Peninsula Technikon (Pentech) vice-chancellor Brian Figaji is said to be so angry about the impending merger of his institution with the Cape Technikon that he is considering handing in his notice.
The Cape Peninsula University of Technology — due to come into being from January 1 next year — is referred to on both campuses as ”kaput”, a tongue-in-cheek pun on its acronym, CPUT.
”We are being forced to do this but we are making the best out of it,” said Figaji, who refused to be drawn on his future.
He and his Cape Technikon counterparts head the joint merger task team that must prepare for the Western Cape’s only university of technology, with about 25 000 students.
With the new name settled in August last year, the joint prospectus for students wanting to enrol from 2005 is being finalised this month.
Envisaged is a multi-campus institution linked via a shuttle service. Current thinking is to maintain two admissions offices, one for each ex-technikon, and to give students a choice of where they want to attend classes.
First-timers will pay a new post-merger fee; those returning pay what their respective ex-technikons would have charged. As Pentech fees are significantly lower than those of Cape Technikon, the new institution is rumoured to be planning to seek help from the Education Ministry’s merger fund to cover the shortfall.
The hard decisions on rationalising faculties and departments will be when by mid-year, when a new council is in place.
Merger manager at Cape Technikon, Adriaan Coetzee, said the aim was not to disrupt academic delivery.
In some respects it will be relatively easy. Each technikon is solvent. The are within a 40km radius and some courses are only offered by one: Pentech has journalism and photography, Cape Technikon hospitality and tourism; Pentech has a radiology section, Cape Technikon offers teaching qualifications in English and Afrikaans at its two satellite campuses.
However, both offer mechanical, electrical and civil engineering, studies in built environment, management — including human resources — and various accountancy qualifications. Both also have continuing education faculties and research divisions.
It is unclear which of the alternatives will survive, and whether students will have to dig into pockets to cover longer transport distances.
Figaji complained that the merger would work against black students. ”The poor are not going to benefit. Have you ever seen any student fees go down?”
In addition, rationalisation talk has made some staff nervous. After all, said one, ”[t]here can only be one head of department”.
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu), which has 200 members at Cape Technikon and half that at Pentech, remains weary about the JMTT’s pledges of no job cuts.
iKapa Metropole secretary Suraya Jawoodeen pointed out that retrenchment notices to support staff, despite promises to the contrary, often followed mergers. At the Durban University of Technology 300 jobs were lost.
Nehawu is also an outspoken critic of the mergers and the education ministry’s ”cost-centre approach”, arguing that it sidelines opportunities for real transformation.
The first proposals, in early 2002, recommended integrating the province’s two historically black institutions, Pentech and the University of the Western Cape, while leaving untouched their three white counterparts.
This sparked an outcry that historically disadvantaged institutions would be further marginalised. Cabinet’s final approval of the restructuring plan in December 2002 gave UWC a respite. Instead the two technikons, the historical opposite ends of the apartheid education, would merge.