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Itumeleng Mosala
The report of the national working group led by Saki Macozoma is simply a disgrace. It is an intellectual disgrace, a political disaster and an educational catastrophe, especially with regard to the rights to higher education of black people in general and African people in particular.
Above all, though, the report is a betrayal of the struggle for a truly and genuinely transformed higher education system in terms of the goals, objectives, principles and challenges identified by the White Paper on Higher Education (official policy of the government).
Firstly, it is not clear how the recommendations of the report will lead to the achievement of the purposes stated in the White Paper:
Meet the learning needs and aspirations of individuals through the development of their intellectual abilities and aptitudes throughout their lives. Higher education is a key allocator of life chances and an important vehicle for achieving equity.
Address the development needs of society.
Contribute to the socialisation of enlightened, responsible and constructively critical citizens.
Contribute to the creation, sharing and evaluation of knowledge.
The reason is that to do so a complete transformation, and not a reorganisation, of the system is required. The White Paper recognised this. Consequently it identified the following fundamental deficiencies in the whole system, not only in the black subsector:
There is an inequitable distribution of access and opportunity for students and staff along lines of race, gender, class and geography.
There are gross discrepancies in the participation rates of students from different population groups, indefensible imbalances in the ratios of black and female staff compared to whites and males, and equally untenable disparities between historically black and historically white institutions in terms of facilities and capacities.
There is a chronic mismatch between the output of higher education and the needs of a modernising economy.
Higher education has an unmatched obligation, which has not been adequately fulfilled, to help lay the foundations of a critical civil society, with a culture of public debate and tolerance, which accommodates differences and competing interests.
The government declared its vision for the system of higher education in these terms: “The ministry’s vision is of a transformed, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist system of higher education.”
Now come on, comrade Macozoma, surely the former apartheid institutions like the University of Cape Town, Pretoria University, Wits, Rhodes, Natal University and others like them do not possess “the fitness of purpose” to achieve this vision. There is a fundamental difference between transformation and reorganisation. The former includes the latter but not vice versa.
Secondly, the report of the national working group failed to engage in the intellectual rigour that would have modelled new institutional forms with a variety of options that the minister could have chosen from, depending on the policy outcomes he wishes to follow in the short, medium and long terms. When mergers are entered into in the business world, thorough analyses and modelling are done to identify synergies and competitive advantages that the mergers unlock. What is more there are factual misrepresentations in some of the arguments, for example, when it is claimed that there are only two academics with masters’ degrees at Technikon North West, and no PhDs. Gross lies.
Thirdly, the political insensitivity of the recommendations baffles the mind. How, in a new democratic South Africa, anybody can dare to suggest the scaling down, swallowing up into white institutions or closing down of black universities and technikons while the white ones are left intact is incomprehensible. This is a clear attack on black higher education in general and African higher education in particular. The African National Congress and the government will have to address this issue. We have a crisis on our hands.
Fourthly, the report is educationally shackled by colonial norms and a Western liberal ideology of education. Nowhere is the issue of the African nature of the educational and research system raised, especially in the light of a fascination with white apartheid universities and technikons as models of “fitness of purpose”. By the way, which purpose is the report referring to? Under liberal ideology this is often taken to be self-evident and obvious: upper-class liberal values that derive from and support Western capitalism.
Not since the days of apartheid have black people in general and African people in particular been so insulted. Not since then has the challenge to return to the streets been so compelling.
The report suggests no new system, only a reorganisation of the old system under the leadership of the old white institutions.
The report’s recommendations are palpably purposeless, except as an idiosyncratic technocratic tinkering with what exists.
The report is driven by an archaic set of Western liberal educational values in the form of “guiding principles” that shift the focus of the Ministry of Education from the purposes, principles, objectives and implied strategies of transformation of higher education in South Africa.
The so-called “properties” of the guiding principles that translate to equity, productivity and sustain- ability, grossly and deliberately minimise the robust transformational objectives of the White Paper, not to say the government’s intentions for Africa as enshrined in the provisions of the Southern African Development Community Protocol on Higher Education. A group of non-Africans could not incorporate this African perspective in their rethinking of the higher education system.
War has been declared on black and African higher education. Maybe the time is now for Africans in South Africa to stand up and be counted, lest they be scaled down, merged or shut down.
Itumeleng Mosala is vice-chancellor of Technikon North West and chairperson of the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Historically Disadvantaged Institutions