The future is uncertain for tertiary institutions following far-reaching proposals for fundamentally restructuring higher education David Macfarlane Seismic upheavals are in store for South African higher education, if the government accepts recommendations formally delivered in a report to the minister of education this week. Likely to prove most explosive are proposals that institutions be combined to reduce the current 36 universities and technikons to an as yet unspecified number. Most educationists recognise the need for major tertiary transformation, and are welcoming the report as an opportunity for innovative thinking and debate on higher education. Technikons in particular are delighted with the recommendations, says Professor Roy du Pr’, executive director of the Committee of Technikon Principals. He points out that the problems addressed in the report manifest themselves largely at universities, not technikons – which are generally better managed, have vastly lower student debt and increased student numbers, and are not in the red. The report accords greater status to technikons than they previously enjoyed. But some educationists are expressing concerns about perceived shortcomings in the report’s modus operandi, such as the basing of its recommendations on a lack of hard data about numbers of school leavers, for instance. “You can have only a limited number of Oxfords,” said Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu, a member of the Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) task team that drew up the report, Towards a New Higher Education Landscape. At the same time, the report explicitly warns against producing “ghetto and privileged institutions”. The CHE team proposes three kinds of tertiary institution, all devoted to high-quality undergraduate teaching, but differentiated by the extent of their postgraduate offerings.
Combining institutions is one way of achieving this, said Nkuhlu. Proclaiming repeatedly that closure of institutions is not an option, the report provides 12 nationwide examples of possible combinations that, some fear, raise exactly the prospect of closures. Vista University, for example, could be “unbundled”, the report says, by combining each of its campuses with the university or technikon closest to it. But this, said a senior Vista academic, is “the logic of closure – or at least disintegration”. He said that the identity of historically black universities needs to be “recreated, but this could not be done through combinations”. There would be “nil possibility” of such recreation if Vista’s Soweto campus combined with the University of the Witwatersrand or Rand Afrikaans University, he said. “Combinations will mean that most black institutions will be eliminated,” said Vista Students’ Representative Council deputy president Mashudu Fhedzisani, “and, obviously, Vista University would be included.”
And Vista’s affordability (its fees are among the lowest in the country) will surely be affected, said Pan-Africanist Students’ Movement of Azania member Thandisizwe Gagayi. Vista gives poor people access to higher education, he said, so if Vista merges with an institution such as Wits, that “whole mission will be defeated”.
The universities of Rhodes, Fort Hare and Transkei could become a single institution in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape, the report suggests. Responding to concerns that universities such as Fort Hare want to preserve their historical identities, and could lose these, CHE task team member Khotso Mokhele said that such institutions would “continue to exist and to play a meaningful role”. But, he said, the government “cannot leave transformation to educational institutions themselves”.
The report refers to Australian models of education development, but “the process of merging institutions would not be easy, as the Australians themselves discovered”, says George Subotzky, director of the University of the Western Cape’s education policy unit. “Institutional cultures are very complex, and proposed mergers would occur more easily in some regions than in others.”
The biggest problem with a merger would be staff losses, says Manoj Maharaj, president of the University of Durban- Westville’s (UDW) Academic Staff Association.
“Already the university has retrenched 37 staffers, 30 of whom were academics.” The CHE report’s example of UDW being combined with the University of Natal comes at a time when many Durban-Westville staff feel pessimistic over the future of the university, partly following the loss of senior academics to other universities – the latest being respected education specialist Jonathan Jansen to Pretoria University.
A merger “will not necessarily be an answer to the problems of demoralisation”, says Maharaj. He also expressed doubts that Natal would be “happy” about merging with UDW.
Another academic commented that the financial implications of combinations would have to factored in, as relatively well-resourced institutions would be reluctant to take on debt-ridden partners. The CHE report has little to say on this, other than recommending “the use of financial and other instruments as ‘pulleys and levers'”. Yet the report also makes it clear that “no public institution should believe that it is exempt from combination … The historically advantaged institutions, in particular, cannot assume that their track records with respect to equity, quality, social responsiveness and effectiveness and efficiency are beyond dispute and self- evident.”
Commenting on the CHE team’s modus operandi, one academic observed that there are “no reliable data available regarding the projected number of students to enter” higher education. As a result, “I do not see the necessary linkage of secondary and tertiary planning” in the government’s overall planning for tertiary education. The CHE report makes minimal reference to secondary schooling. It is clear that extensive further work is needed in key areas of the report’s recommendations – and the CHE team fully acknowledges this. Yet few will dispute that the report has produced what Minister of Education Kader Asmal asked for – “a set of concrete proposals on the shape and size of the higher education system and not a set of general principles which serve as guidelines for restructuring”. Additional reporting by Evidence wa ka Ngobeni, Elisabeth Lickindorf, Glenda Daniels, Marianne Merten, Connie Selebogo