David Macfarlane
Technikons are the latest force in tertiary education to launch an assault on essential pillars of Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s national higher education plan. The Committee of Technikon Principals (CTP) warns it will have “severe difficulties in engaging” with the Department of Education on implementing the plan if certain key issues are not “clarified and corrected”. While the CTP accepts the broad aims of the national plan, it homes in on the plan’s intention to entrench traditional distinctions between technikons and universities, in particular that technikons offer diplomas and universities degrees. This is one of the plan’s most striking departures from last year’s Council on Higher Education recommendations for restructuring tertiary education. The council proposed that technikons become “universities of technology” a recommendation the CTP strongly supported. It is “unacceptable” and “incorrect”, says the CTP, for the Ministry of Education to continue regarding technikons as primarily diploma-awarding institutions.
This “simply ignores what has happened in the technikon sector in the past seven years and … contradicts” legislation since 1993 on higher education. Technikon sources say the plan misrepresents the variety of courses that technikons offer at degree level more, in fact, than universities do. Sources consider this a deliberate strategy by the education ministry to downgrade technikons while elevating universities to superior status.
This could affect future perceptions in a way that is “damaging” and could do “incalculable harm” to the development of technikons, sources say.
Meanwhile, Technikon SA principal Dr Neo Mathabe welcomes the plan’s announcement of a merger among the technikon, Unisa and Vista University’s distance education centre (Vudec) but expresses concern that this should not be a takeover. Unisa vice-chancellor Antony Melck told the Mail & Guardian that it is “well within Unisa’s capabilities to serve upwards of 200 000 students” (March 9 to 15); but Mathabe says there should be no perception that Unisa will be “the leader” in any merger. “While the merger will eliminate duplications among the three institutions, many of Technikon SA’s programmes do not duplicate those of Unisa or Vudec and can’t be sucked up by other institutions.”
The CTP intends to engage the education ministry with its objections to the national plan; and a meeting of Technikon SA, Unisa, Vudec and the government is needed to achieve “a marriage of thoughts”, says Mathabe. Launching the plan three weeks ago, Asmal said it was “not up for further consultation and certainly not for negotiation”. But there is already no shortage of takers who are up for exactly that.