David Macfarlane Sharp disagreements among some of South Africa’s leading education experts this week indicate the Ministry of Education’s planned shake-up of higher education will be marked by bitter conflict and tense political infighting. The Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) recent recommendations for fundamental changes were the subject of a divisive panel discussion hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand’s Education Policy Unit on Wednesday. Among the most controversial of the CHE proposals is that institutions be combined to avoid duplication of courses and to cut costs. The discussion suggested Minister of Education Kader Asmal faces a battle on two fronts – against tertiary institutions as well as the government and the African National Congress. Delving “beneath the spin-doctoring” that has followed this “very poor report”, Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the University of Pretoria, let rip with one of the strongest political critiques the report has yet received. Asmal had his nose severely bloodied in the Cabinet because of his handling earlier this year of the review of the government’s master plan for schools, Curriculum 2005, he said. Going public with the review before briefing the Cabinet was a tactical error, and Asmal’s ability to drive through the most radical of the CHE recommendations is now compromised, Jansen argued. This is especially so because many in the Cabinet sit on the councils of institutions particularly at risk because of the CHE report (as many have interpreted it) – historically disadvantaged institutions (HDIs).
Two “equally frightening” options now face South African higher education: retaining the status quo or incurring aggressive government intervention, Jansen said. The safest political option for the government is a laissez-faire one. What would follow is that ailing black institutions, which have been incurring huge political cost for the government and social cost for the country, would die by themselves when their plummeting enrolments and escalating financial deficits reached unsustainable levels. That way the government would avoid the fatal political fallout that would follow attempts to close unviable institutions. “Boy, I want to be around to see any minister attempt to close the University of Zululand,” he said by way of example. Yet that option would leave massive problems of equity and quality in tertiary education unbroached. The second option – to intervene “aggressively” (the word used in the CHE report) – would work only with “soft targets”, such as further education and training colleges that lack the historical identities and support bases enjoyed by a university such as Fort Hare, Jansen said.
Speaking on the same panel, Saleem Badat, head of the CHE and a member of the task team that produced the report, again endorsed the idea of direct government intervention: “Left to institutions and stakeholders themselves, necessary changes probably won’t happen,” he said. “But if we stay as we are, the consequences will be disastrous.”
“The rationale for change is undisputed,” said a third panellist, Piyushi Kotecha of the South African Universities Vice- Chancellors’ Association, but the CHE recommendations are “inadequate, simplistic and unsustainable”. Submissions to the association clearly indicate that the degree of government intervention will be a major sticking point. And in yet another indication of the political minefield Asmal now has to traverse, Professor Itumuleng Mosala, vice- chancellor of Technikon North West, argued that the real problem has been the Department of Education’s failure to develop strategies for implementing the 1997 White Paper. “And now the minister [of education] turns around and blames institutions!” he exclaimed. Badat said there are problems in the system as a whole, not just in HDIs. “A single, differentiated yet integrated higher education system, called for in the White Paper – that’s what the CHE addressed, not every little difficulty in black institutions.”
But, said Jansen, the CHE report is a response to the crisis in HDIs – that is its “first and last reason”. Without grasping this fact, Jansen argued, “you can’t understand the report’s many contradictions – such as saying that there will be no closures and yet a few pages later that in the end there will be fewer tertiary institutions”. The report “is and always was political”.