The relatively unscathed passage through Cabinet of the proposals of Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s National Working Group on higher education opens up the most far-reaching restructuring of the sector since Hendrik Verwoerd’s initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s.
Most analysts expected the process to be stymied, Asmal to be roasted and a lifeline to be thrown to the historically black universities. But the Cabinet endorsed virtually the entire report, reducing South Africa’s institutions from 36 to 21. Only the Universities of Fort Hare and Western Cape survived the closure of apartheid’s Bantustan institutions or their merger with historically white universities, with the aim of creating new, representative and efficient institutions of higher learning.
Now the debate needs to turn to the question of how restructuring can be undertaken. Our own immediate history teaches us how important this is. Mismanaged processes lead to compromised outcomes, and the consequences in this case would be devastating not just for higher education, but for the broader development of our society. Asmal will have to balance a range of considerations.
International experience and South Africa’s recent history of higher-education restructuring suggest that five lessons have to be borne in mind. First, decisive leadership is esential at a national level. Once a programme of action is decided on, the government — and in particular the Department of Education — has to be firm in implementing it. Any stalling or delay will be interpreted as a sign of weakness and is likely to generate all kinds of opposition from individuals and groups hostile to the plan.
Secondly, capacity to manage the exercise has to be built at national and local levels. Any merger or incorporation is a hugely complex business. To undertake so many at the same time would tax even the most well-resourced and efficient bureaucracy.
Clearly, such capacity does not currently exist in either the national Department of Education or local institutions. The department should consider staggering the mergers and incorporations. But even if it does this, capacity will have to be substantially improved.
The department has a very small unit with a handful of staff focusing on higher education. Individual institutions are even less well-resourced. More staff and training in the department and individual institutions are an absolute necessity if the process is not to flounder.
The third requirement is the government’s willingness to invest in the exercise. The National Working Group, the Council for Higher Education and the department have recognised that restructuring will entail an investment totalling billions of rand. How will this square with the Department of Finance’s push to contain government expenditure and reduce the budget deficit?
Savings are unlikely to materialise from the mergers in the short term. Indeed, spending in higher education will in all likelihood have to be increased in the foreseeable future to synchonise systems, salaries and cultures where single institutions are created from many.
For example, the University of Natal has estimated that its merger with the University of Durban-Westville would require a minimum investment of R64-million and an additional R62-million for contingent liabilities payable at some future date. This figure would have to be multiplied many times to cover all the institutional mergers and incorporations envisaged by the plan.
Fourth, and related to the above, an astute management of the process would require the political buy-in of different interest groups in higher education. No merger or incorporation can succeed unless all interests buy into the process.
And this requires taking care of their concerns. For instance, the big concern of student organisations and student representative councils is the continued access of disadvantaged students to universities and technikons. At a minimum, the department will have to subsidise their access. If the responsibility is placed at the door of institutions, it will plunge them into financial crisis.
Similarly, staff concerns centre on retrenchments. If the mergers and incorporations are coupled with streamlining and ”right-sizing”, they are likely to generate enormous political opposition that could stymie the whole restructuring exercise.
Perhaps the department should guarantee the employment contracts of all staff at the affected institutions for three to five years. This would facilitate the necessary buy-in by staff and give management the space to develop a framework for streamlining in future.
The final interest group whose political agreement is necessary is the management of the affected institutions. Their worries also centre on retrenchment. But guaranteeing managerial jobs must be balanced against another equally valid concern — empowering the new institutions with good leadership.
Any study of the crisis of historically black universities will show that they were cursed with weak managers and buddy councils. This was largely because equity criteria alone, despite protestations to the contrary, decided who was chosen for senior managerial positions.
This, coupled with councils whose make-up was unduly influenced by the vice-chancellor and political criteria, meant that all sense of governance protocol was ignored in managing the crises.
Councils need to be independent of management, constituted on merit rather than political criteria, and should make some attempt to understand the nature of the academy. Governance protocol must be observed and penalties imposed on councillors who play a role in plunging institutions into crisis.
Similarly, higher education managers must be selected on their managerial and academic abilities. This does not mean equity criteria should not be considered. But they cannot be the sole criteria, as now happens in the selection of higher education managers in all historically black and most historically white institutions.
Research indicates that the crisis of higher education is rooted in two factors. The first, which is structural, is the dependence of historically black universities on financially poor and academically untrained students. In a laissez-faire higher education market, this condemns these institutions to high failure rates, fee boycotts and financial crisis. The second factor, mainly related to process, involves the ability of managers, the quality of leadership throughout institutions, and institutional culture.
The recommendations endorsed by the Cabinet correctly address the first by merging and incorporating institutions. We no longer have a structural logic that confines some institutions to serving disadvantaged communities.
But the authorities and higher-education leaders cannot ignore the need for far-sighted leadership and capable management. We must not compromise on this. Without it incorporations and mergers will fail.
Adam Habib is director of the Centre for Civil Society, professor in the School of Development Studies, University of Natal, and a part-time research director at the Human Science Research Council