Khadija Magardie Education-sector stakeholders have expressed concern at the apparent ”steamrolling” of the process which resulted in the Council on Higher Education (CHE) report on the future of higher education in the country. Insiders say both the consultation process involving the initial ”size and shape” discussion document and the time- frame given by Minister of Education Kader Asmal within which he will take the CHE recommendations to the Cabinet have been extremely thin. In April, on its website, the CHE invited comment on the discussion document. But the Mail & Guardian has been told that tertiary institutions and other stakeholders were given less than a week to respond to the document.
Some institutions have complained that they were given insufficient time to respond, leaving them to draw together hasty responses. Similar sentiments regarding lack of adequate consultation were echoed by unions. The Higher Education Employees’ Forum has described the present consultative process as ”deeply and structurally flawed”. ”Consultation with major stakeholders should occur – consultation with labour unions seems to have been next to non- existent,” said the union. Though the CHE has invited comment on the latest report, the Ministry of Education has given itself until September to take its response to the CHE report to the Cabinet – a surprisingly short time. Responding to the report this week, a University of Stellenbosch representative said she ”trusted there would be sufficient opportunity in the near future for further comment” on the report. She added that the university would have welcomed more time for consultation on the initial working paper.
The report has strategically shied away from using terms like ”grading” or ”scale”, nor has it sought to distinguish qualitatively between superior and inferior institutions. But there is little masking the suggestion in the report that the ”elite” universities of yore would be structured to attract the cream of the student and academic population, while those lower down on the resource availability list would have to attach themselves to the nearest ”posh” university, or face redundancy. The suggestion that there should be three kinds of tertiary institution – which some fear would amount to a tier system by another name – is bound to generate controversy. More specifically, the debate focuses on what could, in future, be termed ”bedrock” institutions. According to the report, an institution where at least 20% of academic staff have doctorates, coupled with a significant level of research output, would qualify an institution as a ”bedrock” university – in effect a bare minimum standard. Those institutions which qualify in this bottom tier would, in future, have to concentrate on building the capacity of their undergraduate programmes. Higher up would be those institutions that would be allowed to offer a limited number of postgraduate courses – the second tier.
The top tier would comprise those universities that qualify not only to offer programmes from undergraduate to postgraduate, but that would also qualify to undertake intensive research – thereby attracting lucrative research funding. In terms of this new ”reconfigured” system, institutions would be mandated to ”pursue coherent and more explicitly defined educational and social purposes”.
Institutions would be obliged to ”focus” on certain aspects of education provision, and would no longer be able to offer as diverse a curriculum as is presently the case.
Although the report slams what it calls ”parochial and crude” interpretations of what the market wants, which have the effect of ”squeezing the humanities”, at the same time it emphasises the need for churning out graduates in disciplines with ”high economic returns”. A tier system would effectively limit the number of institutions offering honours and master’s courses in a wide range of disciplines.
The idea of ”grading” universities has already sparked heated debate – with universities slamming the idea as an attempt to down-grade them. This week Rhodes University in Grahamstown said it was concerned that the report had described it as a possible ”bedrock” institution. The report also provides the example of Rhodes merging with the universities of Fort Hare and Transkei – the rationale being that the latter would not qualify as independent institutions in terms of the new criteria. ”We don’t believe that we fit into that [bedrock] category,” said vice-chancellor Dr David Woods. He said that the university had a sterling reputation in terms of research and of producing master’s and doctoral students, and said the university’s administration was ”efficient”.
”We would not wish to deny our expertise to other institutions, but the university does not have spare capacity,” he said in a press statement. Asmal is not obliged to accept the recommendations of the CHE report, but he is compelled to furnish written reasons for not doing so. Additional reporting by Ntuthuko Maphumulo