David Macfarlane
New management imperatives, new student enrolments patterns, new administrative and financial needs … For about a decade South African higher education has been under- going fundamental, rapid and often painful transformation.
Last year’s National Plan for Higher Education provided the government’s blueprint for reforming the tertiary landscape, after decades of apartheid-era inequities and wastages. In addition, the country’s education system has been registering international pressures of globalisation: new communication and information technologies, for example, are dissolving national education borders.
But in tertiary institutions’ rush to transform or die, a huge skills vacuum within higher education has developed. “The main obstacle to successful transformation is not just a paucity of financial and other infrastructural resources, but the absence of a critical mass of high-level professionals who have the required understanding of the changing higher education terrain and technical abilities,” says Professor David Cooper, who leads a new master’s programme at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at filling the vacuum.
Called Higher Education Policy Analysis, Leadership and Management, the coursework master’s programme responds to the higher education plan’s diagnosis of “a lack of planning capacity” in many universities and technikons, “in particular data analysis and modelling skills, and strategic planning skills more generally”.
Tertiary leaders and managers, Cooper says, have to deal with the challenges of comprehensive transformation and with the need for greater efficiency and accountability. As a result, management styles within higher education are shifting rapidly.
“The clear trend,” Cooper says, “in South Africa as elsewhere in the world, is for the devolution and decentralisation of management into cost centres within an increasingly market-like managerial approach.” He says the new master’s programme, offered this year for the first time, aims to provide critical thinking and analytical skills, content knowledge of national and international policy changes, and broader knowledge about crucial higher education topics such as finances, quality assessment, student affairs, and workplace changes for academics and others.
The MA especially targets people, mostly already employed in higher education, who are academic planners, institutional research officers, faculty officers, human resource managers, student affairs administrators and research administrators.
“This target group might also include some senior executive officers, deans and heads of academic departments and research units,” Cooper says, pointing out that the numbers of such senior personnel in international postgraduate programmes are growing “as the management and administration of higher education becomes more professionalised”. Further target groups are people in higher education policy and planning in the government or NGOs.
Complex questions that all higher education planners have to face, and that the UWC programme addresses, include: How is globalisation impacting on universities and technikons in South Africa, and in Africa generally? How are constraints of finances and inter-institutional competition affecting management and leadership in higher education? How are teaching and research being transformed by the forces of “the market university”? And how are the countries of the South in Africa, Latin America and Asia experiencing problems in higher education compared with countries in the northern hemisphere?
The MA intends to link general issues such as these to concrete problems that universities and technikons nowadays face: Why is it often so difficult to translate policy ideas into policy implementation on the ground? How can effective leadership, governance and participation be built at different levels of the higher education system? How can planning and systems of information management be better developed?
The programme’s system of teaching is intended “to help busy working adults find time for further study to enhance their professional development and their creativity at work”, Cooper says. To this end teaching “blocks” will be employed three a year, each consisting of 10 days and all in Cape Town. The blocks will be held in March, June and September, and will involve teaching, workshops and sharing of experiences.
An agreement between UWC, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University will mean that students on the UWC programme can select modules from UCT’s master’s in teaching and learning for academic development and Stellenbosch’s master’s in science and technology studies.