Mashupye Ratale Kgaphola and Annette Lansink Kirk-Cohen on the Unisa squabble
Newspaper readers and news followers in general in recent weeks may be forgiven for confusing the unfortunate squabble between the council of Unisa and the Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, with the real debate in respect of the changing landscape of higher education in South Africa.
The spectacle has taken an unseemly turn, with the substantive issues around the configuration of higher education being obscured by mud-slinging and personality clashes. In turn, a gamut of sinister motives has been suggested as explanations for the developments, leading even to the unfortunate scenario wherein racial solidarity begins to rear its head.
An old adage goes that when generals focus too much on a single battle they run the risk of losing the war. For one thing, a singular focus may divert strategy from even the possibility of making tactical retreats and territorial concessions, at times necessary evils in the pursuit of a greater goal.
Equally, the general public gets none the wiser if conventional news and opinion forums, such as the media, themselves further entrench the one-dimensional, and even contextually distorted, perspective on what in reality is a multifaceted phenomenon.
The Unisa debacle must in the first instance be located in the historical and political context of an absolute need for higher education transformation in line with the ethos and aspirations of our post-apartheid dispensation. Indeed, it is common cause that the decision to merge Unisa, Technikon SA and the distance education campus of Vista came about as a result of a number of prior evolutionary processes in the higher education sector.
To recap, the first substantive policy initiative on higher education in the post-1994 dispensation has been the work of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE), which culminated in a seminal albeit controversial report in 1996. This report noted many systemic and functional deficiencies and challenges in the higher education sector, and made a number of recommendations to remedy these.
In the immediate context, the NCHE report recommended a single, coordinated higher education system and, in respect of distance learning, it called for the “review of the future role of the present three distance education institutions …”.
Suffice to state that much of the controversy around the NCHE report emanated mainly from a reading by the black higher education constituency that this document did not adequately address the political, historical and moral imperatives of redress, equity and access for black people. In fact, one can go so far as to say that the aforementioned have since remained a battle cry for the black constituency in its aggregate persona, and has latterly become a notable agenda item for the historically disadvantaged institutions.
For their part, historically white institutions seemed more concerned with the broader implications of the recommendations of the NCHE on institutional autonomy. In general, these institutions looked at the notion of a national plan with a mixture of suspicion and foreboding. In respect of this particular aspect, the black constituency and institutions generally saw the anxiety of white institutions as a sign of resistance to change.
It is arguably a fair point to make that the black constituency has on the main been more supportive of the need for strong government intervention in higher education than their white counterparts.
The snag, however, has been that this support seems to have been premised on an assumption that any such intervention would happen primarily in white institutions. Current events in the sector seem to have tested that assumption to breaking point.
It is a matter of record that the NCHE report has since been used by the Department of Education as a functional and guiding template for its further development of higher education policy.
In terms of the merger process, for example, we note that the Education White Paper on Higher Education Transformation (1997) calls for the establishment of a national higher education plan that would pay particular attention to programme development, capacity building, reshaping the institutional landscape, and promoting individual and institutional redress and equity.
Equally, the White Paper states that the development of such a (national) plan will be the responsibility of the education department.
The aforesaid highlights the historical background that provides the material grounding for the processes now under way in higher education in South Africa.
In this regard, it would be clearly erroneous to look at the fracas that has erupted at Unisa purely as a matter of personality clashes. Granted, the temperament and tactical approaches of the “protagonists”, in this case the education minister and the council of Unisa, may have a bearing on how quickly and smoothly certain outcomes are achieved.
The latter point would, however, not alter the fact that the substantive issue is ultimately about the realisation of the goals of the White Paper on Higher Education Transformation, and the apportioning of responsibility and mandate for carrying this through.
In the nature of transitions, the story of policymaking and evolution in higher education in South Africa was unlikely to be an emotionally dull affair. Equally, given the spectacular legacy of apartheid social engineering and the disparate world outlooks this has created in turn, it would have been almost impossible to reconcile at one go the many competing and complex interests in the higher education sector.
There is clearly a need for a more enlightened debate on the transformation agenda as it unfolds, but this debate is unlikely to benefit from shallow explanations that never rise above the allegedly banal, personal and whimsical tendencies of any individual.
In a somewhat ironic sense the developments at Unisa have highlighted the fact that in reality our notions of institutional autonomy have never really been tested against each other. In this light, perhaps we should welcome these events, for all the inconveniences and discomfort they may have caused us, if only for the fact that they contribute to the creation of a functional reference point and solid base for the further transformation of the higher education sector.
Dr Mashupye Ratale Kgaphola is manager of policy at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and chairperson of Vista University’s council. Annette Lansink Kirk-Cohen is a lecturer at the University of Venda