikons on an ACE project that is helping these leaders develop strategies to sort out their institutions.
The high turnover, he says, has severely hampered the project, whose primary focus is to give technical, financial and other assistance to vice-chancellors and rectors, and to help them implement five-year strategic plans. Since the project got off the ground, dozens of senior administrators have left their jobs – amid soaring debts, student and worker strikes, and repeated closures at their institutions.
Once the leaders leave, their skills are often not passed on. Thus, the march forward to turn the institutions into top universities is sometimes an awkward shuffle, with a step backward for every two steps forward.
Hayward believes, nevertheless, that the goal is well within the realms of possibility: “There is no reason why South Africa, in terms of its higher education and education generally, should not be the next Japan.”
Funded by the Ford Foundation and USAid, the project started in 1992 and winds up at the end of this year – a crucial year during which the policy of the National Commission on Higher Education will be etched into legislation. But already the ACE project is five months behind schedule.
A key pillar of the project is the secondment of 10 successful presidents or former presidents of American universities, who spend two fortnight sessions a year working alongside the South African vice-chancellors. They were amazed, says Hayward, at the working conditions vice-chancellors at historically black institutions face. When the project began, only one vice-chancellor had a computer in his office.
Hayward, a political scientist by training, speaks with a wealth of knowledge about higher education worldwide. He has been involved in electoral processes and higher-education institutions in Africa for the past 30 years, and played a key role in South Africa’s policy debates preceding the new education system. He was also the United Nations’ representative on the Independent Electoral Commission during the 1994 elections, and helped uncover large- scale computer fraud.
The ACE has assisted universities in post-Cold War Czechoslovakia and Poland to re-establish their autonomy and financial viablity. But most requests for assistance are turned down, says Hayward, including one from universities in the former Soviet Union. The organisation only gets involved when it believes it can do something, and in the former Soviet, they are “simply not ready yet”.
In contrast, South Africa has had a phenomenal advantage over other societies undergoing rapid change: “Everybody agreed the system had to change. There has been an enormous amount of preparation in changing higher education already.
“I have never worked on a project where I thought my time was more worthwhile than this one … I expected someone to say to me, ‘you’re a white American, you’re on the wrong side. But no one ever has.'” Perhaps this is because Hayward undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about; only fools would rebuff the overtures of a person with such expertise and intimate knowledge of the problems involved.
He says the National Commission on Higher Education’s report was “excellent”, primarily because it managed to embrace seemingly contradictory aims of equity on the one hand and quality on the other. Nigeria failed to confront “tough issues like these”, and its once-impressive higher education system crashed when students flooded the universities. Budgetary cuts prevented them hiring more staff, which led to a brain drain of staff, bringing the universities to virtual collapse.
Hayward doesn’t invoke the Nigerian example for nothing: he is worried about a similar scenario here. Over the past 30 years, expenditure on higher education in Africa has been whittled down from R24 000 a person to
R4 000 a person, partly as a consequence of the World Bank’s decision to invest instead in primary and secondary education on the continent. But this policy is turning around again.
Of course, money is the crunch issue in determining the success of South Africa’s new higher education system. People have spent a lot of time devising grand policy; now is the time to work out viable budgets, says Hayward. But many heads of the historically black institutions have little financial experience, partly as a result of the whittling away of their responsibilities when they took over from “old guard” white bureaucrats. The ACE project is about “rethinking universities, from academic programmes to building new budgeting programmes.”
The student loan scheme is “wonderfully designed” and a good starting point, he says, but “unless there is sufficient infusion of money from the government to level the playing fields, there is no way progress can be made”.
He lauds the proposed higher education council to oversee the governance of the sector as a key feature in ensuring university autonomy. Although it doesn’t wash well with those academics who fear a loss of institutional autonomy, and those in government who fear a reduction in their control of the sector, Hayward believes the structure is crucial. Not only will it help institutions deal with ongoing, repetitive problems like student and worker strikes and rising debt in a more coherent way, it will place necessary distance between the government and the sector.
The government and higher education are enjoying a “honeymoon” that won’t last forever. The government has former university heads in strategic places – including the president’s office – and they are “friends” of the sector. “But you need structures in place to protect you from friends who might one day be replaced by enemies. We have structures like these in the United States to protect our campuses from too much political intrusion.”
A higher education council would also help “vice-chancellors to manage the turmoil on their campuses. Ways have to be found to deal with these issues in a non-confrontational manner. Food services in residences may be the burning issue today, but what about in five years’ time?”