/ 28 September 2001

Vista bosses’ motives questioned

Bongani Majola

Vista University continues to appoint senior management personnel despite its imminent dissolution. This is prompting Vista academics to question the institution’s commitment to the National Plan for Higher Education.

And Vista unions have formally declared a dispute with the university over the management appointments.

Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s national higher education plan released in March targets Vista for “unbundling”. Its eight campuses around the country are to be merged with nearby institutions; and its Distance Education Centre is to be merged with the University of South Africa (Unisa) and Technikon SA.

One academic suspects that some “unemployable non-academics” at the central campus in Pretoria have a plan “to phase out contact tuition and want to use the campuses as learning centres for distance students.

“That way, they think, they will be able to enter a partnership with Unisa and TechSA with a bit of weight behind them … They realise that without contact campuses Vista is dead, so they think that by preventing the contact campuses from leaving the sinking ship” and by turning them into distance education centres the non-academics at the central campus “will be able to justify their further existence”, the academic says.

The Vista branches of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) and the National Tertiary Education Staff Union (Ntesu) recently withdrew from the shortlisting and interview procedures for the positions of special assistant to the vice-chancellor, director of human resources and all other appointments.

This week the unions and university management had their first rounds of talks over the dispute. The unions demanded that the university reverse the already settled appointment of the special assistant to the vice-chancellor. Negotiations continue next week.

University representative Hanrie Greebe says Vista will go ahead with interviews for the human resources director very soon. “The university will continue to appoint senior staff to enable it to continue to operate until the date of unbundling or merging with other institutions …

“The university fully supports the [national plan] and will do nothing to endanger it, we endorse it unreservedly.”

Early in August the National Institutional Forum (NIF) the Vista body driving transformation at the university expressed concern about “accelerated and irregular practices” by university management.

The NIF spotlighted the speed with which the university has been moving to fill senior positions, raising suspicions that management wants Vista’s council to rubber-stamp the appointments before the new council is constituted.

The NIF and the unions question the wisdom of the appointments. They point out that similarly senior positions at other campuses have not been filled for a long time. These are the dean of science, and the campus principals of the East Rand, Mamelodi and Welkom campuses.