Addressing lectures to halls filled almost entirely with women, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, the first professor of English at Cambridge University, would open with the word “Gentlemen”.
That was about a century ago, when English literature was struggling to find a place in British university curriculums. This ran parallel to “the gradual, grudging admission of women to the institutions of higher education”, explains literary critic and theorist Terry Eagleton. “Since English was an untaxing sort of affair, concerned with the finer feelings rather than with the more virile topics of bona fide academic ‘disciplines’, it seemed a convenient sort of non-topic to palm off on the ladies, who were in any case excluded from science and the professions.”
We in South Africa, where tertiary education trembles on the brink of the most sweeping education revolution the country has ever attempted, and one of the largest the world has ever seen, might be tempted to exclaim: “How things have changed!”
But as Eagleton acerbically also observes: though modern male lecturers may have changed their manners the ideological conditions that create and maintain tertiary institutions have not altered much. For example, English is still a predominantly female subject — in its student intake, that is: tellingly, senior staff are still mostly male. And to walk into any engineering faculty in the 21st century is to be asphyxiated by clouds of testosterone most recently generated in equivalent volumes at Kamp Staalraad. As for the gender ratios among tertiary senior management and professors…
“Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose,” as the French like to say: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” And it is France that comes to mind in trying to measure the scale, vision and ambition of transformation in South African education. Eighteenth- and 19th-century France, that is, in the sweeping creation of a wholly new society sparked by the revolution of 1789.
Those changes still structure modern-day France. Whether the country continues now to benefit from that revolution is another issue: in education, many argue that one of the finest systems in the world — perhaps the French Revolution’s most glittering product — has ossified into a stifling monolith in which the sterile technical proficiency of graduates is the prized aim, creativity is discouraged, and elitism reigns supreme.
For South Africans, one lesson there is that revolutions are not once-and-for-all-time eruptions: the ones that matter — that enable the enactment of fundamental human rights for all — need constant renewal, rethinking.
Other comparable examples on the scale of what South Africa is attempting, in education as in other sectors, point to the same lesson: the Russian Revolution, Cuba, Australia (mergers there too) and Britain (the post-World War II massive expansion of higher education, with many new universities created, and, more recently, the transformation of polytechnics — somewhat like our technikons — into universities).
But will tertiary education in 2014 still provide the space in which critical thinking can be done? How will the university and the technikon 10 years from now enable us to make workable the core values to which decades of struggle against apartheid, and before that colonialism, were dedicated? In brief, what do we want from higher education in 2014 — and what will we get?
To answer that, we need first to ask how the Ministry of Education’s Revolutionary Express locomotive — currently powering up at the Kader Asmal Railway Station in Schoeman Street, Pretoria, and due to depart at midnight on December 31 — has reached its present location.
Probably the most authoritative account is that of Professor Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the University of Pretoria. In a recently published essay, he traces the twists and turns in the evolution of government policy since 1994 and in those national developments that have both hindered and helped that evolution.
“The restructuring of higher education has been driven by the twin goals of global competitiveness and national development,” he writes. But two critical developments threatened to undermine the process. The first was the “dramatic decline” in student enrolments from the mid-1990s; the second was the “dramatic incline” in institutional instability over the same period.
Plummeting numbers of university-entrance matriculants were the reality for all institutions, Jansen writes, but were especially disastrous for historically black institutions, struggling as they already were with financial deficits, high failure rates, managerial ineffectiveness and students unable to afford fees. In short, this development put these institutions’ very survival at stake.
Partly overlapping with this development, these institutions were engulfed by “a vortex of student revolt, staffing conflicts, managerial ineptitude, unstable councils and senates, and a general failure of the leadership of universities and technikons to effectively manage this instability”.
Despite widespread misconceptions, government policy is race-blind: the aim is “to deracialise all institutions and to create a smaller number of high-quality, non-racial institutions”. This, Jansen argues, “is what critics of restructuring fail to understand: that the recasting of the institutional landscape was never about retaining pockets of black institutions on the one hand, and islands of white institutions on the other”.
In other words, he concludes, mergers — the chief (though not only) tool of restructuring — are in fact “consistent with a more balanced reading of higher education policy” than has come from some activist groups such as the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Historically Disadvantaged Institutions.
But it is also true that the intense focus on mergers — especially the weekly, sometimes daily, nuts and bolts, the legal challenges, the gross opportunism on the part of some senior managements involved in mergers — has obscured a much more central question: Will the system as a whole deliver on the central goals of equity of access and redress of historical discrimination?
And, to answer that, an especially sharp microscope needs to be focused on the Charmed Circle of universities that have escaped mergers — South Africa’s own Ivy League or Oxbridge or Grandes Ecoles: in no particular order, the universities of Cape Town, the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch, Pretoria and Rhodes University. (The University of the Western Cape is also not merging, but can hardly be thought of as historically advantaged and so isn’t part of the Charmed Circle.)
Quality of student life must be —and can be — achieved by 2014 at all campuses. That brings in almost everything that matters: a safe learning environment for women, quality teaching and assessment, residences that protect their students, sporting and cultural facilities for all, well-stocked libraries and IT access for everyone, a full student financial aid system.
And quality of student life does not mean the sorts of glitzy, California-style shopping malls — hairdressing boutiques included — that some of the Charmed Circle have introduced. If that is their main contribution to “quality”, then they have already betrayed the commitment to equity that their rhetoric so resoundingly — and, via well-oiled advertising campaigns, so expensively — trumpets.
Clearly, there are other threats to the 2014 wishlist — some of which the education ministry will not be able to counteract even if it stands on its head, performs the rumba and toyi-toyis down Schoeman Street led by a bristling moustache. A sluggish economy is the chief threat, because much of the 2014 vision needs even more money than is presently committed to transformation.
But not all of it requires money on a vast scale. On the gross neglect of gender considerations at all institutions, Wits University’s Professor Margaret Orr remains the most trenchant observer: gender is “the forgotten equity”, she says. The overwhelmingly male-dominated top of the system (vice-chancellors, deans, members of senate, senior professors) contrasts revealingly with gender ratios at the lower ends. Whether you look at first-year student intakes or junior lecturers, women at least match men in numbers, and often outnumber them.
So the system is not retaining women. But its treatment of other historically disadvantaged groups is equally unimpressive. Among the Charmed Circle, a growing scandal is the tiny pool from which much-vaunted senior black appointments are made: a new elite is being silently established — and nothing is being done to expand the pool.
By 2014 we will need active programmes that promote access for the poor, the landless, the disabled, immigrants…
Salim Vally, acting director of Wits’s Education Policy Unit, points out that if, as Asmal has memorably argued, the present system is the product of the “geopolitical imagination of apartheid”, we need a new imagination — one to which all institutions subscribe.
Here institutional leadership, traditionally weak in this country, is critical. The government can have all its ducks in a row, but if the gross instances of incompetent and opportunistic governance that have polluted the tertiary landscape in recent years are not monitored and eliminated, by 2014 the whole grand plan will have disappeared down the national toilet. More government intervention, not less, is needed in such cases.
That is not an argument for more bureaucratic control and centralisation of power. By 2014 we also want genuine research spaces expanded (they are diminishing now). This means research that will critique the government and the whole society, and contribute to community development; it does not mean a wholesale selling-out, the first signs of which we have been seeing here since the 1990s, to corporate-sponsored research that produces market-driven results and brings in tons of cash.
And community development means that Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) had better get back on the Charmed Circle’s list of priorities fast. In essence, RPL is intended to bring into the system vast numbers of people via non-traditional routes. That is, where once you had to climb a rigid ladder up the system (a matric to get into university, a bachelor’s degree to get to honours, and so on), RPL should provide alternative routes by crediting people’s experiential and non-formally acquired knowledge.
For once, the Charmed Circle should learn from the technikons — they have been far more innovative in implementing RPL, which is part of the National Qualifications Framework and so has legislative backing. The universities’ silent dropping of RPL from their agendas needs urgent attention.
And in 2014, we want a truly integrated education and training system. Official rhetoric and dissembling aside, if there is not serious intergovernmental coordination between the two sectors — education and labour —the next 10 years will see the Revolution Express pulling into many an arid siding where a few elite intellectuals (of all hues) are playing dominoes and the surrounding community has long since been decimated by starvation, HIV/Aids and criminal violence.
The Revolutionary Express is gathering steam now. The gradient will be steep. Some carriages still need to be built, as do many of the railway lines; some links between the carriages need to be checked. The fuel supply needs anxious attention. The conductors will have to care for their passengers with great care. The passengers will, unusually, have to collaborate in keeping the train going and sharing the driving. And big business will have to be discouraged from hijacking the train.
All aboard! Destination uncertain, but scenery guaranteed to keep everyone awake.