The market is being flooded with students who have “meaningless postgraduate qualifications”
David Macfarlane
Weak research leadership is perpetuating a cycle of mediocrity in South African research and scholarship. And research-related degrees especially master’s degrees with an up to 50% coursework component have become seriously devalued, so that the market is being flooded with students who have meaningless postgraduate qualifications.
“The sad reality is that most of our deans and heads of department (and indeed many of our vice-chancellors) are such poor researchers themselves that they cannot make the [necessary] kinds of demands on new researchers in their faculties for sheer lack of credibility,” argues Professor Jonathan Jansen, dean of the education faculty at the University of Pretoria.
Equally worrying is that the pressures on universities to maxi-mise their government subsidies by plumping up their postgraduate enrolments are damaging the quality of some research programmes. “I remain stunned by students who cannot do basic statistics at master’s and doctoral levels, who cannot talk intelligently about any major research tradition, or who have not designed an even simple research instrument at any level of sophistication,” Jansen observes. “Small wonder there are so many postgraduate students without employment outside of schoolteaching posts.”
Jansen makes these points in the course of a characteristically plain-speaking and hard-hitting contribution to a recent edition of the Quarterly Review of Education & Training in South Africa, the Wits University Education Policy Unit’s highly respected journal. His article, Changing Institutional Research Cultures: Lessons Learned from Recent Experience, takes education research as a case model, which he diagnoses to be in a “parlous state”; and he proposes specific remedial measures.
Such measures need to go well beyond current national strategies, Jansen argues, because these have “completely underestimated what it takes to build strong institutional research cultures” in universities and technikons. The government’s National Plan for Higher Education, released early last year and aimed at redressing decades of apartheid-induced inequities and inefficiencies, expresses “bland and meaningless ambitions” to strengthen academic research, Jansen says.
Three conditions are necessary for building institutional research capacity and productivity and the national plan underestimates all three. For Jansen, research leadership is the most critical. While South Africa does indeed boast some outstanding researchers, “there is a very big difference between individual research excellence and institutional research leadership: the former category of person can neither lead nor inspire institutional change within or beyond a faculty of education”.
Secondly, strong research cultures rely on strong research libraries. “In historically black universities, the libraries hardly exist, the shelves are poorly managed, the time taken to get a good book or journal is ridiculously long, the rates of theft and destruction are very high, and the library, in many places, has become a ‘hang-out’ for students rather than a serious place in which scholarship can be fostered and productivity enhanced,” Jansen writes.
Historically white universities provide little relief in this area: neglected holdings mean that, with the possible exception of Unisa, there is no library in which you can find or obtain the latest publications on education research and theory “without some level of frustration”. This exacerbates a further poverty in the libraries of formerly white institutions: their failure to develop collections “with strong African traditions and that are geared towards addressing developmental conditions of the Third World on our doorsteps”.
And thirdly, building strong research cultures requires research expertise but South African education faculties are very thin on the ground in this respect. This expertise is not adequately measured by a headcount of doctorates: Jansen refers rather to people “who are acknowledged experts in particular theories and methodologies, and who provide training and dispense expertise within and outside their institutions in their areas of specialisation”.
Jansen insists that money is not the primary factor in strengthening research capacity. By way of illustration, he points out that in 2000 the education faculties at two historically advantaged institutions produced per capita less accredited research than two historically disadvantaged institutions over the same period.
More critical is how research funding gets used, which returns to the quality of research leadership something the “government does not appear to realise in its national plan”. Jansen observes that South Africa provides more scholarship funding for postgraduates than any other Third World country. But there are not enough black and women students applying, the quality of applications from these target groups is often extremely poor (and therefore turned down), and in many cases the available funding is not exhausted and either returned to the source or simply diverted to other needs. This under-utilisation of existing opportunities reflects poorly upon research leadership, Jansen says.
It also raises disturbing questions about the returns on high levels of investment in postgraduate training over the past 10 years or so. Institutions such as the National Research Foundation need to ask auditing questions, Jansen recommends, and “hold institutions accountable for what appears to have been (not in all cases) a very low level of productivity”.
And the scramble for government subsidies awarded per enrolled student has damaged the quality of some postgraduate courses: “It is clear that students are rushed through a theory-based kind of training, itself superficial, and then are completely incapable of doing the very basic research manipulations required for advanced study.”
An essential step towards breaking the current cycle of mediocrity is the “intellectual rightsizing” of education faculties. Jansen argues that “simply working with existing staff arrangements will not I repeat, will not enable institutions to become strong research entities”. Promising young academics need to be consciously selected; and, on the other hand, research leaders need with institutional support to encourage the departure of academics who have been around for so long that they’re neither interested in nor capable of becoming top researchers.
Another priority is to retain new and emerging scholars. Flexible salary scales to attract especially black researchers are only one strategy. Jansen cites his own experience to suggest young scholars will be retained if they’re offered “a development-based career plan, with clear targets to be achieved and with equally clear indications of the kinds of support to achieve those targets”.
In addition, research needs to be concentrated in a few institutions five to seven, rather than the current 30-odd. This would not exclude developing niche areas at other institutions. “But we must also accept that there will not be new monies or sufficient levels of funding from the state that can give black universities a fighting chance with respect to the development of quality research outputs and quality research scholars,” Jansen observes. It follows that pouring already limited research funds into whole universities because of their historical disadvantage wastes taxpayers’ money and prolongs “racially disfigured institutions (black and white)”.
A widely experienced problem is that researchers staff and students often start well but don’t sustain their momentum. “Research leadership should develop systems to ensure that research becomes publications; that training leads to journal articles; that papers written become conference papers; that outstanding research done becomes the basis for academic appointment.” Appropriate systems for what Jansen calls “follow-through” are lacking: they need to be installed to ensure that initial efforts bear fruit.
Finally, research training is often too disconnected from real-world, problem-solving practice. Research internships already under way in some institutions provide one answer: students have to conduct research under supervision in a working environment a policy bureau, an0 Aids research unit, a counselling centre where research and inquiry are valued and required in the operations of that workplace.
“Unless we recognise and apply the hard lessons learned from recent experience,” Jansen concludes, “we are unlikely to make much progress in building world-class faculties of education which have something to say to the developmental challenges of the Third World and beyond.”