Prominent educationists doubt that simply merging tertiary institutions will attain the government’s policy goals for higher education. They argue that increased access to and participation in the tertiary system are especially unlikely to be achieved if proposals the Cabinet recently endorsed proceed.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal announced in May that the Cabinet had approved far-reaching proposals for transforming and reconstructing higher education. Mergers are the chief instrument by which the current 21 universities will be reduced to 11 and the 15 technikons reduced to six.
Four new ”comprehensive institutions” will be created, three by mergers between universities and technikons, and another by refocusing the University of Zululand to offer more technikon-type programmes.
Two new ”national institutes for higher education” will be created in the two provinces that now have no tertiary institutions — Mpumalanga and Northern Cape.
”This is not a technical exercise to rearrange existing institutions into different configurations,” Asmal said when he announced the Cabinet’s approval of the proposals. ”… We propose to increase the participation rate, that is, the percentage of 20 to 24-year-olds enrolled in higher education, from 15% to 20% over the next 10 years. This will require that an additional 200000 students be recruited into the system.”
This is a major policy goal that is receiving sceptical scrutiny. Ten leading educationists subject the proposals to detailed analysis in the latest edition of the Quarterly Review of Education & Training in South Africa, published by the Education Policy Unit (EPU) at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Most of the analyses acknowledge that there are clear cases in which mergers might be a useful route for transformation, but ”they question the application of institutional mergers as essentially a common strategy to attain the policy goals of higher education transformation”, observes EPU researcher Kimberley Porteus, who edited this edition of the Quarterly Review.
There is also ”a strong concurrence” among the 10 educationists that the proposals ”are less consistent with the stated goals of higher education transformation, and more fundamentally a reflection of political pressures, on the one hand, and global economic pressures to downsize social services, on the other”.
The relationship between the proposals and the overall goals of transformation comes under focus from Piyushi Kotecha, chief executive of the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association, John Butler Adams, executive director of the eastern seaboard Association of Tertiary Institutions, George Subotzky, director of the education policy unit at the University of the Western Cape and Teboho Moja, formerly special adviser to the previous education minister, Sibusiso Bengu.
Sipho Seepe, campus principal of Vista University, Sebokeng, Gesler Nkondo, vice-chancellor of the University of Venda, and Moretsele Chikane, senior researcher at the Wits EPU, consider the relationship between the merger strategies and larger objectives of redress, equity and the development of uniquely South African institutional forms.
Tertiary governance, what is needed to make mergers work, and policy choices within a global context of hostility to social services development are the focuses respectively of Martin Hall, deputy vice-chancellor, University of Cape Town, Jonathan Jansen, dean of the education faculty at the University of Pretoria, and Richard Pithouse, research fellow at the University of Natal’s Centre for Civil Society.
Mergers as the chief instrument for transforming higher education received massive endorsement from the ministerially appointed national working group, which reported back to Asmal in January. But from the outset the group’s terms of reference were biased in favour of mergers and so did not allow for what Porteus describes as ”a rational study of system transformation requirements”. As a result, ”the full range of instruments available to address the complicated task of landscape transformation was not brought to bear”.
Moja, Seepe, Subotzky and Butler Adams all argue too that reducing the number of institutions has not yet been well motivated in the context of stated policy goals.
”There is doubt as to whether reducing institutional numbers will help to achieve the overall effectiveness, equity and efficiency of the system,” Subotzky writes.
He also points out that the Ministry of Education has yet to inform the country about the cost of mergers and how these will be borne — a concern Kotecha and Butler Adams echo.
The proposals are unlikely to achieve redress, a number of the contributors argue. While the government’s policy documents ”have tried to reconcile national goals of reconstruction with the requirements of global economic competitiveness”, Porteus writes, ”in reality there is a tension, if not hostility, between these goals”.
If the global environment were more supportive of transformation objectives, different choices would have emerged, ”most of which would have required increased investment into the system and focused more explicitly on issues of redress”.
Another concern is that the large-scale merger process envisaged in the proposals could blur a specific focus on the challenges of quality, access and equity by consuming the focus and energy of institutional leadership.
Universities and technikons that escape the mergers also come under scrutiny. Nkondo, Seepe, Subotzky and Chakane argue that the proposals privilege historically white institutions, many of which may well operate efficiently but have cultures that are far from inclusive or representative of South African society.
There is little substance, they suggest, in what the proposals say about the need for these institutions to transform themselves meaningfully or to guard against a scenario that Seepe describes as ”a reorganisation of the old system under the leadership of the old white institutions”.
There is some disagreement about the fate of historically black institutions in the proposals.
Nkondo and Chakane criticise the mergers prescribed for these universities and technikons, particularly considering criteria of regional equity and access to the rural poor. Seepe is less critical, suggesting that apartheid created these institutions to prevent access to white institutions, and that they continue to prevent black scholars from participating as intellectual leaders.
Two ways forward emerge from the 10 contributors, Porteus suggests. Some sense the government’s finality about the proposals and recommend a focus on how best to make them work. But others view the proposals ”as potentially counter-productive to the goals of transformation (or as a potentially costly mistake)”.
They urge the education ministry to take a step back from mergers as its standard tool, to focus on those mergers that are best linked to policy goals, and to rethink transformation strategies in other cases.
A three-month period for comments before the proposed mergers are completed is under way. This is ”an important opportunity for further engagement”, Asmal announced in May.
The comment period will close on October 4.